Holy ****. Xeon E5-2670s from decommissioned Facebook servers selling for $70 on EBay

[jihe]

Ok then,I guess I wont be going Skylake then.I just thought maybe that with the newer instruction sets in the skylake it may be faster at encoding and transcoding then the Xeon E5 series.Anyhow Raduque did you try out your new motherboard? Did it end up working or haven't you got to it yet? Also dont know if this is a thing or not but it seems the E5-2670's dont like memory over 1600?? I have a set of G.skill 1866 and 2400 and both auto set to 1600?I tried to manually set them higher and even tried XMP but its the same every time. I even tried updating bios to the newest but no luck. I tried them out in my AMD rig and they test out in perfect working order no errors with the above speeds.Totally Odd!!

You can't overclock these xeons at all. Not even ram.

 

[Burpo]

Oh really? Check out the video below where he takes the 12 core Xeon E5 2697v2 to 4GHz via 113bclk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khDsbxa5_G0

 

[Lepton87]

Oh really? Check out the video below where he takes the 12 core Xeon E5 2697v2 to 4GHz via 113bclk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khDsbxa5_G0

Not many SSDs and hard drives can work in such environment without data corruption. I wouldn't chance it in a 24h day to day rig.

 

[controlflow]

Picked up two of these bad boys along with 64GB of ECC ram and a Asrock C602 board. Should be fun. Pretty ridiculous amount of power for the price.

 

[mysticjbyrd]

Are there any single CPU boards that can be bought for a reasonable price? The cheapest I found was like $250 on Amazon.

 

[controlflow]

Are there any single CPU boards that can be bought for a reasonable price? The cheapest I found was like $250 on Amazon.

Probably the best value for a new board that I've found: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...7352&cm_re=C602_asrock-_-13-157-352-_-Product

The guys on ServeTheHome forum have been buying from this site:

http://www.natex.us/Dual-Xeon-E5-2600-v2-socket-16-DIMM-Motherboard-LG-p/s2600cp.htm

Some pretty crazy deals for both memory and motherboards there. Note that most of these boards are E-ATX or SSI EEB and will need a larger than usual case to fit. A lot of full tower cases should be able to fit them.

It is interesting to note that the E5-2670 actually has PCI-E 3.0 even though the original Sandy Bridge cpus didn't.

 

[Rakehellion]

Multi core enhancement just doesn't work.

What does that mean?

 

[Justinbaileyman]

You can't overclock these xeons at all. Not even ram.

I can confirm you can overclock the FSB from 105 up to 115 but you have to underclock the ram to 1066 otherwise it wont post for some reason. . I personally dont have the balls to keep these settings.A quick boot into windows 7 was enough of a test for me.I opened up CPUZ for a quick peek to and then quickly rebooted and reset back to stock setting.I guess I'm to much of a chicken and to worried my system might catch fire or something.
I might give it a shot again soon as my new cooling system gets here friday.

 

[Raduque]

I'm only interested in running it at stock. =P I bet if I even UNDERclocked it, it would still bury my current server (E8400, 4gb ram, 965 chipset).

 

[Justinbaileyman]

Yep I was wondering about tinkering with that as well. Maybe underclock it to 2.0Ghz and try to drop volts as low as they could go for 24/7 use? Or does that sound stupid? Multi's are unlocked on these chips going down.So maybe set the multi from 26 to 20 to give 2.0Ghz?

 

[Denithor]

Just undervolt as low as you can for stock speeds. Why walk away from speed if you don't have to?

 

[Socio]

Just undervolt as low as you can for stock speeds. Why walk away from speed if you don't have to?

From what I read 3% is the sweet spot, no undervolting, no heat problems, rock solid stable.

 

[Justinbaileyman]

Well my harddrive took dirt nap today so I went to bestbuy and got a super cheap 320gb WD drive.Dont know if this was due to my overclocking last night or what, but I am guessing overclocking the FSB that high corrupted my HDD??Anyways did a fresh install of windows 7 then did the free upgrade to windows 10.Didnt really think I was going to like windows 10 cause of all the spying crap inside,but so far i am digging it.I am thinking I would stay away from overclocking these Xeons for right now guys and save your self the trouble of F'ing up a HDD like me. Thankfully it was an older drive that I didnt give 2 shits about.But still I am sure I would be throwing a tantrum right now if it were one of my SSD's or a more expensive 4tb drive . Also got my new GTX960 in the mail today and tried out Bioshock Infinite and dirt 3 at max settings.Pretty cool games.

 

[Burpo]

It's possible to corrupt the boot sector, but not destroy a hard drive. I've pushed my X58 system too far a few times, but I had an image saved, and was able to just throw same image back on the drive and be back up like nothing happened in 20 min. I did that 7 times one day until I got the OC worked out. It didn't kill the drive (still running today), but did corrupt it.

 

[Justinbaileyman]

I dont know I shut my computer down last night after I posted about overclocking and when I turned it on this morning it started reporting bad sectors. I tried to fix it but there are just to many to worry about to try and save this piece of crap.

