Intel Xeon E5 2407...Good Enough?

Mistro11 · 1 Mar 2014, 17:53

Anyone know about these processors? I have a desktop tower with 2 of these quad core CPUs installed giving me 8 cores and 32 gigs of RAM. No one in the studio knows where this rig came from. It's been just sitting there for months, brand new but had a RAID setup. I just say Santa came and hooked me up (I'm the only PC user in the studio...they're trying to Mac convert me.). I know nothing about RAID and not really interested so I pulled the RAID controller hardware out and installed windows 7. The only thing I need to do is find out if the motherboard supports PCI Express 3. I'm thinking of getting the EVGA Nvidia Geforce GTX 760 or 660. I want to use this rig to do 3D rendering and animation. I don't think the E5 series is as good as the i7s but it looks good enough to get the job done........but I don't know how far I could push it as I been on a Q6600 at home for the past 5 years and I read that these processors are slower than average in its generation. Think this rig is good for 3D rendering?

numerobis · 1 Mar 2014, 23:27

The E5-2407 is a very low clocked (2,2GHz) Sandy Bridge-EP Xeon from 2012, without hyperthreading and without turbo. The E5 is the same architecture like the i7 Sandy Bridge-E but for dual CPU setups. But this one is more a server CPU than a workstation CPU with these low specs. Even a 3 years old i7 2600 with 3,4GHz clockspeed and 3,7GHz single core turbo will be much faster for a workstation.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2407+%40+2.20GHz
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core2+Quad+Q6600+%40+2.40GHz%26amp;id=1038
http://ark.intel.com/de/products/64614/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-2407-10M-Cache-2_20-GHz-6_40-GTs-Intel-QPI

Regarding PCIe 3.0... the C600/602/606 chipsets support PCIe 3.0 but i don't think that this will give you any advantage concerning your graphic performance. Your bigger problem will be that your slow CPU will limit your graphics card...

Mistro11 · 2 Mar 2014, 10:08

Thanks for the Info.

I found out what motherboard Its installed on.
Its a Supermicro 1356 X9DBL-iF
Intel C602 Chipset, Dual Socket

You can see full specs here http://www.wiredzone.com/Supermicro-X9DBL-IF-Motherboard-ATX-S-1356-f--Xeon-E5-2400-~10021944~0.htm

I'm trying to see if anyone ever put a geforce card on one of these. Been searching the net. I know it has PCI 3.0 but not sure what card to get. I set the resolution to max and everything is kinda stretched horizontally. I don't like using onboard video.

I was told that as long as some of the software I'm using supports multi-threading well, I should do ok thanks to having 2 processors. It's software that is single threaded that I would have to worry about. My Q6600 machine I use at home is a quad core at 2.4GHz with no hyperthreading and Sketchup and all my software runs just fine and fast enough for me. I'm not or ever been at 3.0GHz. I will be with my next rig though but I will still be using my current PC. I can see some limitations but it's not that bad. Anyway I will find out soon enough. I even looked at manufacture sites that build these work stations and Geforce GTX cards on on the list of recommendation. Why would there be a PCI 3.0 slot and a list of compatable cards if the GPU would limit the system? I will keep researching.

Mistro11 · 5 Mar 2014, 06:06

Great News! I installed the GTX 760 2GB card today and everything is working beautifully! I even did some test renders and it is much faster than my Q6600 at home. All is well and the mystery of whether this machine can perform the tasks for me is solved.

The only thing I wonder about is the missing motherboard disc but I hesitate to install the drivers I downloaded from the Supermicro site because everything seems to work. At the same time I can't help but wonder if I may be missing out on some added performance. I never did a reformat without using the motherboard disc after installing the OS. It's Windows 7 Professional 64bit BTW. In the hardware manager under "other devices" there are numerous yellow "!". I'm used to having the mobo disc and right clicking on the device in the hardware manager and installing the files directly. But the drivers I downloaded from the site come as installers so I cannot get to individual files. Aside from that everything seems fine.

numerobis · 8 Mar 2014, 22:40

@mistro11 said:

The only thing I wonder about is the missing motherboard disc but I hesitate to install the drivers I downloaded from the Supermicro site because everything seems to work. At the same time I can't help but wonder if I may be missing out on some added performance. I never did a reformat without using the motherboard disc after installing the OS. It's Windows 7 Professional 64bit BTW. In the hardware manager under "other devices" there are numerous yellow "!".

Normally it's always better to use the downloadable drivers, because they should be newer than the DVD version - especially for a board that is already available for more than a year.
So you're saying that you've downloaded and installed all drivers from this page and you're still getting numerous missing drivers?
http://www.supermicro.nl/support/resources/

Mistro11 · 18 Mar 2014, 05:10

Sorry for my long delayed response. I did not install the drivers yet because they are in exe format. I'm making sure they are the correct drivers before I go ahead and try them. The board looks different than the one shown in the picture though the model number is the same as the drivers I downloaded. So far I been having the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" attitude as everything seems to be working just fine. I am curious though about putting in those drivers.

numerobis · 18 Mar 2014, 22:40

I think the correct Intel chipset, SATA, PCH, Management Engine and RapidStorage driver should be installed otherwise you could loose performance. And i would just start the installer. I don't think this will be a problem and you will get an entry to remove it.