Got a T5600, now to do something with it

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#1

Continuing the discussion from iMac(pc) fun:

So, it’s in the title. I’m on the fence on the uses of what I want to do with it. It’s gonna show up with dual e5-2660s(8core per) in it. Those will get changed out in due time with dual e5-2670s(8core/16thread each). The resale of the 2660s should cover most of the cost to upgrade. It’s got 32Gb of Ram and a 2Tb drive. Eventually, I’ll up the RAM: 128Gb maximum across 8 slots.

Now. What to do with it and how:
So then, how to set up the 5600. I’ve seen that there have been a couple of pretty successful Hackintosh builds made on one of these and similar Dells. So I could make it a straight Hackintosh.
Alteratively: I could make it a Linux box and it may be easier to setup a VM or two to run MacOS on via that route.

Then the what:
I really want to CPU farm it but Handbrake doesn’t really support that real well(if at all). I have compressor already and can change my workflow easy enough. Compressor will utilize other Compressor installs it finds on a network if allowed.
Could run a very sizable Minecraft server on donations. Could run a small community of Minecraft servers decently. According to the software, the 16Gb on my iMac are enough to host just over 100 at a time so it’s an idea to host gaming servers.

Anyone wanna input ideas? :smiley:

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#2

Okay, so I tried using the Tony mac stuff and it wouldn’t work at all. Went over to clover and after a while, I could boot clover and see the install for High Sierra. Couldn’t get past an issue with the third(?) clover loaded patch(not at home. Killing time st work writing this up). Optidrv2fix or something like that.
So I went with a vm after all. Works okay. Doesn’t do well with the video cards but neither I have the GF 7300gt or the nvs300(id never seen a dms-59 connection before-kinda cool it’s a single port dual video output). Put Handbrake on the win 7 pro base and it smokes my imac at roughly 2.3x render speeds. Won’t use more than 67% cpu power so it could be faster.
Next up is playing with the usb throughput for my studio recording hardware. See if it’ll run well.
Or I’ll give fusion 360 a true at running on win7 and see if that doesn’t have any marked improvements over the i7. i7 starts to drag with a bunch of objects for living hinges. It’s only 16gb. Pricing for the 32gb upgrade is still going up. It’s well over 300$ now.
Turns out the t5600 actually came with 36gb ram and only a Tb drive. Still is a nice little beast for its age…makes my head spin to think about how fast the new workstations are these days.

#3

So a year later I’ve gotten my hands on a 1080ti turbo. Runs like butter. Added a second monitor above my main(no room on the horizontal what with the iMac there).
My issue: it’s a used 1080 and seems okay except for the benchmark from https://www.userbenchmark.com. The entire system resets on the 3rd 3d render test. The other benchmark programs I run are fine. Cinebench, and msi after burner ran fine. Unigine won’t run. Effing dll issues there. Ran the old ff11 game. Ran it like butter. Also, have the 825w replacing the 625w it came with.
Anyone have thoughts?(I’m already thinking one one thing in particular but want to see what’s thrown out here unbiased.)

#4