Intel SDE AVX and SSE4.2 patch

[Retrorockit]

I found this looking around at which LGA775 have SSE4 and which ones don't.
It seems Intel has a patch to add these to any x64 CPU including AMD. It even spoofs the CPUID to show the change. Intel SDE.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us...-emulator.html

[Topcat]

Making that work is above my pay grade it seems. SSE 4.2 would be nice on LGA771 Harpertown Xeons (they support 4.1)....it seems Waterfox now requires 4.2 for their 4.x platform.

[Retrorockit]

Many of the Wolfdales only have SSSE3, and those are the ones with multipliers from 13-16. The unlocked Pentium E6500K is one of them.
An E5800 at 16x266=4.332Ghz. That's where I would like to be onmy Optiplex 380. But wlosing SSE4 I'm not sure what benchmarks will accept it. Some guys at Steam are getting it to work on AMD stuff. The Harpwertowns all seem to have 333fsb already. So they're only candidates for tape modding on a 400fsb system, and won't go past 4GHz. I can try the BSEL, and VID mod on my dialy computer. But I willl need a test rig to try something like SDE.

[mockingbird]

Time to ditch Wolfdale/Harpertown.

I picked up a nice ATX Socket AM3+ board locally for $5 with a bios mis-flash, and then paired it with a bargain-basement $20 FX8300...

One day I'll put some GPU in there that makes it shine, that is, if they ever come down in price. PhilsComputerLab did a review about a year ago, and it turns out that OS optimizations really did in fact do a great deal for Bulldozer/Piledriver over the last decade:

AMD FX-8350 8-Core CPU from 2012 still going strong?

He used a 5700XT, but that's overkill... I reckon something like a GTX 1660 should do well on it... and nothing says you need to game at 1920x1080. You can turn on GPU scaling and play at 1280x720. You get black borders, but the picture in the center is sharp.

[Topcat]

Originally Posted by mockingbird

Time to ditch Wolfdale/Harpertown.

For my main system in my office, I already have. My old Harpertown system has been relegated to my service bench; as it's packed with utilities that won't be forced into obsolescence anytime soon. My daily driver is a system I built new back ~2010; Westmere Xeon system. It still has a solid 5+ years before instruction sets could even begin to obsolete it.

[Retrorockit]

I have better stuff than C2D. I just find that I don't really need it.
I just want to make a $20 Dell Optiplex C2D office computer go faster than 4GHz.
I have some Dell T3500 workstations and unlocked 6 core Xeons that will go 4.3GHz. There are a few of them at userbenchmark. But it takes a GTX1080 to get on the front page there.
My Optiplex 380 already has a GTX10603GB in it,8GB DDR3. I've done the X5470 Xeon swap already. Next up is the E7600 tapemod for 3.83GHz.But that's been done before too. I really want the E5800 @ 4.33GHz on tape.With a GTX1060, in a $20 Dell.In fact the E5800 is what it came with.t.

[mockingbird]

Originally Posted by Topcat

For my main system in my office, I already have. My old Harpertown system has been relegated to my service bench; as it's packed with utilities that won't be forced into obsolescence anytime soon. My daily driver is a system I built new back ~2010; Westmere Xeon system. It still has a solid 5+ years before instruction sets could even begin to obsolete it.

Yes, such a beast, brings joy to my soul knowing your power-hungry computer irritates a Leftist somewhere.

This is my daily driver:



This system was several months in the making... It's incredible how all the little things that come up take up so much time in custom builds. The platform is an In-Win CK709 running Windows XP on an ASRock B250M-Pro4 (an RMA of an RMA of a customer, I moved them to an Asus CSM series, you know the ones with the green color PCB, they seem most reliable, so this board was left over. I also ditched that customer because his old bat of a wife with parkinsons kept making sour faces -- knew these people for years, oh well).

The deoderant can on the right is my last remaining Old Spice Red Zone Aqua Reef Spray deoderant... This hasn't been produced in probably a decade now (but they all surprisingly held their gas), so it's used sparingly, mainly to repel women at Tim Horton's in the summer.

The heatsink on the left is something that's been tumbling around here for eons and is finally being put to use soon for a P4 retro rig. It's been fitted with a Noctua 92mm fan (grey Redux model).


This is my second machine:



This is my Harpertown system... Xeon 5450 on a trash-find P5K with 16GB (yes, you read that right) of DDR2-800.

I do my optical media disc testing on this machine (over at https://club.myce.com/). The floppy on the top is for the innumerable times I've been working on retro systems and have been without a floppy drive at hand to transfer a small file.

The 5.25 thing at the bottom toggles which drive or drives I want on before turning on the machine. This lengthens their lives by reducing laser power cycling.

