Author: aztpg8

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The most I can get out of the Xeon?

How did we get here?

Some may remember me testing the Xeon ‘replacement’ for the CPU in my Optiplex, that wasn’t a replacement. Long story short, the Graphics card was the issue and I need to do something else. I opted to throw it in another case with a different motherboard and better GPU. That was better, but I thought there was still more I could get out of it. But how much?

To find out, I borrowed the RX 6600XT from my gaming rig in the living room. It won’t stay in there, obviously, but I know it’s capable and I have some tests with similar CPUs. Its the most powerful GPU I can get to easily, so I put it in, expecting the pink case to now be an easy bake oven. I was wrong. Oh, so wrong.

Performance was better than expected and temps were perfect. The CPU and GPU both stayed in the mid to high sixties on the high end; something I never saw coming. The pink case has horrible airflow and hates anything more powerful than a Casio watch. For some reason, though, this combination loved it. I’m sure it will be better in a different case, but for testing, I’ll take it.

The important thing, though was finding where the CPU bottleneck would come, and test comparisons to the other processors. I say test comparisons, because in real world scenarios, paired with a mid-budget GPU playing games in 1080P, there is no difference. Admittedly, with the better GPU I also added more RAM, but the games never used it, so it wasn’t a factor. This thing is solid, and it will probably be the ‘go to’ PC for playing games in the bedroom, if I bother to set it up.

Xeon? for real

Getting one of these and testing against some of the newer four core. eight thread CPUs, was a great choice. It’s a much better than trying to hunt down and pay twice as much for an i7 4770, and it makes me want to see how the larger socket E5 Xeon’s do. That’s another experiment, though. This one goes down as a success, and I couldn’t be happier with the results. Talk about a surprise. Great performance, cheap price and low temps. There isn’t much more you can ask for.

One of these paired with an RX580 is a perfect budget Gamer and 1080P is no problem with anything you want to throw at it. Now it’s time to get my 6600xt out and maybe try a GTX1660. Hmm.

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SSD excitement quickly turned sour. Not the right one.

How did we get here?

Imagine my surprise when I opened an older laptop and found an SSD. In fact it was an SSD in an M.2 slot. Now imagine how I felt when I realized it was a SATA drive. Yes, the same protocol that is on standard 2.5 inch drives, drove this one. Still, how bad could it be? I decided to test it and find out.

The first thing I had to do was actually find where I could test it. Almost all of my m.2 slots were taken on various rigs. I tried the PCI adapter, but you can see where that is going by my telling you it was a PCI adapter. You see, SATA means the serial instructions from the CPU. The PCI bus is Parallel. As I mentioned in the video, linked here, Serial means the data will transfer a single bit at a time, like loading a plane. Parallel will load several items at once, think roller coaster at the theme park that has a separate queue for each car. The Roller Coaster loads much faster, and will every time.

Still, all was not lost, Danny DD to the rescue. With an empty M.2 slot, I tucked it in, checked the BIOS, off we were. Sort of. Read and write speeds weren’t great. I ran Crystal Disk Mark and got about what I expected. 2.5 inch SSD type speeds. That doesn’t mean it’s horrible, or even unusable. You just have to have the right use for it. It’s still faster than an HDD, and a budget build is perfect for it.

Good SSD or Bad

That has to do with your frame of reference. The reason I mention these at all is that they are still common. They are available in various sizes and usually at or below the much faster NVMe drives that fit in the same slot. NVMe drives, also work with a PCI adapter if you don’t have a free slot on your motherboard. It’s not a bad choice, but there are much better ones. It’s best to read the description to make sure you get the right one.

SO, what’s next for the SATA m.2 drive. I’ll have to find an inexpensive motherboard and make an extreme budget build. It’s still faster than a spinning hard disk and perfect for a boot drive. It will fit perfectly in a low cost gaming PC. Paired with a larger 2.5 inch SSD, it will have a lot of life left. Now I need to go shopping.

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The GPU is the Bottleneck? Again? Really?

How did we get here?

Recently, I tested the newly acquired E3 1270v3 Xeon in the Dell Optiplex as a possible replacement. I found it wasn’t an upgrade because of the GPU. Fair enough. I knew the RX6400 wasn’t a great card, but it’s what fit and it worked.

I then chose to get some parts and put the Xeon in a different case on a Dell motherboard. Perfect. So far, so good. The original plan was to compare the new benchmark numbers to the old to show how much more room we had to grow. As it turns out, it was quite a bit, and with a better Graphics card, it now turned in figures like newer hardware.

Well, that didn’t turn out the way I wanted. I expected the set up testing 1440P and 1080P on high, medium and low quality to show the Xeon struggling. It didn’t. In fact it was for the most part within margin of error of the newer CPUs. That wasn’t going to make for an informative video at all.

The Testing

So, I ditched the idea of the comparison with the older i5 and concentrated on testing against the 10105F and 11400F. Not brand new, but recent enough to compare. The 10105F is a four core, eight thread i3 from tenth Generation intel, and the 11400 is a six core, eight thread from 11th Gen. Both of these should be more than a match, so I tested with the mid range RX480 GPU, which was out around the same time as this Xeon. Obviously, the newer CPU’s have an advantage, right? Well, no.

