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evilpaul · Sat Mar 17, 2018 2:10 am

I've got 32GB of DDR3-2400 in an old Haswell system. It could do everything it needs to fine with half that memory (there's four sticks). Are there any good options for putting together a second quad-core system re-using the RAM? Picking up a second Haswell core CPU looks like it'll cost about the same as a current gen Coffee Lake or Ryzen. AMD had kind of bad chips at the time and outdated motherboards even by the standards of the time. Are there any oldie, but goodies I'm missing?

jihadjoe · Sat Mar 17, 2018 4:57 am

I'd go 1-2 steps older get an old Sandy or Ivy Bridge Xeon. 5-10% slower than Haswell, but you get a lot more CPU for a lot less $$$.
You can pick up an E5-2690 for something like $160, which is awesome for an 8C/16T CPU. With sufficient cooling MCE will happily lock all cores to 3.8GHz.

Anton Kochubey · Sat Mar 17, 2018 5:55 am

jihadjoe wrote:
I'd go 1-2 steps older get an old Sandy or Ivy Bridge Xeon. 5-10% slower than Haswell, but you get a lot more CPU for a lot less $$$.
You can pick up an E5-2690 for something like $160, which is awesome for an 8C/16T CPU. With sufficient cooling MCE will happily lock all cores to 3.8GHz.

Heck, the E5-2690V2 can be had for ~$300 and that's 10 cores at 3.6 GHz (much more energy efficient too, being 22nm vs 32nm)

Chrispy_ · Sat Mar 17, 2018 7:55 am

I've recently had to find a replacement haswell CPU for an old Phenom II that died and needed fixing on a super-low budget. I had a haswell board going spare but the cheapest chip I could find on ebay/craigslist was over $50 :\

On the other hand, 3770 and 3770K can be found cheap - they're the one component that gets listed when HP/Dell office PCs get junked, and the IPC of those chips, combined with the reasonable clockspeed makes them an absolute bargain at the moment.

Sat Mar 17, 2018 7:58 am

I was about to say something to the effect that if you're trying to do this on the cheap, a Socket AM3+ board and Piledriver-based AMD FX chip might not be a completely crazy idea. Then I looked at what those chips are going for these days -- they're still priced pretty close to where they were at 3-4 years ago!

WTF... who is buying these things? There must be a bunch of other people like you out there trying to re-use a bunch of old DDR3 RAM (due to the current high RAM prices) or something. There can't be very many people out there who are still trying to do "last gasp" CPU upgrades on their old Phenom II systems.

DrDominodog51 · Sat Mar 17, 2018 11:37 am

just brew it! wrote:
WTF... who is buying these things? There must be a bunch of other people like you out there trying to re-use a bunch of old DDR3 RAM (due to the current high RAM prices) or something.

Yip. I had friend ask me for help upgrading his FX-6300 in January. I told him to buy a Haswell system and reuse his DDR3.

JBI wrote:
WTF... who is buying these things? There must be a bunch of other people like you out there trying to re-use a bunch of old DDR3 RAM (due to the current high RAM prices) or something. There can't be very many people out there who are still trying to do "last gasp" CPU upgrades on their old Phenom II systems.

FX series chips will likely remain relatively expensive into the future for this. Yang binned hundreds of FX CPUs to get one that clocks so high.

jihadjoe wrote:
I'd go 1-2 steps older get an old Sandy or Ivy Bridge Xeon. 5-10% slower than Haswell, but you get a lot more CPU for a lot less $$$.

It's worth noting that Sandy Bridge CPUs likely won't be able to run your 2400 MHz ram at XMP settings, but Ivy Bridge probably will be able to run XMP timings/frequency.

Sat Mar 17, 2018 11:50 am

DrDominodog51 wrote:
JBI wrote:
WTF... who is buying these things? There must be a bunch of other people like you out there trying to re-use a bunch of old DDR3 RAM (due to the current high RAM prices) or something. There can't be very many people out there who are still trying to do "last gasp" CPU upgrades on their old Phenom II systems.

FX series chips will likely remain relatively expensive into the future for this. Yang binned hundreds of FX CPUs to get one that clocks so high.

I can't imagine there are more than a half-dozen people remaining in the world (if there's anyone left at this point) who would go to that much effort and expense just for a shot at OC bragging rights on a 5 year old CPU.

DrDominodog51 · Sat Mar 17, 2018 12:12 pm

just brew it! wrote:
I can't imagine there are more than a half-dozen people remaining in the world (if there's anyone left at this point) who would go to that much effort and expense just for a shot at OC bragging rights on a 5 year old CPU.

There are more than you think.

http://hwbot.org/benchmark/cpu_frequency/rankings?hardwareTypeId=processor_3742&cores=8#start=0#interval=20#familyId=351

(phpBB doesn't like this URL)

Piledriver and one generation of Netburst are the only architectures that can clock so high. Accordingly, FX 8 cores will likely hold the world's highest CPU frequency for a long time.

Sat Mar 17, 2018 2:05 pm

DrDominodog51 wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
I can't imagine there are more than a half-dozen people remaining in the world (if there's anyone left at this point) who would go to that much effort and expense just for a shot at OC bragging rights on a 5 year old CPU.

There are more than you think.
Code: Select all
http://hwbot.org/benchmark/cpu_frequency/rankings?hardwareTypeId=processor_3742&cores=8#start=0#interval=20#familyId=351
(phpBB doesn't like this URL)

Piledriver and one generation of Netburst are the only architectures that can clock so high. Accordingly, FX 8 cores will likely hold the world's highest CPU frequency for a long time.

All of the entries in the top 10 are at least 3 years old. I think even the "stunt OC" crowd has moved on.

jihadjoe · Sun May 06, 2018 2:53 am

So I went and got an E5-2690 like I was suggesting, and let me be the first to say I WAS WRONG.

MCE doesn't work on it and you have to do bclk to OC. My board did allow me to raise the base freq to 3.3GHz and adjust the TDP/power limit, which I currently have at 150W.

Currently have it running at 4GHz single core, just under 3.8GHz three core, and just under 3.5GHz all core turbo on my X79-UD7. I'm almost positive though that it'll do higher, because attempts to boot at 107 bclk end with one long beep followed by three short ones -- memory error. I need to get better RAM before continuing. There's a youtube vid out of someone who got the 10-core V2 Ivy Bridge version up to 4.1GHz single core and 3.7GHz all-core, so I'm keeping that as my target.

The great thing is apparently Intel binned these top-end Xeons really well. I'm running 16 threads of Prime95 small FFTs and temps are just a hair over 70C, and this is with 30C ambient.

turtlepwr281 · Sun May 06, 2018 6:27 am

I got an i7-2600k, Z77 Motherboard I'd be happy to sell you at a reasonable price :-)

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