Originally Posted by Retrorockit

I have better stuff than C2D. I just find that I don't really need it.

I need the Spectre/Meltdown fixes in my hardware because I'm running XP. Right now I have a local bottom-dollar i3-7100 find, but I really should be running something like an i5-9400F for the later microcode fixes.

This thing isn't a speed demon at all - to the contrary, Serpent still runs painfully slow, but a heck of a lot better than my old Core2 equivalent (Xeon L5240). But this thing only consumes maybe 50 watts, if even that.

[Retrorockit]

Here's my T3500 with W3690 and Trifire HD6990/6970 setup.
I can get the lid on it with a macho 120 fits with holes drilled for the heatpipes to stick out. fan is a Delta AFC 1512DG 150x50mm 260cfm. (same as my Opti 380)

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/a...002-jpg.99713/

I mostlt built it judt to see what would fit in a T3500 case.

[Topcat]

Originally Posted by mockingbird

Yes, such a beast, brings joy to my soul knowing your power-hungry computer irritates a Leftist somewhere.

I knew there was a reason I liked you!!

Originally Posted by mockingbird

This is my daily driver:



This system was several months in the making... It's incredible how all the little things that come up take up so much time in custom builds. The platform is an In-Win CK709 running Windows XP on an ASRock B250M-Pro4 (an RMA of an RMA of a customer, I moved them to an Asus CSM series, you know the ones with the green color PCB, they seem most reliable, so this board was left over.

Nice! What browser are you running on XP these days? Mypal?

Originally Posted by mockingbird

The deoderant can on the right is my last remaining Old Spice Red Zone Aqua Reef Spray deoderant... This hasn't been produced in probably a decade now (but they all surprisingly held their gas), so it's used sparingly, mainly to repel women at Tim Horton's in the summer.

Christine Sullivan: What's Dan so upset about?

Harry Stone: ...Because Ursula & Inga turned out to be Lars & Bruno

Dan: The 'Old Spice' should have tipped me off!

Name the series!

Originally Posted by mockingbird

This is my second machine:



This is my Harpertown system... Xeon 5450 on a trash-find P5K with 16GB (yes, you read that right) of DDR2-800.

I do my optical media disc testing on this machine (over at https://club.myce.com/). The floppy on the top is for the innumerable times I've been working on retro systems and have been without a floppy drive at hand to transfer a small file.

The 5.25 thing at the bottom toggles which drive or drives I want on before turning on the machine. This lengthens their lives by reducing laser power cycling.

Nice! I really like the case. I haven't seen a system with that many opticals since I had a SCSI CD server back in the day when HDD space was a premium!

[Retrorockit]

My move up from the Opti 380 will probably be a QX9650 Dell XPS420 with 16GB DDR2 and a brand new GTX1660TI OC card.. I've had it to 4.33GHz already. But a 400fsb tapemod to base clock of 3.6GHz, and a Throttlestop overclock on core 0,1 will probably get a bit more than that.

[mockingbird]

Originally Posted by Topcat

I knew there was a reason I liked you!!

Likewise, brother.

Nice! What browser are you running on XP these days? Mypal?

Serpent by roytam1. It's Firefox 52 but with backported security and some functionality of the later versions.

Christine Sullivan: What's Dan so upset about?

Harry Stone: ...Because Ursula & Inga turned out to be Lars & Bruno

Dan: The 'Old Spice' should have tipped me off!

Name the series!

heh! I have an infantile appetite for television shows. Cartoons of the 80s, COPS, Bravestar, Thundercats, The Raccoons (an old unknown Canadian cartoon), and 90s WWF wrestling. You'll have to forgive me for missing this one. Three's Company (he asked expecting to be told no)?

Nice! I really like the case. I haven't seen a system with that many opticals since I had a SCSI CD server back in the day when HDD space was a premium!

Thanks. I think it's an Antec Three Hundred. It's a trash-find. The acrylic portion of the side panel was broken. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure why I haven't just welded it back together with acetone all these years. I still have all the pieces.

Originally Posted by Retrorockit

Here's my T3500 with W3690 and Trifire HD6990/6970 setup.

Cool. I actually worked on T3500s for a school these past few years... Same with all of them, PSU re-cap.

Originally Posted by Retrorockit

My move up from the Opti 380 will probably be a QX9650 Dell XPS420 with 16GB DDR2 and a brand new GTX1660TI OC card.. I've had it to 4.33GHz already. But a 400fsb tapemod to base clock of 3.6GHz, and a Throttlestop overclock on core 0,1 will probably get a bit more than that.

