WrongLebowski

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I added additional info to the OP.

Hey all, so I've been working on a sever migration lately and in my travels I came across a steal of 500GB PS3 HDDs for 12$ at Walmart. I thought they were just garbage drives, here's the specs. HDD Specifications: - Capacity: 500GB - Interface: SATA - Rotational Speed: 5400RPM - Buffer: 8MB Now I expected even in a Raid 0(Four Drives) for performance with these to be basically garbage, and just bought them for fun. I benchmarked them and got this result. http://imgur.com/a/CG3XA Now, these figures seemed crazy high. Much better performance than I was expecting. So I go back to my Source server, and benchmark it as I hadn't done it in a while. I don't have their specs memorized but I'm fairly certain it's 5x 500GB 10kRPM SAS drives. They are configured in a RAID 5. Here's their benchmark results. http://imgur.com/a/fF4RL So, why the hell are these garbage PS3 drives beating the piss out of my server raid? Do raid controllers effect performance? The PS3 Drives I tested on my Skylake Z170 Chipset, while the Server runs on a Dell Raid Card. Could this be it? I'm stumped otherwise. EDIT: I found the Drive specs for the server, Seagate 500 GB SAS 6Gb/s 64MB Cache. So not 10k Drives but still a significant amount of cache. The Raid Controller is a Dell PERC 6/i. I'm going to go buy another PS3 HDD and throw it into a Raid 5 and check the performance.

Now here's a strange one, where all signs and typical troubleshooting steps lead to "board's dead, gg"... I'm working with an ASUS Rampage III Extreme (LGA1366, X58) motherboard that just will not power on by any [normal] means. I've tried multiple CPUs (2 i7-965s and a 940), a whole shoebox worth of RAM, the entire spectrum of GPUs (GT210 to 390X), a couple different PSUs, in a case or on a bench. All mentioned components work perfectly fine when a different motherboard is involved. "So what's the deal man, your board is obviously dead?" Wrong! When everything is hooked up the way the good lord intended, I can poke a paperclip through the back of the ATX 24pin and jump start it just like you would a PSU on its own (green wire + any black wire). By doing this and hitting the START button on the board, everything works flawlessly. OC'd to 4.2GHz, multiple GPUs, 6 DIMMs, RAID arrays, crazy benchmark runs, even reboots properly! I just can't turn the damn thing on. What gives? What can I possibly look at to try and solve this problem?

I just use it for Plex, Vent, Minecraft, whatever I think of really. I'd just like to have something dedicated in there as it even struggles with rendering Remote Desktop to my 4k display at times even on a LAN.

I've got a Dell PowerEdge R710 I'm looking to throw a graphics card in but I'm having some trouble making a decision. See the motherboard uses riser cards that only have 1x and 8x slots. I'm not looking to do any rendering or anything crazy, I'd just like to take any of the existing load off the CPU and perhaps be able to run 3dMark(Integrated G200 Matrox something doesn't support ANY DirectX besides 6). Finding cards that come in the 8x Form Factor is challenging. So far I've only found a Geforce 710. I know you can cut down a 16x card but I'm wondering how much that will gimp performance. Also another thing to consider is while this has redundant 800watt power supplies we don't have any PCIe power connectors to speak of, so it needs to be powered strictly from the 8x connector. They do make a riser card that has a 16x slot but it's insanely expensive anywhere I can find it. What would you recommend?

That's super interesting, see you are using faster RAM but we tried 1866 and 1600 and saw no score difference at all. If you are curious I'm wonder what your score would look like if you downclocked it and ran it again.

I'm really just trying to find out why this one configuration seems to be underperforming. Anyone have any ideas?

The Dell BIOS is extremely limited. I'm looking into picking up another motherboard but you apparently can't spend less than 200$ on a 1366 Board, even on EBay.

The highest HWMomtior claimed it got was 52C and most things I've read say 60C is the limit so I don't think that's the issue.

The highest HWMomtior claimed it got was 52C and most things I've read say 60C is the limit so I don't think that's the issue.

Hello all, I wanted to ask you folks on your thoughts on a situation I am experiencing currently with two different systems I've got on hand. I often buy my hardware second hand or open boxed. I had built myself a pretty nice FX-8350 on a Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 with 2x8GB sticks of 1866 DDR3, all being backed up by a nice 390X. While this perfomed admirably I did find myself CPU bound in most situations, in many games like GTA5, Ashes of the Singularity and other CPU intensive titles. I saw a deal on a retired Dell XPS 435T Studio PC that I just couldn't pass up on after finding out it had a i7 965 Extreme Edition, so I acquired it and set off to find out which I should make my daily driver. Now I did do some research and while everything I saw online told me the 8350 should come out on top I just felt like I wasn't getting the right performance out of it. After slipping a friends 290X into the XPS I started to run a series of 3dMark runs and to my disbelief the i7 965 and 290X came out almost a thousand points ahead of my FX-8350 with a 390X. I've essentially committed myself to migrating to the XPS at this juncture, but I did look up more 3dMark scores and I found my results to be atypical. Does anyone have any thoughts on why my 8350 PC might be underperfoming? I'll drop 3dMark results below. 8350 http://www.3dmark.com/fs/7870990 http://www.3dmark.com/fs/7870644 http://www.3dmark.com/fs/7870154 i7 965 http://www.3dmark.com/fs/7869725 http://www.3dmark.com/fs/7869692 I played with overclocks pretty aggressively on both systems and I almost took the 8350 to 5Ghz! However the score remained the same, which makes no sense to me given I even have 1866Mhz RAM. The i7 has a maximum RAM Speed of 1066 due to the LGA1366 Limitations and I saw massive gains from over clocking. My only dissapointment from that platform is the Dell motherboard does not allow for overclocking and I had to use the Intel XTU to overclock. However the utility does not allow for voltage levels to be modified, leaving my gains minimal. Any thoughts would be appreciated, thanks! Paul

So I could in theory throw some regular SATA drives into this SAS bay and make an array? Would the performance be that much worse? Is SAS just 10k+ RPM Drives?

Hello, I've got a Dell PowerEdge R710 I recently acquired and have been playing around with. I'm trying to add more drives to increase my storage. While I'm pretty sure I need SAS Drives, I'm still really confused about SAS vs SCSI vs SATA. Can anyone shed some light on this for me? Perhaps also educate me on what I need to be considering when buying SAS Drives second hand?

I'm mostly looking for tutorials and such. I tried initializing a MySQL Database because many server type applications seem to require that, but I never had much luck.