Pacland's Philippine Boxing Forum

Ha! This chip is older than I am but it's still alive and kicking and doing some work to date (mining with its meager hash rate and doing blockchain stuff). It never failed me and has been extremely reliable. It has survived through the abuse that I subjected it to; it also survived a major coolant leak. So I'm kinda growned attached to it. The mofo is equally resilient as the cacaroach.

It has had quite a rebuild history since I've had it. Back in 2006, I built an air-cooled Quad-SLI gaming rig around a freshly-released Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (bleeding edge at that time) in a Thermaltake Soprano mid tower case.

http://forum.philboxing.com/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=169997&start=15#p3704254

With OC'd quad cards and CPU, striped 2x 10000RPM WD Raptors and 2x 7200RPM WD Caviars and a whole host of fans and other components/parts, it got pretty cramped and hot in there. So a month or two later, I rebuilt it into a modded Lian Li PC-V2000 server case and decided to watercool pretty much every major component/part including the HDDs.

http://forum.philboxing.com/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=107298&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=15#p2470071

Then some years later, disaster struck. While I built a new Intel Core I7-950/X58 with the Lian Li PC-V2000 case/Koolance watercooling system...

http://forum.philboxing.com/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=118627&start=60#p4531970

...I also rebuilt the E6600 and put it back in the Thermaltake Soprano case...

http://forum.philboxing.com/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=118627&start=60#p4531985

...and it has been serving me well to date. Of course, it went through a host of different GPUs (mining) and the PSU was upgraded to a Corsair GS600 as well as the boot drive to an SSD since then.

I intend to install Windows 10 Pro and while I'm at it, I might as well see if I could do some optimization to improve its performance and give it a new lease on life. Why the heck not?

Some amusing info on and specs of this rig to be considered ahead of the attempt to optimize it:

CORSAIR Gaming Series GS600 600W 80 Plus Certified PSU
https://www.newegg.com/corsair-gaming-series-gs600-600w/p/N82E16817139023

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe Dual-Core 2.4 GHz
https://www.newegg.com/intel-core-2-duo-e6600/p/N82E16819115003

CORSAIR XMS2 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800MHz
https://www.newegg.com/corsair-4gb-240-pin-ddr2-sdram/p/N82E16820145241

MSI G41TM-E43 LGA 775 Intel G41 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard
https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/G41TME43/Specification
- 1x PCIe 1.0 (Gen1) x16
- 4x SATA II (3 Gbits/s) ports
- No RAID option in BIOS
- DirectX 10

1x Corsair Force SATA II (3 Gbits/s) 120GB SSD
https://www.newegg.com/corsair-force-120gb/p/N82E16820233125

1x Seagate BarraCuda SATA II (3 Gbits/s) 320GB HDD
https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16822148140

As you can see, it's really very old tech.

Stay tuned.

Good stuff bro......I guess imma have to keep my x58 setup build till it dies......at least I ain't worried about spending $$$ on some new stuff until my windows 7 goes out of commission next year I heard.

Yup! Keep it if it still works. The X58 is a high-end chipset that affords you more latitude to do upgrades and is still a good one by today's standard. Somebody offered me to buy my X58 (in the Lian Li case/Koolance watercooling setup) some years ago. It was a very good offer so I reluctantly parted with it. I would've had so much fun upgrading that baby and make it purr like it is current tech. There's no reason why you couldnt the same. I'd put an NVMe boot drive in it first and foremost...assuming your mobo has UEFI instead of the legacy BIOS. You should have an availabe PCIe that runs on at least four lanes on your X58 mobo.

BTW, W7 EOL will be after 01/24/20. It doesn't mean it'll stop working after such date. It would still be functional until it doesn't anymore but there'll no longer be support, updates and security patches after 01/24/20. I'd upgrade now or anytime soon. W10 is much more polished and faster than W7. I know we're on the same boat as far as W10's privacy intrusiveness is concerned but it has come a long way and MS has capitulated and made some changes since then to pacify the public outcry. It's still not completely privacy-friendly by a long shot but it's better and you could manually turn off the rest of them during or right after installation. There are also apps (some open-source) that disable/remove any lingering privacy-unfriendly features that users could not get to.

