CPU upgrade. needed?

[agrasyuk]

Hello freeNAS community.
I've been looking at this project for quite some time. Recently I received retired Dell T7500 precision workstation and decided to give it a try.

In case plug for usb stick was a nice bonus. Installed 9.3 just fine. pair of new 3Gb WD green drives was visible as 2Gb while connected to SAS ports (even after bios update) had to relocate them to SATA to see the entire drive. Running in mirror. At the moment system has 3Gb non ecc ram, so no critical data loaded for now, testing CIFS shares, permissions etc. I hope to get The ecc 12Gb of RAM kit before weekend. Once installed another pair of drives (my older 2gb WD green) will go in.

Question for your consideration,
System has dual core Xeon 5503 at 2ghz which probably will be sufficient to run couple shares to serve our 3 user household. However my son was quite excited to find out freeNas can also be a Minecraft server and contemplates sharing it with his friends. Would you say CPU upgrade will be needed to comfortably run it? I see several non expensive upgrades , like compatible quad core 3.06@Ghz , but with tdp of 130W I wouldn't want to use it unless really nessery

Thanks for your attention

 

[cyberjock]

I wrote a Minecraft guide that is on the forum and I use it. I run a few basic addons on the Minecraft server and it runs fine. If you don't plan to run a bunch of addons and stuff your system will be fine. Your limiting factor is probably going to be how much RAM you have available for the server. You need 8GB of RAM just for the OS to be stable, with Minecraft I'd expect you to need another 1-2GB or so.

It does only have 2c/2t, so you may run into CPU bottlenecks when doing things like zpool scrubs and resilvers. That is a socket 1366 system, so an ebay purchase of $100 or so will probably buy you a nice 6c/12t CPU. :P

 

[Darren Myers]

You can pick up matching hex cores for $162. But i would best offer $125 because well...thats what i feel the market value is for used hex cores, and i've been following them for a long while and they've gone up and up for whatever reason.

 

[cyberjock]

That ebay link is awesome. I'd totally buy one right now if I had a spare 1366 board that could use an upgrade!

 

[Darren Myers]

I keep ALOT of 1366 stuff on my summery page :p mainly since all my systems are dual 1366 and i try to buy matching sets. CPU's, motherboards, memory lol.

EDIT: incase you NEED a reason to get those CPU's :P , oh and RAMz

 

[cyberjock]

EDIT: incase you NEED a reason to get those CPU's :p , oh and RAMz

/pulls out his wallet

How much for some good Registered 16GB DIMMs? LOL

 

[agrasyuk]

thanks for your hardware guide , cyberjock. i was about to make my first thread something along the lines of "why 8Gb ram if it runs just fine with 3" , but read it on time :)

RAMz... 12Gb will be good starting point, at least for now. :)
as far as CPU, I don't resist the idea of upgrading, i almost impulse bought a second CPU riser and a set of matching CPUs , but then reason seemed to prevail at that point. now i'm watching this CPU auction and while given the cost it seems like no brainer its a 130W of TDP unit and i would preffer to not burn any more electricity then i have to. and then there are those six cores looking so tempting... bottom line your message is quite mixed - you say it is sufficient, yet you say triple your core count :)
dilemmas, dilemmas...

 

[Darren Myers]

Good question! eBay doesnt return too many results...but there is this module but the price makes me tear up a little...i think i could live with this amount

 

[cyberjock]

bottom line your message is quite mixed - you say it is sufficient, yet you say triple your core count :)
dilemmas, dilemmas...

I thought I made it plenty clear...

I wrote a Minecraft guide that is on the forum and I use it. I run a few basic addons on the Minecraft server and it runs fine. If you don't plan to run a bunch of addons and stuff your system will be fine. Your limiting factor is probably going to be how much RAM you have available for the server. You need 8GB of RAM just for the OS to be stable, with Minecraft I'd expect you to need another 1-2GB or so.

It does only have 2c/2t, so you may run into CPU bottlenecks when doing things like zpool scrubs and resilvers. That is a socket 1366 system, so an ebay purchase of $100 or so will probably buy you a nice 6c/12t CPU. :p

Or to distill it down, the CPU should be fine, but when you do scrubs and resilvers it may be stressed. If this causes problems for Minecraft there are very very good upgrade options that are very inexpensive and will definitely give you the power you want. ;)

I definitely don't upgrade unless there is clear, tangible benefit. I'm not someone who "upgrades just because I can" and I don't recommend people spend their money on that philosophy either. It can get expensive because you are never the guy that can no longer upgrade the system.

 

[agrasyuk]

thanks again for the input.
well, i have a new CPU on its way to me :)