Good / Inexpensive Upgrades For An Old Workstation? (LGA 1366)

[bmichaels556]

Hey everyone!

 

I've been loving my dual X5675 rig, and it's actually not a half-bad gaming machine with the HD 7950 I threw into it. Seems to be a very reasonable match for the performance of these CPU's. Also went for 24GB 1066mhz ECC RAM on the cheap, couldn't pass up that much RAM for $40, even if it's not gonna' be the speediest.

 

Anyway, while I do have an amazing workstation and a very adequate gaming rig with this machine, I'm wondering: What inexpensive but worthwhile upgrades would you personally make to an older system like this? I'm already running an SSD, although my speeds are really slow for some reason. It's a Dell T7500, I think it had SATA 2, but I'm not even getting proper speeds, since I'm pretty sure real-world speeds between SATA 2 and 3 aren't that different anyway.

 

It's an OCZ Arc 100 that I got for cheap, and I figure I should be getting like 250-ish MB read on CrystalDiskMark, but I'm only doing about 145/130. Which got me thinking, why not go for a PCIe M.2 card. I believe some of the Samsung ones are really nice with backwards compatibility for these old machines. It's just weird that I'm not seeing massive speeds over a 7200rpm HDD on this thing despite SATA 2 being more than adequate for this drive..

 

The other thing, which I already pulled the trigger on, was a USB 3.0 PCIe card. This thing is stuck with two USB 2.0 ports on the front with a Firewire 800, and a few more USB 2's on the back. Servicable, but definitely not great for my USB 3.0 external HDD. Getting about 25MB/s when it could be quite a bit faster. And since this is a workstation, I'm moving lots of video files, using Handbrake a lot, things like that. So USB 3 will be a nice plus.

 

What other inexpensive upgrades would you guys see as generally beneficial for this thing?

[TheBean]

i think the sata 2 is bottleneck. 

the endurance on that ssd is crap (no offence).. also, i believe that its a dram-less ssd (i could be wring) which could contribute to the slow ssd.

honestly, its a really great build. try and get faster ram (if lga 1366 supports it)

[bmichaels556]

50 minutes ago, saksham said:

i think the sata 2 is bottleneck. 

the endurance on that ssd is crap (no offence).. also, i believe that its a dram-less ssd (i could be wring) which could contribute to the slow ssd.

honestly, its a really great build. try and get faster ram (if lga 1366 supports it)

Wow, okay yeah I'm not crazy familiar with SSD's or the underlying tech. So could it just be that performance has degraded over time, and that's why my speeds suck? But I'm sure sata 2 isn't helping much either. I may just go for the pcie card for it. I got it for dirt cheap and it did the trick, so no offense taken haha. It was already well-used when I put 'er in. 

 

Then again, I'm not even sure it would work. Even my HD 7950 is newer than things like M.2, even on servers and workstations, right? Guess it's not a huge investment. Seems like $10 USD can get me one to test. For that amount of money, even if eveything becomes just a bit snappier in real-world performance, it'd totally be worth it!

 

Yeah, I've actually been thinking of sticking the RAM from my dead FX-8350 build into here. I think it was 1600mhz? Only 8GB. Where do you suppose I'd see noticable improvement with the faster RAM? And would the added cost of say, 16GB be worth any small improvement I might get? I think I'll leave this one on the back burner mostly, and just play with what I have on hand to see what the difference might be. 

 

Thanks so much for that information! Greatly appreciated.  

[Canada EH]

Should be a X58 chipset, which is still a good computer, you can do a lot with that, try to over clock that 5675 and go from there.

[bmichaels556]

5 minutes ago, Canada EH said:

Should be a X58 chipset, which is still a good computer, you can do a lot with that, try to over clock that 5675 and go from there.

Easier said than done. It's a dual CPU setup, which I think someone mentioned was a... Was it like i5000 something or other chipset. I was thinking maybe a custom bios would be available for the T7500 board and maybe allow something like that, but apparently not.

 

The Xeon W3690 has an unlocked multiplier so I could easily use XTU for it, but they're way pricy compared to these, and are single CPU only I think, so pretty much useless. In a single CPU board, I'd go for that 100% of the time, especially given the easy software overclocking. Not optimal I know, but easy for sure.. 

 

Are there custom bioses for any of these server boards that would allow overclocking, unlock multiplier, stuff like that? Or are those features strictly 100% tied to hardware?

[TheBean]

13 hours ago, bmichaels556 said:

Wow, okay yeah I'm not crazy familiar with SSD's or the underlying tech. So could it just be that performance has degraded over time, and that's why my speeds suck? But I'm sure sata 2 isn't helping much either. I may just go for the pcie card for it. I got it for dirt cheap and it did the trick, so no offense taken haha. It was already well-used when I put 'er in. 

 

Then again, I'm not even sure it would work. Even my HD 7950 is newer than things like M.2, even on servers and workstations, right? Guess it's not a huge investment. Seems like $10 USD can get me one to test. For that amount of money, even if eveything becomes just a bit snappier in real-world performance, it'd totally be worth it!

 

Yeah, I've actually been thinking of sticking the RAM from my dead FX-8350 build into here. I think it was 1600mhz? Only 8GB. Where do you suppose I'd see noticable improvement with the faster RAM? And would the added cost of say, 16GB be worth any small improvement I might get? I think I'll leave this one on the back burner mostly, and just play with what I have on hand to see what the difference might be. 

 

Thanks so much for that information! Greatly appreciated.  

i dont really know much about ram, but i do know that it helps with pretty much everything (except gpu performance). i also dont know which ram modules are compatible with which chipsets. (search it up). 

 

dram ssd's are ones which have a faster cache that is used for well.. caching. it is basically like system ram, but in a ssd. eg: when you download a file, it will go into the super fast dram storage. then it will transfer that onto the actual storage on the ssd (slowly). this dramatically improves responsiveness and speeds (for files <1gb). usually pcie vs nvme ssd's have like a 6% difference and is not worth the added cost (pcie being faster and more expensive). 

[TheBean]