Upgrade from Magny Cours to Interlagos

[LucasH]

I very recently bought an HP Proliant DL165 off ebay for 200$. Quick specs before I begin:

Dual Opteron 6172 12 Cores, 24 cores total (2.1GHz base, with no turbo support)

48GB of ECC ram

Quad Gb NICs

It works great (amazing deal btw), though its single/few core performance is sub-par (as you would expect with an old, low-clocked opteron). I plan to use it mostly for virtualization, with 2 to 4 cores per VM. Within the VMs, the performance is a bit underwhelming as things stand. 

I was wondering how much of an upgrade switching to dual Opteron 6276's would be (dual 16 core based on bulldozer platform, 2.3GHz base and 3.2GHz turbo), as the upgrade would be relatively cheap. 

[Blucyrik]

7 minutes ago, LucasH said:

I very recently bought an HP Proliant DL165 off ebay for 200$. Quick specs before I begin:

Dual Opteron 6172 12 Cores, 24 cores total (2.1GHz base, with no turbo support)

48GB of ECC ram

Quad Gb NICs

It works great (amazing deal btw), though its single/few core performance is sub-par (as you would expect with an old, low-clocked opteron). I plan to use it mostly for virtualization, with 2 to 4 cores per VM. Within the VMs, the performance is a bit underwhelming as things stand. 

I was wondering how much of an upgrade switching to dual Opteron 6276's would be (dual 16 core based on bulldozer platform, 2.3GHz base and 3.2GHz turbo), as the upgrade would be relatively cheap. 

Damn... all of that for $200??? Impressive!

 

I would assume upgrading to dual Opteron 6276's would give you an increase in performance (due to higher base clock speed and turbo boost) but with a bit of an older system I'm thinking there could be something else affecting performance...

 

Have you tried allocating more cores per VM to see if that makes a difference? I know this means less VMs you can put on your machine but you would be able to see if something else is bottlenecking your system

[LucasH]

35 minutes ago, Blucyrik said:

Damn... all of that for $200??? Impressive!

 

I would assume upgrading to dual Opteron 6276's would give you an increase in performance (due to higher base clock speed and turbo boost) but with a bit of an older system I'm thinking there could be something else affecting performance...

 

Have you tried allocating more cores per VM to see if that makes a difference? I know this means less VMs you can put on your machine but you would be able to see if something else is bottlenecking your system

Thanks lol, if you scour ebay for long enough you can find some amazing deals

Anyways, from what I can tell, the lack of performance in the VMs (and single threaded stuff in general) is due to the fact that each opteron 6172 is basically two phenom X6's strapped onto one chip, but clocked significantly slower. I've looked for other bottlenecks, but the CPUs seem to be the lowest common denominator. The storage for the VMs is a RAID 0 array of 7200RPM HDDs that gets read speeds of ~500MB/s, so storage isn't the problem (especialy since the VMs don't do much random reading/writing), and ram definitely isnt the issue (2-4GB per machine, ram usage is below 50% on all of the VMs), so I'm left with the CPU. The main question is this thread is how much will I gain in terms of CPU performance from an upgrade to Interlagos (bulldozer) opterons.

[Blucyrik]

9 minutes ago, LucasH said:

Thanks lol, if you scour ebay for long enough you can find some amazing deals

Anyways, from what I can tell, the lack of performance in the VMs (and single threaded stuff in general) is due to the fact that each opteron 6172 is basically two phenom X6's strapped onto one chip, but clocked significantly slower. I've looked for other bottlenecks, but the CPUs seem to be the lowest common denominator. The storage for the VMs is a RAID 0 array of 7200RPM HDDs that gets read speeds of ~500MB/s, so storage isn't the problem (especialy since the VMs don't do much random reading/writing), and ram definitely isnt the issue (2-4GB per machine, ram usage is below 50% on all of the VMs), so I'm left with the CPU. The main question is this thread is how much will I gain in terms of CPU performance from an upgrade to Interlagos (bulldozer) opterons.

Without having a system identical to yours with the new CPUs there's really no way to know how well this will increase system performance. But on paper and looking at the different specs between the two CPUs you should see an increase.

 

If for whatever reason the upgrade makes little to no difference (if the system just isn't powerful enough), then I guess you're SOL. It's a risk you're gonna have to take.

 

Good luck and I hope it works out  

[Coaxialgamer]

Are opterons locked? 

Maybe you could try overclocking? 

[LucasH]

23 hours ago, Coaxialgamer said:

Are opterons locked? 

Maybe you could try overclocking? 

Yes, opterons are locked. The only way I could overclock these is with a board that supports changing the bus speed.