Shoehorning Duallies - The Lenovo C30

Just picked up a Lenovo C30 from ebay, which looks like at least one company thinks like me as far as cramming a lot into a small case. In this case, a more or less EATX dual Socket 2011 motherbard in a case rather smaller than a regular PC case.

I'll be going into this into a bit more detail in a later posting but first a few observations:

1. The BIOS was rather old and Lenovo has done quite a good job at releasing regular updates to cover Intel's security holes - both in the Management Engine firmware and the whole Meltdown/Spectre debacle. However, the CDROM-based EFI BIOS update failed - judging from the error message, the EFI code on the board was too old to run the update script. So I go to use the DOS update using a Rufus generated bootable USB key - I'm running Linux on this so the Windows update was not an option. This gave me an out-of-memory error which was somewhat annoying - fortunately the error message was accompanied by the command line that flash.bat was trying to execute. Entering this manually, without the overhead of command.com and Lenovo's wrapper code, worked fine.
2. The motherboard is identical to the considerably larger Lenovo D30  but with half the RAM slots missing (8 instead of 16) to allow better airflow - the D30 has RAM cooling fans but the S30 relies on passive airflow. However, I think that a D30 motherboard would work fine with all the slots if I stick to low voltage DDR3L. If one comes up for a good price I may try that. As it is, 16GB DDR3 DIMMS are getting quite cheap on eBay and 128GB is probably enough.
3. The C30 is quiet - even with all the cores maxed out running SETI it hardly makes any sound.
4. There are several versions of the C30 and early ones, the 10xx series, don't support Ivy-Bridge Xeons but the 13xx series do. Most sellers don't distinguish and, frankly, if they're just shifting the boxes that they have, then I wouldn't expect them to know. Lenovo's documentation isn't the clearest on this either. I bought one with dual E5-2609 v2 chips to ensure that it was the right version - and then promptly swapped the CPU's for something less feeble. 
5. I'm waiting for the more beastly e5 v2 Xeons to come down a bit in price. In pairs, they hold their own against current single socket cpu's in multithreaded benchmarks rather well. I suspect that this is because multithreading tends to be memory constrained and a dual 2011 platform has 8 channels of DDR3 which isn't bettered by today's Epyc and Xeon Gold's. While they do give up a bit in bandwidth (DDR3 1866 vs DDR4 2666) the latency is almost the same - which counts for a lot as thread numbers and consequent randomness of memory accesses rise.