Drop-in Replacement for i7 920

djstarfox

Gawd
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Sep 20, 2010
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I have an EVGA X58 mATX board (121-BL-E756-TR) with all the power i need except CPU. The i7 920 CPU that's in it lacks the AES instruction set, and I could really use the extra instruction set for all the encryption/decryption I do plus batch photo processing. When exporting/transforming photos, it uses all cores at 100% and I'd like to get more performance out of it. (Disk i/o not an issue with my raid.)

Are there any drop-in replacement CPU for upgrade? I'd prefer not to upgrade motherboard if I can avoid it. I guess what I want is a CPU support list, but I didn't find it on EVGA's website....
 
Are there any drop-in replacement CPU for upgrade?

I say get a used i7 970 or replace the motherboard / CPU and probably ram (if your ram is > 1.5V) with a haswell based i7 system.
 
Something like a L5639 might be interesting. It is a low power 6 core Xeon CPU that drops in to any X58 board. It is built using the newer 32nm technology, similar to the Core i7-970. They overclock like crazy if your board lets you adjust the BCLK. They also include the AES instructions and best of all, they sell on EBay for about $80 including shipping. Good luck finding an i7-970 at that price.
 
Something like a L5639 might be interesting. It is a low power 6 core Xeon CPU that drops in to any X58 board. It is built using the newer 32nm technology, similar to the Core i7-970. They overclock like crazy if your board lets you adjust the BCLK. They also include the AES instructions and best of all, they sell on EBay for about $80 including shipping. Good luck finding an i7-970 at that price.

I'd go for an X5650/5660 for the same price, higher stock multi if your board doesn't like 230+ BCLK. My X5650 did 4.2ghz no sweat in my Gigabyte UD3.
 
just double check if your evga board will work with hexa core xeons......some do ...some don't.......course if it doesn't evga will mod it to work for free i hear....but that be like 2 weeks of down time
 
I just checked my mobo, and I saw "REV 2.0" on the bottom left corner. So, I'm optimistic that I can do this in-place upgrade. I may bump to the X5675 just to have all glorious 3.0 GHz. :)

Thanks for the tips, everyone.
 
i7 920 easily overclocks to 3.5Ghz without vcore increase or just get xeon x5650 on ebay for ~$70 shipped
 
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