On May 30, 2006, at 11:42 AM, Phillip Kelchen wrote:
Sorry to hear that. I have heard that the Pentium D 8xx chips have some issues
(supposed to have been fixed in the Pentium D 9xx series, and given that your
BIOS is recent enough, drop-in replaceable for the 8xx ones.) and that
Intel's EM64T 64-bit extensions also have issues because Intel
reverse-engineered it from AMD's original spec and didn't nail it perfectly.
That is supposed to be mostly fixed by the time that the next generation of
Intel CPUs- Core 2, aka Conroe, Woodcrest, and Merom. The Conroe desktop chip
and the Woodcrest Xeon are slated to be released July 23rd, but I hear that
the motherboards will be pretty expensive, especially for the Xeon (think
$700+ for a DP Xeon board and $200-300 for a regular desktop Conroe board.)
I've heard the same things. The interesting side of me fixing the issue, is that the issue didn't exist when I started working on this machine - the memory went bad while using it. I'd guess heat, or some other issue. BUT, either way, I'm not very impressed with the Intel processors - they're hot, slow, etc. I've got an AMD64 system at home that smokes the ones I've got here, and it's over a year old.
I'd suggest that you get Dell to give you a refund on the GX620s and you buy
some AMD Athlon X2 processors, suitable motherboards, RAM, HDD, etc and build
some computers. I'll even help you do it if you need. If the agreement with
Dell doesn't preclude it and you'd rather not assemble whiteboxes yourself,
HP could set you up with Athlon X2 workstations similar to the GX620s and
support it like Dell does. The Athlon X2 machines I have used run much cooler
and just generally don't have issues. I push mine quite hard and it runs like
a champ- it never gets above 45 C in a 75 F room under 100% load on both
cores and that's with the fans at 70% speed. I guess if Dell will only
exchange the machines, I'd see if they would drop Pentium D 930s in there as
the 930s run cooler and are more stable than the 8xx series. The 820 actually
costs more than the 930 as Intel slashed prices on the Pentium D series
before the new Core 2 chips ship.
Phillip
Would love to do the X2 processors - I've built a few of those for friends, and MAN, are they fast and sweet! However, work buys dells, and that's it. No other options. SO, I'm stuck with it. However, as said in another email, the memory looks like the issue right now. Course, under my load, it'll probably fail again in a few days - we'll see. *sigh* I'd even take the HP machines, no questions asked right now, over these stupid dells. But, guess what - Computer Desktop Enhance funds are what's provided, and that means dell systems. Oh well...
On Tuesday 30 May 2006 10:53, McIntosh Jason wrote:
This is ALSO after I updated the bios (I'm still having problems
after going to A07). The new bios apparently changes the fan
settings, and allows the machines to recognize newer CPU's. Eh, I
think the machine's hozed no matter what I do.
Anyways, back to phone call...
Jason
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