3 ms·

The magic word "ECC" got me very interested. Do you have the model number to check the specs? Is 32GB the max? (That's what I already have on a thinkpad) Think

The magic word "ECC" got me very interested. Do you have the model number to check the specs? Is 32GB the max? (That's what I already have on a thinkpad) Thinkpads are interesting: 4 years ago they CPU slightly faster than yours: i7 3940XM.

igravious 10y ago
There must be more to Xeons than being an i7 w/ ECC surely.
- devereaux 10y ago
  In practice? I don't know. i7 means IOMMU. That I care about. But it may be useless to most - like ECC. We have niche interests, and a few things that matter (IOMMU, ECC) Most people care about TDP or prices.
- ComputerGuru 10y ago
  Sure, SGX, bigger L3, some virtualization features thrown in. But ECC is the only one that matters (the 6920HQ doesn't have virtualization support which I live and die by, but other i7 chips do). There are servers running i3 chipsets because for some bizarre reason, Intel has allowed using ECC RAM on i3 machines but not on i5 or i7.
ComputerGuru 10y ago
HP charges an arm and a leg for customizations; I bought it with a 120 GB M.2 SSD and 16GB of ECC then swapped those out for a Samsung PCIe NVMe M.2 950 Pro and 2x16GB ECC RAM. It has 2x SODIMM slots and each can take up to 32GB, so you could do 64GB if you wanted to. That upgrade would have cost me around $1000 preconfigured from HP, but since these are real machines that let me actually do what I want to them, I was able to swap them out for myself for $350 - and that's before recuperating the costs by selling the parts it came with. btw, I think the 3940XM is only faster on paper. The E3-1545m has 8GT/s vs the 3940XM's 5GT/s, ~33% more memory bandwidth, and an L4 memory cache.
- intrasight 10y ago
  I've been looking for a similar machine. Wish there were more available with the E3-1545m which is an awesome CPU. In the past I've shied away from HP due to quality concerns. Have the addressed that issue? So you had to self-upgrade and sell the original parts? That's sad that that is necessary. Did you try contacting HP to see about purchasing a bare-bones machine to avoid getting parts you don't want? Are both M.2 slots gen3 x4? I was looking at the Dell workstation and was dismayed to find out that only one of slots can work at that speed.

igravious 10y ago

There must be more to Xeons than being an i7 w/ ECC surely.

devereaux 10y ago
In practice? I don't know. i7 means IOMMU. That I care about. But it may be useless to most - like ECC. We have niche interests, and a few things that matter (IOMMU, ECC) Most people care about TDP or prices.
ComputerGuru 10y ago
Sure, SGX, bigger L3, some virtualization features thrown in. But ECC is the only one that matters (the 6920HQ doesn't have virtualization support which I live and die by, but other i7 chips do). There are servers running i3 chipsets because for some bizarre reason, Intel has allowed using ECC RAM on i3 machines but not on i5 or i7.

ComputerGuru 10y ago

HP charges an arm and a leg for customizations; I bought it with a 120 GB M.2 SSD and 16GB of ECC then swapped those out for a Samsung PCIe NVMe M.2 950 Pro and 2x16GB ECC RAM. It has 2x SODIMM slots and each can take up to 32GB, so you could do 64GB if you wanted to. That upgrade would have cost me around $1000 preconfigured from HP, but since these are real machines that let me actually do what I want to them, I was able to swap them out for myself for $350 - and that's before recuperating the costs by selling the parts it came with. btw, I think the 3940XM is only faster on paper. The E3-1545m has 8GT/s vs the 3940XM's 5GT/s, ~33% more memory bandwidth, and an L4 memory cache.

intrasight 10y ago
I've been looking for a similar machine. Wish there were more available with the E3-1545m which is an awesome CPU. In the past I've shied away from HP due to quality concerns. Have the addressed that issue? So you had to self-upgrade and sell the original parts? That's sad that that is necessary. Did you try contacting HP to see about purchasing a bare-bones machine to avoid getting parts you don't want? Are both M.2 slots gen3 x4? I was looking at the Dell workstation and was dismayed to find out that only one of slots can work at that speed.