Dayum! The ancient MSI G41TM-E43 mobo only got USB 2.0...not that I'm gonna be doing a lot of USB activity on this one beyond installing Windows 10 Pro but just sayin'.

So the old Corsair Force 120GB SATA II SSD boot drive is rated at around 285/275 MBps (read/write). But its CDM benchmark shows a paltry 163.8/92.65 MBps. Still, user experience hasn't relatively been that bad considering it's a 13-year-old tech with a dual-core chip.

https://i.postimg.cc/P5Xxv1PD/corsair-120gb.png

The old Seagate BarraCuda 320GB SATA II HDD is equally feeble and boring and worse at 72.40/72.66 MBps (read/write).

https://i.postimg.cc/1XWRS1pf/hdd-320gb-original.png

The old budget microATX mobo doesn't give me much choice or option in optimizing the system. There's no RAID feature in BIOS that allows booting from a striped set of two SSDs (doubling its speed). There's no available PCIe slot to use with an M.2 NVMe SSD adapter and even if it does, it has legacy BIOS (UEFI is required to mod the firmware to make it NVMe-aware and boot from it). Furthermore, it only has the older SATA II (3 Gbit/s) ports and not the current SATA III (6 Gbit/s).

All I could do is get a current, better-performing SSD as a boot drive and recycle/repurpose the old one as a work/blockchain drive. Besides, I need a larger one anyway as 120GB just doesnt cut it anymore nowadays as a boot/app drive. I'll also get a matching 320GB HDD to the old one and stripe them after the fact (via Windows 10 OS) to double its data rate and improve performance.

I got a Patriot Burst 240GB SATA III SSD (for the boot/system drive upgrade) from a local retailer which was on sale for under $25.

I also found a refurbished HDD for under $10 that is exactly the same model and capacity as the old one (Seagate BarraCuda 320GB SATA II HDD) to pair with for a RAID 0 array. How lucky can I get? Super budget it is.

It went from the old Corsair Force 120GB SATA II SSD boot/system drive with 164/93MBps read/write speeds to a more current Patriot Burst 240GB SATA III SSD with 235/240MBps. It's a very significant upgrade for peanuts as this made the C2D E6600 a lot zippier than before. To reiterate, this is still running on a SATA II port and not SATA III. Otherwise, it would be doing closer to the max rate of around 500MBps read/write as specified.

The RAID 0 pair of Seagate BarraCuda 320GB SATA II HDD does 153/155MBps. A single one does 72/73MBps. As expected, striping them together doubled the transfer rate.

...and apparently, Windows 10 Pro 64-bit installed just fine on this oldie.

New and recycled SSDs, refurbed and recycled HDDs and recycled PSU

It's housed in the same case as in my recent Budget Ryzen Build and Budget Bulldozer FX-8120 Rebuild with pretty much similar setup/case fan configuration.

https://i.postimg.cc/dVDh5zjP/IMG-0042.jpg

No need to use an AIO liquid cooler on this dual-core E6600. Even with the persistent OC of 3GHz and constant 100% load (mining), the Zalman CNPS9500 have kept it nice and cool. Besides, I've always liked its looks; reminds me of a turbine.

My goodness! All that redness...not to mention the mustard and ketchup...and pepper wires. But that was rig fashion back then.

I'm using an old Nvidia GTS 450 for the picture. It matches the size of the microATX board and looks better than a much longer AMD GPU miner. But it is equally a pathetic loser and impotent as the rest of the Nvidia cards that I've had in terms of mining hash rate.

Tada! I figured I might as well go with it (the redness) since it's something that I can't control at this point. Splashing tomato soup lighting on the red bell pepper mobo and mustard/ketchup/black pepper wires actually toned down and diffused all that starkness. Now it's delicious.

https://i.postimg.cc/50PsXf6F/IMG-0067.jpg

Persistent OC from the Conroe E6600's stock clock of 2.4GHz to 3GHz on both cores.

I just realized just how old this motherboard really is. It still got a parallel IDE or PATA connector (blue strip just below the ATX 24-pin power connector on the right side of the board). Remember those airflow-restricting parallel ribbon cables? Fun times!