[SOLVED] Extremely SLOW Dell Precision T7610 Workstation (has 10x lower benchmark scores than any other box in my office)

[WPostma]

So when I check Geekbench scores out and compare the Dell T7610 workstation I have to any other computer, it's mind-numbingly horribly slow. Latest geekbench 5.x scores are in the range 290-490 for single core, depending on bios options. Other Dell 7610 workstations owned by other people have geekbench single core scores for geekbench 5 in the range 2000-2800, even for the same Xeon E5-2609 CPU. The machine is populated with DDR3 ecc dimms. I have a set of 5 dimms with cisco part number 15-13615-01, which they describe as "Cisco 16GB 1X16GB 1600MHZ PC3-12800 Ecc Dual Rank Registered DDR3 SDRAM 240pin Dimm Genuine Cisco Memory". I also have 12 dimms from another vendor Micron 16GB ddr3 PC3L (2Rx4 PC3L-12800R-11-13-E2 MT36KSF2G72PZ Server Memory Ram, which is also ECC)

Here's a sample of the ridiculously low score:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/5725286

Compared to any other Dell Precision T7610 I can see out there in the wild, and compared to my non-workstation class laptops, the performance of this machine is laughably bad, and is easily 10x to 16x lower than it should be.

It's like this was one of those early 2000s systems where you could alter the wait states and clocks directly in your BIOS and this was accidentally underclocked 10x too slow.

Has anyone encountered this sort of problem with Dell Precision workstation class machines?

The Diagnostics in the BIOS run fine, but the memory tests take over 20 minutes to complete. The hardware diagnostics report as Bios build 4230.13 UEFI.

For example, after 60 minutes of memory test run, the XMATS32 test sits at 88% complete, and in the details, the CPU 0, through CPU 7 NUMA memory test detail lines are bumping up 1% at a time (from 41% to 42%) every 30-50 seconds. It's grindingly slow.

I'm curious if anyone owning a Dell Workstation class machine with > 80 GB of RAM could report their GB of RAM and the total time to complete all "ePSA Pre-Boot System Assessment Tests" in the dell bios is. It seems odd to have diagnostics system assessment taking over an hour. You get to those tests from the F12 boot menu or the F2 bios menu, I believe.

 

[SamirD]

When did you first start seeing this slowness? So you have 17x16gb=272GB of ram installed? What does it do if you just install 1x 16GB module?

 

[WPostma]

I have 17 sticks of compatible RAM but the machine capacity is 16 slots, so I can put any 16 of them in there.

So it's populated out at 16x 16gb, 256gb.

It's been slow since I bought it, but since I used it originally as a file storage system, I didn't notice the awful CPU performance until I started to use it as more than a file storage pile.

I bought it one year ago used on ebay, this week I got more RAM for it because I thought the slowness was because the DIMM configuration was a single channel DIMMconfiguration issue.

With all 16 memory slots populated at 16 gb DDR3 ECC DRAM DIMMs, it should be operating in dual channel memory mode, and should be at peak performance, but with the 16x16gb dimms, the speed wasn't any much different from when it had 4x or 5x 16db dimms in it.

Good idea about testing performance with just ONE dimm installed. I will try that once it finishes all the extended memory tests. I figured if something is wrong with the motherboard or RAM perhaps the testing would expose it. It took almost 70 minutes until it got to a message box to say "do you want to run more tests"? I thought, hell, let it run all night if I learn something. I'll update the thread tomorrow after it's sat and run memory tests all night. Who knows how long Dell's test routines should take, I don't actually know. Expected times for tests would have been a nice thing for them to tell us.

 

[SamirD]

Gotcha. Thank you for the additional details.

That extended memory test will take a loooooong while. Testing 256GB in my hp z420 took about 36hrs using memtest. I would expect around the same in the Dell.

Unfortunately, you're going to have to break this thing down to the basics--check the cpu and cooler, check booting absolutely barebone, check booting a linux live cd/usb and testing there. Worse case, it's a motherboard or cpu issue. Best case, it's some obscure bios setting set wrong.

 

[WPostma]

It may be I'm totally wrong here. If anyone else having a Dell Precision workstation with a circa-year-2011 manufactured CPU and can post their SINGLE CORE score for Geekbench V5 I would appreciate it.

 

[SamirD]

The e5-2609 is a seriously weak processor. Even my z420's e5-2630L is faster and uses less power and has more cores. To give you a comparison, even an lga775 q9650 is faster, so your performance may be right:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compar...Intel-Core2-Quad-Q9650/1429vs2222vs1038vs1050

I think you may have confused the 2609 with the 2690 which are night and day:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compar...tel-Xeon-E5-2690/1429vs2222vs1038vs1050vs1223

 

[WPostma]

That's actually oddly comforting to realize that the E5-2609 is a weak ass processor, it means that I didn't overpay for this rig when I bought it used. It simply was a decent if aging workstation box with a craptastic CPU but with the ability to upgrade to a pair of better processors. Now that I have the box at 256 gb RAM, I think it would be worthwhile to ditch these E5-2609's and get something better.

Mentally I had categorized this machine as somehow performing closer to a Pentium III @ 1 ghz rather than a 2.x GHZ dual socket xeon workstation class machine

 

[SamirD]

It should be comforting as anything more as a file server would have been a waste of processing power--you definitely got what you needed for the job.

As far as that p3 1ghz...it is definitely faster even though it feels slow:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Pentium-III-1400S-vs-Intel-Xeon-E5-2609/1146vs1429

Software has a lot to do with that slowness too. It's been almost 3 decades since windows 3.1 and all the hardware is an order of magnitude faster, and yet doing the same things like a spreadsheet or letter takes the same amount of time, lol. I actually boot up some of my old systems and use them just to compare sometimes, lol.