Dell r900

A

apopleptic

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 6, 2013
Messages
340
I recently acquired a Dell r900 with 4 x7460 cpus and 32GB ram and no hard drives.
I installed a 160GB WD Black drive and Windows 2012 R2 onto it and I can't get the fans to spin down at all. I installed Dell OpenManage and it shows all 4 fans running at ~5500RPMs and I find no option to lower that, or to have the 2 redundant fans off, which I am told is the normal operational mode. BIOS is 1.2.0 and I see no option in there either.

So far not impressed by the performance I've seen. x264 Video encoding isn't on level footing with an i5 3570k since they tend to only use 25~50% of the CPU depending on the input file, unless I run 3 or more instances, and even then it barely tops 110% of what the 3570k outputs before CPU use is at 100% and I expect not much else at that point.
:(
But I would hope that I could at least get the volume down to where I can only hear it from 5 rooms away if that's all it's going to do...
 
I don't think 264 encodes can very efficiently use that many cores.


I could obly get my dual Xeon workstation to about 75% with one encode and it had 1/3rd the cores you do. That said, keep in mind it's a very old architecture, on a per core basis modern stuff is light years faster.
 
X74xx Xeons are Core 2 based, so they perform accordingly seeing as they're nearly 8 years old. 130W each, so lots of heat and noise is expected. Only good thing about quad 604 systems is that RAM is dirt cheap, but that's about it. I've had a similar system (same CPUs) in colo for years now and have been thinking about replacing it with something newer just on account of how much power it eats up.
 
I reseated the power supplies and the fans finally spun down.
I guess that maybe all I have is a new doorstop that I can use to toast bread.
I find that I can run multiple instances of x264 and it'll use all the CPU, I just wish I could get it to use all that 'power' on a single encode.
 
I would never pay to power that thing -.- oh my god.
 
host some vms for people(for a fee ;-), stick it in a closet with the door barely cracked open, profit
 
apopleptic said:
So far not impressed by the performance I've seen. x264 Video encoding isn't on level footing with an i5 3570k since they tend to only use 25~50% of the CPU depending on the input file, unless I run 3 or more instances, and even then it barely tops 110% of what the 3570k outputs before CPU use is at 100% and I expect not much else at that point.
:(
Click to expand...
What are your "--frame_threads" , "--pme" , "--pmode" options set to? You have to set those to how many threads you want to use when encoding. It sounds like they're just the default values.
 
i have a r900 and i prefer to not use it when ever i can, it sounds like a jet (i removed two ofthe large fans and 4 of the small ones from it) and its preformance is very meh. i havent been able to change fan speed as i was using it for vms for abit
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top