To upgrade or not to upgrade?

[MikhailV]

Long story short, I have been running my dual X5650 system since early 2010, and recently my motherboard decided to take a crap on me, I was running a Tyan S7002AG2NR nevertheless I've gotten a good 3 years out of it.

The specs:
Motherboard: Tyan S7002AG2NR
2x - Xeon X5650s
6x - Kingston 8GB = 48GB total.
Adaptec 6805 w/ 4 x 250GB Western digitals in RAID10 and 2 x 60GB Intel 520 SSDs (Recent addition).
GPU: nVidia Quadro 2000D (Recent addition)
OS: CentOS 6.3

The machine was mainly used for parallel computing, running several VMs usually no more than 5, to sum it up it was a software development/data mining workstation. Xeons never broke a sweat though, and I feel that they're more than enough even nowadays. In short it has never been used for games, multimedia or such as it is for work only. So I am thinking should I just get an ASUS Z8NA-D6 and continue on my merry way and upgrade to Lian Li PC-90 case.

However since I work in a datacenter, I have access to E5 Xeons which I can buy relatively cheap, 350/400 for each E5-2643 which is 4C/8T as even on my current Xeons I haven't been using more than 8 cores at full capacity. However I don't like the format of the current LGA2011 boards as I am very picky when it comes to expansion slots, as you can see Z8NA-D6 has 1 X16 slots and 2 x4 in x8 slots which in my opinion have more than enough bandwidth for the hard-drives and I don't feel like getting an EATX board since it is overkill for me and most SSI-CEB boards for LGA2011 don't have a full X16 slots with the exception of ASUS Z9PA-D8. According to the benchmarks E5-2643 is about 13-14% faster than the X5650.

So what I'd like to know if its worth upgrading.

 

[Nathan_P]

If you were more disk bound than cpu bound then no, get the Z8NA and save for the lian li and ivy/haswell xeons. They are good boards and will run 24/7 for years - just make sure that the chipset heatsink is cooled by a fan - it does get hot

If you were pushing the cpu's, then maybe upgrade but I wouldn't swap a westmere hex for a sandy quad, especially since you can get more cpu for the same money.

If you do decide to upgrade the x5650's PM me - I might be interested in them myself

 

[MikhailV]

The main reason I have some many HDDs is because well working in a datacenter and seeing HDD/SSD failures all the, one wants to have as much peace of mind as they can get.

As I mentioned above my workload usually consists of working with Parallel/Distributive processing so it is mostly CPU/RAM intensive. But if I am not mistaken Westmere CPUs should be enough for at least two more years. The main reason I have chosen Lian Li case is because I am currently using a CaseLabs M8, and well it is overkill, I was planning on using it for watercooling my gaming machine, but that plan fell through.

Also do you know the dimensions of the chipset cooler on Z8NA? So I could find a fan that I can strap on it.