Follow-up - ASRock Rack EP2C602-4L/D16 Build

[Bill1950]

Following is the configuration:

ASRockRack EP2C602-4L/D16 mb
2 x Xeon E5-2670 v1, SuperMicro SNK-P0050AP4 CPU cooler
8 x 4gb DDR3 Reg/ECC DIMMS, 4 per processor
nVidia GTX 750 Ti
Xonar PCIe sound card
USB 3.0 expansion card
EVGA SuperNova 850 B power supply
Corsair Obsidian Case
2 x Samsung 750 250bg SSD (not RAID)
1 x Kingston 110gb SSD (dedicated Pagefile drive on Marvel controller)
1 x Toshiba 1TB HD, 1 x Toshiba 2TB HD, both on Intel SC
2 x LG DVD drives
Windows 7 Ultimate

I'm coming off of an AMD FX-8320 (O/C'ed to 4ghz) that just seemed to run hot beyond the CPU specs even at stock speeds and tended to bog down regularly. It was generally stable and quick, but didn't seem to have much processing capacity once there were a lot of windows open.

I guess it's been three or four weeks since I finished the build. Had to try a few different drivers to stabilize the system. Tweaked the power options. Got all the updates in, apps loaded. All the devices are working including the USB devices.

I'm pleased with the results. The system runs relatively cool, rarely exceeds 50C / 122F on any CPU core using HWiNFO64. And runs quiet in the Corsair case. W7 multitasking uses all 32 hyper-threading cores though some applications only single thread. Other tasks seem to be distributed to other cores.

The system seems just an eye-blink slower and does hesitate at times in Firefox (not network-related), but doesn't get bogged down. Program start-up seems comparable. Video does not seem quite as "snappy" as with the AMD system even though I have tweaked the slot configurations. Not really an issue since I'm not a gamer, but I do use MS Flight Simulator on the highest settings and it is a somewhat jerky.

The system just never seems to run out of steam regardless of what I choose to run, how many windows I have open or the mix of applications. I try to watch Windows Task Manager for core and memory usage. Barely above idle.


Windows Backup does not work. Keeps telling me my drives are not mounted. That's not an issue since the entire system is backed-up every evening using an original Microsoft Home Server. Full disk image of critical drives.

At this point in the process, I am very satisfied with the overall improvement in performance. The system does not run out of processing power / "steam." I have not tried any CAD applications (next week) or heavy math computation.

Question:

The system does not seem to have ever used more than 7 GB memory of the 32 GB available. Maybe that means there's a lot of paged memory (as indicates in Windows Task Manager). Would additional memory would help lower the paged memory amount to improve performance?

 

[William]

I would turn down paged memory to 2GB, there is no need for it use massive amounts of paged memory with the amount of RAM you have installed.

The reason I say 2GB is some programs just do not like it if you have it turned off completely.

I use a dual socket system for my daily driver also, 256GB of RAM tho. I can have so much running its not funny and it just doesn't scratch the system at all. I have VMWare Workstation Pro running also with a few VM's going, it makes no difference, the system just hmmmm's along.

 

[Bill1950]

Good idea! No point in paging with so much free memory.

I did forget to mention the very long time it takes the hardware to start-up, initialize and POST. In particular, it takes a long time to find the Marvel controller and detect the Kingston SSD. I haven't actually put a stop watch on it, but that step more than doubles the time from reset or power on until o/s load. I don't do many shut downs or resets so it doesn't matter too much.

 

[William]

That's very typical of dual processor boards.
I use a ASUS Z10PE WS and yeah... it takes a while.

Its nothing compared to Quad socket systems. Did you check out Patrick's video ?
Racing Quad Intel Xeon E7 V3/ V4 systems - How much downtime does a reboot cause?

 

[wildpig1234]

i have run zero paged virtual memory on all my computers with more than 4gb of ram and hasn't much of any problem. if you have 128gb + ram, you should definitely run ramdisk software if you are not running anything else that use up a lot of the mem. i have a few programs that have cache folders which i move onto the ramdisk and got some serious improvement in loading speed of files. also help so that you are not stressing out ssd main disk

 

[William]

I have tried no paged file before, some programs dislike that and that's the reason I run a small page file. Haven't checked this is a long time tho., might be worth testing it again.

I have RAM Disk software I have run in the past, it works pretty good... Radeon RAMDisk
I have to get that set back up on the new workstation.

 

[Bill1950]

I dropped the pagefile size down to 1.25gb - 2.0gb. There is a performance improvement. It seems that Firefox and Thunderbird both want pagefile space. On start-up, they seem to first read to the pagefile, then open their respective windows.