Slow Dell Precision 530

Hello,

I wondered if you'd had any luck with this... I'm thinking of buying a used dual Xeon precision 530, and wanted to see if it's worthwhile.

 

Scott

 

I work for a TV graphics deptartment in San Jose. We bought 5 of them and have the same problem. Very irritating.

All are 1.5 xeons with 1 gig of ram and Medea raids. My dual custom built 800mhz seems faster than our workstations at the office.  I don't think I would recomend buying one of these. Nor do I think we will reorder any workstations from dell, unless a solution is found fast.

 

-B

Mine is the same, Dell 530 duel 1.7 xeons 1.5gigs of ram. Its slower then my Dell 330 with a p4 1.7 500megs of ram. As far as I'm concerned I got ripped off. I will not reccommend Dell to anyone that wants a workstation.  If anyone has any suggestions for a fix please post. -Mike

I'm running a dual Xeon 1.5g with 1gb of ECC ram and the Sandra 2004 benchmark #'s are pathetic compared with similar systems. My P4 2.4 lappy seems faster.

 

For my CPU Multi-Media benchmark results:

Integer 18059 it/s

Floating Poing 20397 it/s

Message Edited by Xeon 530 on 03-01-2004 11:49 AM

I have three of these workstations. One works OK but two have been nothing but problems. I was running Win2K. It would work Ok for a while and then crash. I would have to reinstall the OS. Did this on two of them at least 3 time each. These were supposed to be our high end GIS boxes but are pretty much useless. I am tired of reinstalling the OS and all the software. They are slow too. I thought Dual Xeon would be screaming. Not the case. If anyone has any suggestions (LIKE A TECH FROM DELL!!!) I would be happy to hear them.

Is there still no response to this? Is there no answer for speeding these systems up?
Without an answer soon I'll suggest ABD in the future. - Anything But Dell -

Even today, when I open a 38mb QT file, it literally takes 18 seconds to open the QT player. The system has 2gb of Ram. It's almost like the system can't decide how or where to put the program and so sits there. Everything opens or closes like that, with long delays while the system is frozen.

Why is the response time so poor!?!?

Well well, would you believe it, I think I know what the problem is.. Believe it or not, but it is software-related. I've been running some Linux on this box now, and all of a sudden all problems are gone. I've been using a standard Red Hat 9.0 install, and it's not at all slow, with no excessive disk accesses and such. Interesting, eh?

There simply must be a glitch in the chipset drivers in Windows, there cannot be any other explanation. If it had been a hardware issue / BIOS issue, it should behave similarly in other OS's as well, but it simply doesn't. Far from it, Red Hat is really snappy. Since there don't seem to exist any drivers for this chipset other than those integrated into Windows, I'd say the blame is a joint venture of Microsoft and Intel (who made the chipset and also the motherboard design Dell uses). So my hat is off to those idiots once again. Thanks!

I also find it rather annoying that Dell hasn't been able to come up with ANY suggestion or answer to this problem. Believe me, I have tried. All they suggest is that -I- have a software problem and that I should run the restore CD, because they've never heard anything about this problem before. Yeah, right.

Just a newbie here but thought I'd pass along my experience with these "boat anchors" as they are sometimes referred to. I've tried a few different things on our W2k machines which helped performance and they might not apply to all of you, but if I save one person a headache it's worthwhile. First, in device manager the HAL on some of these machines was set to ACPI uniprocessor and I had to update the driver to ACPI multiprocessor. They also had Hydravision installed (desk95.exe in running processes)--after uninstalling this program some of them sped up considerably. When we implemented EPolicy on-access scan settings with McAfee, all the developers' pc's slowed to a crawl as it scanned every file they accessed and we had to make adjustments to EPO settings to avoid that (I'm just a technician--the engineers handled that part). Turned off indexing service on some and it helped. Also, many of these developers on the 530's had machines over 35% fragmented due to serious file transfers all the time so a defrag helped a bit. The info about the inefficient swapping is interesting and I'd like to see more info on that issue. This is definitely a trial by error situation and I always dread getting a service ticket opened up on one of these dogs. Good luck to all of you!

I came by to see if this computer was even worth trying to fix up.

My girlfriends mother works at a trucking company, and they got flooded and I had found a bunch of computers lying outside, which I got some to work.

Then I see this Precision 530 lying there, gutted and all is left is the power supply box and the mother board.

No RAM is left on the board and was trying to find out what type it used.

But seeing as how so many people have had problems with this computer, I am not quite sure I would want to spend about $400 to fix this thing up. It did however look pretty powerful, and it may be being that some people found solutions by changing operating systems or by changing values on the OS.

Any of you think this is even worth my time?

I am on a DELL right now and it's a Dimension 4500s. Not a bad computer, not slow, just non-customizable. Wished this computer had room for even a good graphics card, but as far as this DELL goes, I've not had any slow problems with it. I run XP Home Edition.

 

Thx.

i guess i'm the lucky one.  i have had my dell precision 530 for 3 years. dual 2.2 xeons and 1 gig ram.  i'm running around 800 gigs in HD space (with firewire drives connected as well) and have every usb port and firewire port in use!  my machine screams!  i am running xp pro and use it for my video production co.  i have used it for heavy editing and rendering and photoshop and multi track recording of bands.....24 tracks of uncompressed audio at once via pro tools.  this pc doesn't bat an eye!  i can't imagine anyone having issues................

The issue with programs accessing the hard drive eventhough there is plenty of available RAM has to do with Windows I think.

I had the same problem so what I did was I deleted the paging file totally so Windows now has to use the RAM.This eliminated the constant disk-accessing etc..

Hope this helps.

Must be Windows related. I'm running Ubuntu Linux on mine (dual xeon 1.7) and there are no problems nor slowdowns. It's as fast as it should be and no excessive disk accessing what so ever.

I just started a new job and have been put on a precision 530 workstation ... it has a single xeon 1.8 cpu, and a 512mb rambus pc800 ecc ram stick. I'm mainly using it with Autodesk Architectural Desktop 2007, using it's full capability of building information modelling (complex 3d architecture software).. Min. requirements for this software accd'g to AutoDesk are 3.0ghz cpu and 2gb ram. The video card in the box is plenty sufficient, but the cpu and ram are really slowing me down. We have two of these workstations (identical) for running the same application. I just purchased a 2.8ghz xeon, a voltage regulator, and two more 512mb pc800 sticks. I will be putting one 1.8ghz and the regulator into one of the boxes, and the new faster cpu in the other. So, each will have 1gb ram, one will have dual xeon 1.8cpu and the other a single 2.8. I'm sure this will make things faster... if necessary, i may upgrade both to 2gb ram.. too bad that's the max ram each can take (4x512 ea.).

As for maximizing the 530's potential;... I'm running win2k pro, have all the bios settings correct, am using 1000rpm ide drives with 8mb buffers, and here are some helpful tips:
set the display settings to 16bit color instead of 32bit.
set the pagefile to a constant size, and on each physical drive. (inital and max size should be min. 1.5x physical ram size.
have c: used only for the os, with plenty of free space left over. I set my c: partition to ntfs 20gb, and it's only used for os and system files.
have another physical hd for your applications. if you have only 1 drive, then have a partition for the applications.
download msconfig.exe for win2k, and use it to remove everything unnecessary from the startup que. also disable all non-essential services and items in the start-programs-startup folder.
disable microsoft auto-updates, and after all tsr's are removed, use an efficient antivirus if you're going to run one as a tsr. I highly suggest Nod32. Everything else seems to be sluggish bloatware in comparison.


hope this helps to speed you up, and good luck!