[SOLVED] [SOLVED] HP XW8600 Dual Xeon e5450 - some games not launching

[sezbulent]

Hello,
I recently managed to get my hands on an HP XW8600 workstation, on which I attached an GTX 970.

Shortly, as stated in the title, I have some issues and can not launch some games in windows 10 ( AC Valhalla, Doom Eternal, Horizon Zero Dawn for example) - no error being generated meanwhile.
To complicate things a bit more, some other games as Sea of Thieves, Ori and The Will of the Wisps and Farming Simulator 19 are working without any issues at all.
My guess is that the culprit are the dual Xeon E5450 CPUs as they are probably missing some instructions.

I know this is not a perfect gaming computer, as it is a workstation, but it is something temporary that I'm willing to spend some time on.

Seeking for an answer on forums, I noticed that people had issues similar issues with Xeon CPUs and managed to solve them by disabled hyperthreading in BIOS.
The problem is, this CPU I'm using does not have Hyper-threading implemented in it.

So now I'm looking for an answer here, hopefully someone has an idea regarding this issue.

The full config is the following:

System: HP XW8600
GPU: GTX 970 4GB
CPU: x2 Intel Xeon E5450
RAM: x2 quad channel 8GB 667 MHZ DDR2 ( 16GB in total )
Power Supply: 1000W


EDIT:
[SOLVED]: CPU is missing SSE4.2 ( and more than that ) instructions and due to this the games wouldn't work. The workaround is to find SSE4.x fix/bypasses for the specific games which requires SSE4.2 - fixes/bypasses which solved me the issue for some of the stated games ( DOOM Eternal, Horizon Zero Dawn, Biomutant ).

 

[chaoyang]

Although its unlikely that your PSU has anything to do with this. But what is its brand, model and how old is it?

Also what are your storages (HDDs, SSDs, etc.)

I'm not very fluent about Multi-CPU computer, so I would wait for the others in the mean while.

 

[SamirD]

Have you updated the system bios? If it's a bit old it may have some issues. Also, have you been able to run the games without the gtx970 installed? If so, then it could be that the gpu or its drivers are at fault.

Kudos to putting a great old system to work like this. It's amazing how reliable the hardware of this era was, but actually not surprising considering how expensive systems like yours were originally. I have several servers from the same era that are still running, and while I got them for cheap, their MSRPs when new were more than $7000/ea so they're reliable because they were built that way for sure.

 

[SamirD]

Although its unlikely that your PSU has anything to do with this. But what is its brand, model and how old is it?

Also what are your storages (HDDs, SSDs, etc.)

I'm not very fluent about Multi-CPU computer, so I would wait for the others in the mean while.

PSU in these is enterprise grade so probably not an issue as storage probably would not be as well.

The multi-cpu isn't the only thing that makes this system different--it's that it was a high-end business workstation with a lot of proprietary and high-performance parts (at the time) is what sets it apart.

 

[sezbulent]

Thank you everyone for your answers.

@chaoyang the PSU is about 2+ years old for sure, will take a look to see what brand it is.
@SamirD yes, I looked forward to updating the BIOS but noticed that it is already the latest one. Unfortunately did not try to run the games on the integrated graphics, and nor do I have in my current location another GPU to test ( in any case I fully reinstalled my nvidia drivers to eliminate the drivers as a possibility for the issue ). This weekend I will take the video card and attach it to another system, to see if it is related to it, though I don't think so - but who knows.

And indeed, its really nice to see old systems like this still reliable today, especially because they were made to be so resilient for huge workloads and "forging". Congratulations for your systems as well!

 

[BFG-9000]

Well, this one is pretty simple, those CPUs have only SSE4.1 and those games require newer than that.

You can launch the games (well, besides AC Valhalla which also requires AVX) with a "SSE 4.1 fix" but performance with emulated instructions would be very poor.

 

[sezbulent]

@BFG-9000 you were indeed right, and how I also initially supposed, my CPU actually misses some instruction due to being this old. But your response helped me with the direction to go forward to solve this issue, so I got some SSE4.X bypasses for some of the games mentioned and now they work pretty well.

Thank you everyone for you help and responses, this thread seems to be solved now!