As I mentioned the Xeon stayed within margin or error using the mid range GPU, so what could I do? I dropped the resolution. Instead of 1440P and 1080P, I dropped the settings down to test 1080P Low, 900P Low and 720P Low. Resolutions that the 11th gen chip has no business thinking about, because it would normally run with a better GPU.

Very much to my surprise, the 11400F actually lost to BOTH four core chips in some games. What? Seriously? That can’t be right.

But it was. on multiple games in repeatable tests. It traded blows with the 10th gen CPU in some games, but in others it actually performed the worst. Now, understandably, the six core CPU has no business thinking about running games at 720P and it shows, but that doesn’t solve my original problem. How do I get a fair test between the three processors?

Need a different GPU

Quite simply, I need to be able to test all three of these at a higher resolution, so I’m going to have to get use a better graphics card. The RX 6600XT is the easiest one for me to access and test with, so it will be next. To that point, seeing how close the two four core chips are, I will probably just compare the Xeon with the 11400F. I have records of a fair difference in the 10th gen and 11th gen using the 6600XT, so if I have to, I’ll include all three, but that should give us a better idea of how good this Xeon actually is.

I’m curious, just how well the older E3 1270 holds up to a far more recent product. This should be fun. The video will be linked here.

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The Xeon results are outstanding.

For Starters

I originally put the intel four core, eight thread Xeon in the Dell Optiplex to see if it out performed the original CPU. It didn’t. More accurately, it performed near the same because the limit became the graphics card. The GPU, in turn, was limited by the size of the case, so what could I do?

The only good answer was to put it in a different case. That skews the experiment, though, because that puts it on a different platform that might help it run better. I wouldn’t know what made the difference. But, an Optiplex motherboard would assured that things would be relatively equal, and for 18 bucks, it was a no brainer. So, off to eBay I went.

Then came a different issue. It’s not the same connections. Adapter cables cost me another twenty seven, but they came next day. Sweet. Everything showed up, I installed all of the parts, and turned it on. To a great shock and surprise, it worked the first time. That isn’t a normal occurrence, so yes, I enjoyed it. Now, on to the testing.

I decided to match it not only against the older CPU in the Optiplex, but to test it against newer CPUs, six generations younger and again, was surprised. It held it’s own against a tenth gen i3 and 11th gen i5! It is even keeping up with a processor that has more cores and threads, the 11400F. Again, as it turns out, it’s only limited by the graphics card. We’re on a roll.

So, what’s next for the Xeon?

It performed great against the two newer processors with a mid range GPU, so the next step is a better GPU. The mid range is a very capable RX480, that has shown it’s worth even in 2023, but now we need more. I have an RX6600XT to use, or an RTX 3060Ti, and either should prove worthy. The AMD card is easier to get to and test with, so that will be next, but first I have to record this video. Technically, there are two more benchmarks, but there won’t be an issue, and I will set the stage for the next video with the results. This turned out far better than I expected.

Which brings me to my next thought. Do I post the result charts here, or not? Obviously, I won’t post all of the charts, but maybe a couple. I probably could do an average, but I don’t have combined numbers yet, so I don’t know what extra effort that is. Leave me some thoughts, and I’ll mull it over. In the mean time, I’ll post a few pics and we’ll wait for the video. It should be ready mid-week, then I can move on the next part.

I think I like this Xeon.

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Converting a Dell Optiplex…. Interesting.

How did we get here?

I knew there may be more to this than meets the eye when I started, but it’s down the rabbit hole I go. First, I got the Xeon CPU to test. Perfect, so far. Then, after realizing it needed more ‘space’, I ordered an Optiplex 9020 motherboard because it was cheap. The board works beautifully, but there are some challenges.

The first is the power supply connections. I do have an adapter, but the PSU in question doesn’t seem too happy with it. Next is the front panel and power switch connections. Oh brother, more adapters. Lovely. I can do it without adapters, but there is a lot of jerry rigging involved. I went safe, and for only a few bucks here and there, we are still well below the price of a mainstream motherboard.

At what cost

The biggest challenge is staying below what a mainstream board would have cost, but I don’t want to set the house on fire trying to do it. It wasn’t on my list of goals for the week. It’s not on it for next week either, if you were wondering. I do have some parts, but the trick here will be to come in as close to $250 as possible and still have a solid gaming PC. Buying a mainstream motherboard would have killed that, but 20 bucks is solid.

Counting what I have on the shelf, we’re talking around 250 so far. If we ignore that, it’s much cheaper, but defeats the point. Using all of the parts versus buying an Optiplex in a bigger case might eventually still be a good comparison. The results of this experiment will tell me if I should try it. Maybe a standard sized PC and a can of spray paint would be just as effective. I may as well start looking for one to order.

So, what’s next for the Optiplex?

The next part is waiting for the adapters to come tomorrow, and making sure the PSU will work with what I already have. That in itself will be one video. After that, we start testing and see what it best compares to. I know I will compare numbers to the i5 4670 in the slimline, but I also want to compare numbers to a modern four core CPU to see what’s missing after six generations.

The ‘finished’ product will end up on the channel, here, but of course this will be where I discuss what went right and what went wrong, so if you’re reading this, please check back. Until then, I wait. I have begun to assemble the parts that are here, and I probably could do some testing, but then I wouldn’t have needed the parts, and I wouldn’t get to cover the adapters in the video. Six of one, half dozen of the other. It is bound to all work out some way.

Stay tuned, it should be fun.

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