Choosing a second hand computer:
As my previous laptop died of heat, I was looking for a new machine with a tight budget. Having read the post from Denys Katerenchuck on a budget friendly PC for deep learning it was tempting find an old machine capable of powering a gpu such a GTX 960 or better.
Old workstations are capable of powering such GPU. The Dell Precision T series are valuable since they comes with a 875 W PSU in the case of the T5500.
A lot of peoples tweak this model for gaming (thanks for the link), for example this one. Several videos show such Dell Precision workstations running games:
I bought on Ebay a Dell Precision T5500 (12 Gb RAM, xeon 5520 CPU, no HD, no cable, 875W PSU) for 133€ (~100€ for the machine and ~30€ for the transport from UK to France).
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| 3x4 Gb RAM |
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| Dust included |
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| PCI slots |
When first connected to a TV as monitor (no HD at this stage), an error message was displayed (due to the size of the screen?):
Fortunately, initial tests show no hardware problems:
A 128 Gb SSD from a previous laptop computer was connected on SATA1:
Ubuntu 16.04 was installed from a usb-key. Installing Ubuntu took 15 minutes.
Some BIOS settings were modified to boot on the SSD. SATA-1 was checked and other settings were unchecked:
RAID config was switched from "RAID-on" to "RAID auto detect/ AHCI":
Powering up looks like:
If needed, the boot-info is here.
CPU
This Precision T5500 model comes with a 0D883F motherboard accepting E55xx or E56xx CPU, this is not the best possible choice for a T5500, currently, it has one Xeon E5520 CPU.
GPU card:
The graphic card provided with the computer can't be used for deep learning, even not for 3D with geogebra !! It's a:
VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV635 [Radeon HD 3650/3750/4570/4580]
in 2016, Denys Katerenchuck recommended the GTX 960 4Gb as a good tradeoff between price and performances. In 2018 such card can be found on ebay for less than 150€. The Dell T5500 can power a GTX 1050 from its PCI slot. It has also a six pins power connector (left) to power an EVGA GTX 1060 for example.
Somes reported that they installed a GTX 960 and even a 1080.
BIOS
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| Dell splash screen visible on first boot |
The bios version is a A02 from 2009. Dell provides updates for A02 both for windows and linux (for redhat, not ubuntu). It seems that the BIOS has to be upgraded in order to install a recent GPU.
Questions about BIOS version and GTX960 can be found, The BIOS upgrade is a recurrent question.
BIOS version history
Latest version is A17
Testimony of a user showing he had a hard time when he tried to upgrade the firmware. The user reported that : "Oh I should state that when I got the machine it had bios version A5 on
it. I was able to get to A9, but I had to flash each BIOS in order to
get to that point."
Different feedbacks from the web, advice to upgrade the BIOS directly from the current version to the last version
Upgrading from windows yields:
From Ubuntu or freeDos:
There are different possible ways to upgrade the BIOS:
There are different possible ways to upgrade the BIOS:
- Using a binary linux, .bin, file
Running the .exe version from a bootable freedos usb-key and possibly from ubuntu too.- a 2017 article about the use of freeDOS (not related to T5500)
- a post on ask ubuntu reports that the use of a windows- 7 repair disk is necessary
By the way, The T5500 refused to boot from a freedos usb stick up to now ...
Motherboard versions
It seems that the motherboard can comes in different flavours:
- D883F
- CRH6C
- W1G7K
The most capable motherboard seems to be the CRH6C model supporting up to X5690 xeon CPU. One user reported the use of two X5660 on the D883F model with the latest BIOS (shoud be A16).
Upgrading the GPU
An asus GTX 960 4Gb turbo was waited:
The card is long for a T5500, some place has to be made to plug it in the case:
As the T5500 was powered on, it just boot (from a BIOS A02!) and open a linux session (with a nouveau driver):
So no firmware update!
Some softwares were installed (nvidia ppa, driver 384-130...) and this yields:
The card is long for a T5500, some place has to be made to plug it in the case:
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| The blue plastic locker was removed |
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| The hard disc support was partially cut and bent. |
So no firmware update!
Some softwares were installed (nvidia ppa, driver 384-130...) and this yields:
CUDA 9 + cuDNN 7 on ubuntu 16.04
Several tuto are available to install cuda 9 + cudnn:
After installation, the nvidia driver was updated to 396.26:
Checking install
Copy the cuda sample files somewhere to the home directory and build them:
Launch deviceQuerry for example:
The GTX 960 card (PCIe 3) is plugged on a PCIe 2 16x slot. How the card and the computer communicate? May be bandWidthTest can bring some insight:
