Greetings Sup Forums. I managed to befriend a wealthy person who was was giving away there old PC. It's an i7 960 with 12gb or RAM.
Is a 960 still pretty good for today's use as a virtualization box?
x58 sabertooth board, 500w power supply, no video or HDD.
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Clock it @4.3GHz and enjoy e the power. This CPU still rocks.
Hey, look into getting an Intel Xeon CPU for that motherboard. X5650 if I recall correctly, check Wikipedia. Same socket and it's got 6 cores, you can find them pretty cheap on eBay, also overclockable. I also don't remember how many cores i7 960 has but probably 4, so it's quite an upgrade.
the power consumption is genuinely horrifying though, 400-500w if you want to run it at 4GHz+.
We constantly have threads asking about x58
The short answer is if you dont want to spend $300+ on a new platform, even more if you need ddr4, go on Ebay and pick up a Xeon X5650. 6 core nehalem on 32nm, clock to 4ghz easy, same power draw as a 920D0 stock for stock.
Mine clocked at 4gig runs at 1.2v and is fully stable with HT and power saving options. Uses ~150w at full load.
I appreciate all the replies here.
That's pretty cool user. Thanks for pointing that out.
i7 960 if you want to overclock, as it's stilla rock solid CPU.
Go Xeon X5650 - X5675 for lower TDP, temps, and +2 extra cores.
As far as I'm aware, Xeons are locked CPUs.
Any specific cooler you guys recommend for the Xeon?
i7 960 is slightly better than FX 8350.
So yes, still viable.
multiplier on the Xeons are locked but you can still OC using Bclk
i7 920 OC`d to 4ghz will draw 300+ watts as well.
You`re lying out your ass. It`ll draw that much under load stock.
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>x5650 @4ghz + GTX 970 draws 700W from the wall with an 80+Gold PSU.
Nehalem / Westmere xeons have locked multipliers but can be OC'd on bclk and will run great given a good enough MB / PSU.
Sandy bridge e and up, the 1600's are unlocked, but 2600+ you will not get more than a 5% bclk OC, and that`s a golden chip.
Pic related, but mine would only run at 97.5mhz stock, and after setting the bclck to 103, and some tinkering. It`ll run at 102mhz. Which I suppose is ~5%. Although, my chip uses QPI and the boards bios is specifically designed around DMI. No QPI strap option which could potentially increase the OC.
At 3.3-3.6 Ghz a 120mm aio will keep it under control, but if you want to go higher you`re gonna want a 240mm aio / air equivalent or better. If you shop around you can usually find an NH-U12s, or NH-U14s on ebay for a fairly reasonable price. This CPU has a NH-U12s on it with both fans at full speed, I`ve never seen the core temp go over 53c
Thats interesting considering I run my 4Ghz 5650 with a 7850 modified to draw as much power as a 970 and I run them off a 550w PSU. 6 case fans, two drives and almost all my peripheral slots are taken up.
Mathematically a 5650 at 4.4Ghz would use about 250w. At 4Ghz and 1.225vcore the cores draw 80w with HT, 65 without. The rest of the chip cant possibly be using much more than stock because I keep the QPI at its rated 6.4Ghz and stock voltage.
i7 940 here, not even OC'd, still runs everything (even CPU-intensive stuff like Arma 3) perfectly fine.
When should I upgrade my i5 2500k?
I was thinking tigerlake but maybe sooner if kaby lake is cheap in price
Easily. I do exactly that: i7-950 with 12GB of RAM as a virt host. Your mobo can probably do 24GB of RAM if you check. My only complaint is no AES-NI, which came just after Nehalem.
It's usable. I don't think it's particularly great for virtualization though. All the virtualization oriented extensions came later.
M-my i5-750 is good too r-right guys?
I'm glad I didn't fall for the i5-750, GTX460, 4GB DDR3 ram in 2010.
Serious question though, if you did get the above (or a 5770 instead of a 460), how did it age? Not so well I'd imagine?
Xen will make cpus acctually improve
At work my PC has a i5 750, 16GB of ram, and nvidia 610 and I can run 3 VMs along with my gmail, GDrive, VOIP and spark, along with any TeamViewer, or any other Remote Desktop app I need to use.
Tl;dr it'll be fine for anything except super high end gaming
I got a 465gtx and it's pretty good. Fermi house fires are real though, it idles at 170f. Still works so no complaints.
The westmeres you can plug into x58 boards have everything but IOMMU and GPU, but on linux you can set up gpu passthrough to a vm
Its really not that big of a deal.
I was still using my i5 750 with a Gtx 980 a week ago. It was great except for one thing. 7zip and video encoding was brutally slow because not enough cores.
Video games were fine.
Well here's hoping the 6600k, 1070, and 16gb ddr4 ages just as well, given my resolution is just 1080p (well 2 1080p monitors but I'll be playing on a single one) I'm guessing it will take a while before an upgrade will be needed.
I've got a non-overclocked 950 that still runs fine after several years. My only complaint is that is that its single-core performance is somewhat lacking compared to modern chipsets (not an issue most of the time but some indie games don't multi-thread well, or only use single-core physics processing).
How could you live with the heat?