I only used 16GB of DDR2 because I bought ECC (read: NOT registered, just ECC, which Asus boards gladly accept) modules and made of like a bandit with 32gb worth for less than $10 back in the day... First, I don't know if China 4GB DDR2 modules will work on a Dell, whether a Dell will even accept it, and if not, whether it's feasible purchasing regular unbuffered 4GB DDR2 modules (read: expensive).

Also, do GTX1660s have OPROMs for legacy boot systems or do they only work with UEFI? In my case it's not an issue, my AM3 board has UEFI, thankfully. Not too sure about your Dell though.

[Retrorockit]

Dells require X64 low density modules. The cheaper X128 versions ran on AMD CPUs. 4GB low density is rare and expensive because Intel went with FBDIMMS for servers in the 4GB size. Some of the aftermarket boards accept them, but Dell didn't until the integrated memory controllers took over. Optiplex DDR3 is the same way. It's cheaper to convert an Opti 360 to a 380 than to buy 2 sticks of 4GB x64 DDR2. You almost always have to buy new. There never were very many of them back in the day. 4GB DDR3 used is bettter for Dells because new ones have moved to x128.
Funny story about the T3500 photo. One guy in the TPU TS Overclocking thread that I started asked to see a photo of my mods. When I posted it he reported me to admin as a nutcase, and started his own Dell Workstation Owners thhread.Turns out he had worked for Dell and couldn't handle what I was doing to "their" stuff.

[Retrorockit]

Here's a photo of it with the cover on.
https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/a...015-jpg.99507/

[ratdude747]

Two of my four workstations (and the two that see the most use) in use are Harpertowns (the other two systems are a Westmere and a Opteron Istanbul). Haven't had any issues (I use chrome, so waterfox/firefox issues don't apply ). One is the eMachines sleeper build so I doubt it'll ever get upgraded (without being replaced outright); the other could receive a new board but short of dropping another westmere board in it (clone my office system), I don't see it changing any time either.

[Retrorockit]

Everyone forgets the unlocked Nehalem Xeons that are cheaper than the QX9650. Or even the X5470.
W3580 can be found for about $30. Adds HT support and DDR3 1333 x3.(DDR3 x6= 1066)
Maybe prices have gone up some since I got mine.
W3570 is listed as unlocked also.

[ratdude747]

Originally Posted by Retrorockit

Everyone forgets the unlocked Nehalem Xeons that are cheaper than the QX9650. Or even the X5470.
W3580 can be found for about $30. Adds HT support and DDR3 1333 x3.(DDR3 x6= 1066)
Maybe prices have gone up some since I got mine.
W3570 is listed as unlocked also.

I'm running a pair of E5649's. Hex Core units, but E-model so they don't run super hot.

[eccerr0r]

Damn. No support of emulating SSE2 on non-SSE2 CPUs...

[mockingbird]

Originally Posted by Retrorockit

Everyone forgets the unlocked Nehalem Xeons that are cheaper than the QX9650. Or even the X5470.
W3580 can be found for about $30. Adds HT support and DDR3 1333 x3.(DDR3 x6= 1066)
Maybe prices have gone up some since I got mine.
W3570 is listed as unlocked also.

Good luck finding a reasonably priced 1156 motherboard.

You're better off buying one of those Chinesium motherboards that take the Xeons with the triple-channel memory support. The boards are like $100 or so and the Sandy Bridge Xeons go for very little... And soon they'll be doing the Haswell version of this if they're not already.

[Topcat]

Originally Posted by mockingbird

heh! I have an infantile appetite for television shows. Cartoons of the 80s, COPS, Bravestar, Thundercats, The Raccoons (an old unknown Canadian cartoon), and 90s WWF wrestling. You'll have to forgive me for missing this one. Three's Company (he asked expecting to be told no)?

Worry not old buddy, my scope of TV is even narrower than yours....but the show in reference above is 'Night Court'; this episode: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0660706/?ref_=ttep_ep16

This is the only sitcom I ever liked....and know it by heart. Of the core cast, only 2 are still alive.

[Retrorockit]

Originally Posted by mockingbird

Good luck finding a reasonably priced 1156 motherboard.

You're better off buying one of those Chinesium motherboards that take the Xeons with the triple-channel memory support. The boards are like $100 or so and the Sandy Bridge Xeons go for very little... And soon they'll be doing the Haswell version of this if they're not already.

I don't bother with 1156. I go for the LGA1366 with 3 channel RAM. The Nehalem based Xeons were called Bloomfield. Whole Dell T3500 are typically $80. I've actually picked them up for as little as $20, 3x Optiplex XE and a T3500 for $80. When I pointed out that the RAM shroud was missing, and it was part of the cooling he sold it to me for scrap value.