looz
Active member
I had a couple of posts regarding this in the "Post your latest purchase"-thread, but not enough material to justify its own thread.
So the story so far is that I used to have a i7-920 rig which I never got rid of after upgrading to i5-4690k in hopes of better gaming performance. Instead I repurposed it as a NAS. NAS with a 130W CPU sounds silly but my electricity bill was static so it didn't really matter unless it was a warm summer's day.
Later on I had a discussion with a friend of mine who told me about Westmere-EP CPUs. I just had to have one, since the value proposition was really good - I already had the most expensive part, a compatible motherboard.
So I ended up ordering one from ebay for 90€ and lo and behold it worked and posted without issues. The rig still continued service as a closet NAS, however.
Some pics (click to enlarge):
It's quite ghetto but functional.
Anyway, since the PSU the Xeon rig had gave up on life, I decided that now's the time to invest in some parts for my main rig - with the Westmere "playground rig" in mind of course. Honestly it lasted surprisingly long for an Antec SmartPower SP-450P, 10 years if I recall correctly. It also died gracefully and didn't take any parts with it!
Seasonic M12II 620W paired with GTX 970 goes in, leaving Zalman ZM-850HP and 760 SLI for the xeon rig. I also ordered a CM 212X cooler for the Xeon since it was conveniently on sale.
I still didn't upgrade the case since I found the idea of a decently powerful rig crammed inside an old Sonata II quite amusing.
So what I have now looks something like this:
Sadly the MSI X58 Platinum doesn't allow voltage adjustment on Westmere-EP, but a modest 3.3GHz was achievable even without. My questionable leftover ram might also be the issue, which I will probably investigate later on by borrowing some of my main rig's RAM. =)
Graphics performance is somewhat limited as well. GPU airflow is quite poor with this ole Antec Sonata II, and MSI Afterburner causes some tremendous issues. For example, exclusive full screen applications refuse to run at 1080p. 4k is somehow completely fine but that doesn't bode well with 2GB of VRAM.
So how does it perform? Well, I am quite pleased with the results. My main rig's 970 has a modest overclock of 1550 MHz on GPU and 1924MHz on memory - I ran 3DMark Fire Strike and Unigine Valley in order to compare the two:
3DMark comparison link
Xeon rig Unigine
4690K rig Unigine
It also runs surprisingly cool, considering. GPUs cap out at 80c and CPU doesn't reach 60.
I hope a ghetto build like this is fine over here - it was certainly a fun experience for me.
I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to do with it in the future, however.
Specs:
Xeon X5670 6c12t @ 3.3GHz
2x4Gb DDR3 1333MHz @ 1.5GHz
2xAsus GTX760 OC2 @ Stock
OCZ Agility 3 128Gb
MSI X58 Platinum with SLI BIOS
Zalman ZM-850HP PSU
Antec Sonata II ATX Case
So the story so far is that I used to have a i7-920 rig which I never got rid of after upgrading to i5-4690k in hopes of better gaming performance. Instead I repurposed it as a NAS. NAS with a 130W CPU sounds silly but my electricity bill was static so it didn't really matter unless it was a warm summer's day.
Later on I had a discussion with a friend of mine who told me about Westmere-EP CPUs. I just had to have one, since the value proposition was really good - I already had the most expensive part, a compatible motherboard.
So I ended up ordering one from ebay for 90€ and lo and behold it worked and posted without issues. The rig still continued service as a closet NAS, however.
Some pics (click to enlarge):
It's quite ghetto but functional.
Anyway, since the PSU the Xeon rig had gave up on life, I decided that now's the time to invest in some parts for my main rig - with the Westmere "playground rig" in mind of course. Honestly it lasted surprisingly long for an Antec SmartPower SP-450P, 10 years if I recall correctly. It also died gracefully and didn't take any parts with it!
Seasonic M12II 620W paired with GTX 970 goes in, leaving Zalman ZM-850HP and 760 SLI for the xeon rig. I also ordered a CM 212X cooler for the Xeon since it was conveniently on sale.
I still didn't upgrade the case since I found the idea of a decently powerful rig crammed inside an old Sonata II quite amusing.
So what I have now looks something like this:
Sadly the MSI X58 Platinum doesn't allow voltage adjustment on Westmere-EP, but a modest 3.3GHz was achievable even without. My questionable leftover ram might also be the issue, which I will probably investigate later on by borrowing some of my main rig's RAM. =)
Graphics performance is somewhat limited as well. GPU airflow is quite poor with this ole Antec Sonata II, and MSI Afterburner causes some tremendous issues. For example, exclusive full screen applications refuse to run at 1080p. 4k is somehow completely fine but that doesn't bode well with 2GB of VRAM.
So how does it perform? Well, I am quite pleased with the results. My main rig's 970 has a modest overclock of 1550 MHz on GPU and 1924MHz on memory - I ran 3DMark Fire Strike and Unigine Valley in order to compare the two:
3DMark comparison link
Xeon rig Unigine
4690K rig Unigine
It also runs surprisingly cool, considering. GPUs cap out at 80c and CPU doesn't reach 60.
I hope a ghetto build like this is fine over here - it was certainly a fun experience for me.
I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to do with it in the future, however.Specs:
Xeon X5670 6c12t @ 3.3GHz
2x4Gb DDR3 1333MHz @ 1.5GHz
2xAsus GTX760 OC2 @ Stock
OCZ Agility 3 128Gb
MSI X58 Platinum with SLI BIOS
Zalman ZM-850HP PSU
Antec Sonata II ATX Case
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