Tag: Xeon

Memory speed vs capacity

Memory speed isn’t often a consideration when building a system except for those seeking ultimate Overclocking performance. While OC memory exceeds the JEDEC standards, there are other considerations which may rob you of maximum performance.

I will discuss memory technologies ranging from DDR2 FB-DIMM to modern DDR4 ECC memory and how CPU memory controller limitations affect the actual performance you can expect. The TL;DR is that when you add more DIMMs per channel or more ranks, the memory frequency goes down.

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In Defense of Old Tech: Why a 10 year old Xeon could be your next computer

I had the opportunity to acquire some Enterprise hardware from a former employer. This hardware is equipment I purchased and built when I worked there, almost 10 years ago. At the time, I was trying to balance cost with performance, some of the components were not top of the line and others were performant for the day.

In all I acquired a couple LGA771 dual socket 2U systems and a 4U system with a 24 drive enclosure and LGA1366 Xeon. All systems had Adaptec 5x05Z RAID controllers with 2TB Seagate drives. The LGA1366 Xeon is/was relatively modern because it represents the first generation of the Core i series architecture. The LGA1366 E5500 Xeons have a base clock of 133Mhz with 3 memory channels, and 4.8GT/s, 5.6GT/s, or 6.4GT/s transfer rates on the QPI bus. Depending on the model number, the max memory speeds are 800Mhz, 1066Mhz, or 1333Mhz.

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