Dual Xeon L5630 vs Single L5640 advice needed

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canta

Well-Known Member
Nov 26, 2014
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Interestingly, the E3-1225v3 used in the E3 Leveno that you linked to above looks as though it has pretty nearly the same performance as the dual L5630:
PassMark - Intel Xeon E3-1225 v3 @ 3.20GHz - Price performance comparison
one the synthentical test, YES!!!
but speaking on baremetal, dual L5630 better than single e3... -> more cores!! and bigger RAM memory supported
AGAIn, e3 is ideal for non heavy baremetal when idle situation is mixed roughtly 40%-50%.

this your decision, spending abit $ at front and save later in 6 years, or just being cheap to get less $ without saving $ in 6 years.
I pick the first one :D for 24/7,

the other solution is pickig lGA1356 sandy bridge era, which way better than lga1366... processor is not $$ compared with lga1366.
 

canta

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Nov 26, 2014
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Last night I bought two of these Supermicro boards, with dual CPU's and passive heatsinks and IPMI 2.0 (as an add-in card) at $50 each:
Supermicro X7DBN Motherboard 2X Intel E5310 Quad Core CPU Simlc I O Heatsinks 0102646312605 | eBay
togther with 16GB (8 x 2GB) of Samsung ECC memory for them (so, 4 x 2GB per board) for $45:
Lot 8 Samsung 16GB 8x 2GB PC2 5300F ECC Fully Buffered Memory M395T5750EZ4 CE66 | eBay
I paid a slight premium for that particular model of Samsung ECC memory, but I did so because it was on Supermicro's list of "approved" memory for that particular Supermicro motherboard.

After $6 shipping cost, that totals out to $75/computer (I can hopefully uses power supplies and cases and HDD's from older generation computers I have which are now obsolete).

The goal for each computer is just to do separate backups of my file server. That way I should have the recommended 3 copies of data (original plus 2 isolated backups). I wasn't sure how much CPU would be "enough" for the task. If it turns out to be ...........
that could be your personal heater during winter :D. closed the door and let become dual function as a server and heater :D

for non 24/7, that is feasible way.
you can resuse psu and drives.
I am still using one backup single 53XX series with 16G. idle and consumption watt is ugly :D. as I remember 250W with 10 drives. my system is running ZoL under CentOS. just power on once a month for back-up purpose via IPMI (what a great tool).

yeah, more than enough power for backup server, but NOT for 24/7

I pull out my baremetal with dual L5420 last year due on power consumption and replace with e3 ( pretty good deal on e3 ts140 actually):D. what I'm gonna do with this? could be another backup server in the future or not...
not perfect, losing maximum memory on dual L5420. but 32G on e3 should be ok for my longterm use for 6 year server life.
 

chinesestunna

Active Member
Jan 23, 2015
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that could be your personal heater during winter :D. closed the door and let become dual function as a server and heater :D

for non 24/7, that is feasible way.
you can resuse psu and drives.
I am still using one backup single 53XX series with 16G. idle and consumption watt is ugly :D. as I remember 250W with 10 drives. my system is running ZoL under CentOS. just power on once a month for back-up purpose via IPMI (what a great tool).

yeah, more than enough power for backup server, but NOT for 24/7

I pull out my baremetal with dual L5420 last year due on power consumption and replace with e3 ( pretty good deal on e3 ts140 actually):D. what I'm gonna do with this? could be another backup server in the future or not...
not perfect, losing maximum memory on dual L5420. but 32G on e3 should be ok for my longterm use for 6 year server life.
Is that 250W with drives spun up or spun down? Btw - with the Lenovos you got, can you transplant mobo etc to a standard case? I've seen a lot of proprietary mount/power configs on these OEM systems so I tend to shy away as not being able to swap cases would limit future planning considerably
 

canta

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Nov 26, 2014
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Is that 250W with drives spun up or spun down? Btw - with the Lenovos you got, can you transplant mobo etc to a standard case? I've seen a lot of proprietary mount/power configs on these OEM systems so I tend to shy away as not being able to swap cases would limit future planning considerably
arrgm 8 Drives actually on idle with, when crunching or scrubbing, you know the drill... :D
ts140/440 is micro-atx layout, take old motherboard, replace with TS140/440.
one cable actually needed: 24 pins to 14 pins (lenovo connector) that can be bought from mainland China on ebay for ~$5.88.
Plus figuring out front cable pin connector, I already figured out, took 10 mins to know pins conf at the first time.
You need to configure intel AMT for remote, hassle to configure, SM IMPI is a lot better.
 

ViciousXUSMC

Active Member
Nov 27, 2016
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Old thread so hope nobody minds the necro posting, but I know systems like the Dell R710 are still popular and use these sockets/cpus.
I myself just made the jump from dual L5630 to dual L5640 to single L5640 in effort to get my power down as low as possible for a 24/7 ESXi system.

My initial figure was like 140-160w not too bad, but that was when I only had 4 drives and 48gb of RAM as I loaded it up to get 64GB and all 8 drive bays full I was over 200w.

Here is the log of changes I made to get it now to ~145w running 5 VM's

This is all measured with a Kill-a-Watt P3 and a single power supply connected.

Original Setup
205-220w usage with all VM running
190w with only ESXI and all VM Down

Changed the Power supplies from the 870w Silver to the 570w Gold
185-190w usage with all running

Removed the almost fully populated 4GB DIMMS with 1.5v and replaced with 8x16GB 1.35v Low Voltage Dimms
145-150w usage with all running

Replacing the 2x L5630 with 2x L5640 upped the power consumption
About 160w with esxi and 170w with all my VM's up

Removed the 2nd L5640 and running with just one of them
Currently between 135-150w with everything running.

TLDR:
For me running the Dual L5630 was nearly the same power consumption and probably a bit more CPU power than a single L5640
Running dual L5640 noticeably increased the power with no real benefit as I never even got close to 1/2 of my CPU usage on ESXi.

The single largest savings was to use less RAM having 6 sticks instead of nearly 16 and they were low voltage surely helped some as well.
 

fsck

Member
Oct 10, 2013
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Thanks for the numbers. I don't mind, I found the data useful since I just got my hands on a Tyan S7012. Sadly I read your post a bit too late, and I already ordered L5630s, but they were cheap so it isn't a loss, but I'll probably consider grabbing some L5640s soon.