 

[jumpncrash]

well...I gave in and bought 2 of these babies and the ASRock EP2C602 motherboard

should be getting it sometime next week, can't wait to have some fun with it

I've wanted a dual socket system forever, and it was either never cost effective, or the options were just not fast enough to be worthwhile. I have to admit the board was a bit pricey but what the heck, I've resisted the urge to upgrade for a while now and I was due for a treat.

 

[jihe]

It's possible to corrupt the boot sector, but not destroy a hard drive. I've pushed my X58 system too far a few times, but I had an image saved, and was able to just throw same image back on the drive and be back up like nothing happened in 20 min. I did that 7 times one day until I got the OC worked out. It didn't kill the drive (still running today), but did corrupt it.

When you overclock on x58, your pcie and sata links are still working at stock, so the worse that could happen is the cpu sending out some crap that corrupts the file system, but the disk is safe. When you bclk oc on x79 you are ocing the drive as well so it's no surprise your drive might just give up the ghost.

 

[Raduque]

Finally got my server back up and running. WHS2011 booted right up after swapping the mobo - just had to install the drivers and re-activate. I'm going to need to clone the boot drive to something else, though. This really old 250gb spinner is holding the system back.

I have a spare 1tb 7200rpm laptop drive though - and if I put that in, I can actually use the D partition to store things.

Edit: Ran CinebenchR15 and got a 954. Temp breakdown:

• Core 0: 52c
• Core 1: 54c
• Core 2: 53c
• Core 3: 51c
• Core 4: 57c
• Core 5: 57c
• Core 6: 52c
• Core 7: 52c

The cores idle anywhere between 30c-38c. Idle power is around 24w and max power during Cinebench was 101w.

 

[bittermann]

Got a free Asus Rampage IV Extreme Black Edition motherboard from work. Boss thought the mobo was bad (I knew better) so he replaced it. Picked up one of the E5-2670's for $70 off of eBay. Running 16GB - 4 sticks of PC1600 G.Skill RipJaws memory. Nice little powerhouse gaming computer now. Turned off Hyper-Threading as I pretty much only surf, office and game on it and eight cores is overkill even now for most games running DX12 much less 16. Runs about 67C max prime95 on an Intel 2011-V3 stock cooler. Haven't even felt the need to try and OC anything yet.

 

[Raduque]

Got a free Asus Rampage IV Extreme Black Edition motherboard from work. Boss thought the mobo was bad (I knew better) so he replaced it.

Totally jelly. :thumbsup: If I had another $300, I'd build another Xeon box and set the board/CPU aside till I could afford a 980ti.

 

[Justinbaileyman]

I picked up a second motherboard to replace that broke DOA Asus P9x79 WS-E that I sent back.The new board is a Asus P9x79 and I got it used for for $150 shipped.When I got it I thought it was broke as well as one of the ram slots weren't recognizing one of my sticks of ram that I know for a fact works. I narrowed it down to slot D1. So instead of RMA'ing the board I thought I'de give it a little tinker. I gently ran a micro flat head screwdriver down along both insides of the slot against the slot pins,just to be sure there weren't any stuck or misaligned memory slot pins.Sure enough that was the problem thankfully. so now the slot reads the memory perfectly again and I have 2 working x79 motherboards.This one is for a backup in case my Intel board dies which I hope not cause for a Intel board I love it to death,probably the best damn motherboard I have ever owned.as for cooling I still didnt upgrade my cooling situation,instead I just put a small desktop fan next to my pc with the side panel open. LOL ;P

 

[Burpo]

I don't know.. I'd rather be using the Asus... Amazon has a new one for $589

 

[Justinbaileyman]

Woooow that's way to much money!! for that amount I could go x99 ASUS ROG V or MSI God Like.. I mean this is a nice board and all but I wouldn't pay more then $200 for it. I do plan to go X99 soon as the refresh motherboards hit the market so I can get a nice Broadwell-e cpu in the future. By the way, is Broadwell-e what AMD's Zen will be going up against? or is it going to be more like Skylake-e?

 

[jlee]

Got a free Asus Rampage IV Extreme Black Edition motherboard from work. Boss thought the mobo was bad (I knew better) so he replaced it. Picked up one of the E5-2670's for $70 off of eBay. Running 16GB - 4 sticks of PC1600 G.Skill RipJaws memory. Nice little powerhouse gaming computer now. Turned off Hyper-Threading as I pretty much only surf, office and game on it and eight cores is overkill even now for most games running DX12 much less 16. Runs about 67C max prime95 on an Intel 2011-V3 stock cooler. Haven't even felt the need to try and OC anything yet.

I'm thinking about a v3 Xeon (2650 ES's are under 300 bucks right now) but am concerned with the lower clock causing problems in games that aren't heavily multithreaded -- are you running into any performance problems?

 

[Socio]

I'm thinking about a v3 Xeon (2650 ES's are under 300 bucks right now) but am concerned with the lower clock causing problems in games that aren't heavily multithreaded -- are you running into any performance problems?

From what I have read if you are not going to be running a lot of multi threaded applications then higher clock speed beats number of cores particularly so in games.

So you might want to look at V3 Xeon 2637 quad cores they have the highest clock speed of the V3's.

I planned to run two of those in my rig since I only have a couple work related multi-threaded apps but I got a great deal on a pair of 2643 V3's instead.