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May 12, 2006

RadioBot scheduled for surgery

The aging radiobot computer for seismicradio.com is scheduled for surgery.
This baby has been running on a PIII BX-133 MoBo for the last 3-4 years now.
Power measurements show it drawing about 120 WATTS.

Although it's been a great performer over the years, my planned projects of automated jukebox and FTP server will require just a wee bit more horespower. Plus it's my backup computer to hercules and if I'm doing so much with VMWARE, I need the emergency horsepower.

I thought about going to a P4 with hyperthreading so I have smoother opertion, but the thoughts of power utilization & heat production for the Preshott CPU's have held me off.

I've also considered AMD, yet there's still more research for me to do on my end.

I even considered using a Mobile processor which uses only 30watts of power

That is... until recently when I discovered Low Voltage XEONS.

After a bit of hunting, building and testing it seems that LV Xeons is the way to go.
(for now anyway, We'll see what the future brings with DUO-CORE or AMD technology).

So I snagged a pair of 2GHZ 1.3V (Low voltage) XEONS on eBay the other week.
Sold off my higher voltage (1.5) XEONS for a price close to the ones I bought.

Installed them into an ASUS NCCH-DL MoBo with a pair of Swiftech MCX603-V Heatsinks and Wala!
We have achived success.

I like the board itself, although I'm not happy with the heatsink mounting process.
It requires you stick certain plates onto the Chassis and screw the CPU fan onto these plates.
This required going back to the internet for special screws on the heatsinks.
After some consideration I also purchased some aftermarket plates and rigged my own set up.
It all worked out good. If you click on the image above, you will see pictures of the process (Which I took for 2CPU.COM)

These CPU's are supposedly very overclockable.
I'm a moderate overclocker so I elected to only overclock the bus a bit. Reliability and low power/heat production are my main concerns. Right now this puppy only runs an EGGDROP bot for seismic and is my gatekeeper for all incoming connections. So, instead of running the CPU's at 20X100MHZ bus, I'm running them at 15*133MHZ.
This seems to yeild a slightly faster response time. I still have more benchmarking to do.

What really amazed me is these CPU's only pull about 35 Watts each when they are running flat out on a high stress load. Something that I do not reach very often.
So with this upgrade I get dual hyperthreaded processors, and it draws about the same power as my current PIII system which is about 120 WATTS. The 2 Xeons are currently drawing 100 Watts on idle. (.7 amps)
In addition, the heat produced by these is very low. They average around 35c and when they hit 40c the fans whir up to wisk the heat away.

Some of the utilziation could also be the new Seasonic S-12 power supply. This has Active PFC which is far more efficient (at a cost) then regular power supplies. So when I run the CPU's flat out the power will spike to about 160 WATTS. (still not bad).

Overall I'm pretty pleased, yet we'll see how well the fans and heat handle the summer.

Posted by Me on May 12, 2006 10:30 AM

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