Thoughts, opinions on my new builds of P6T WS Pro Mobo's and Xeon 5570 Procs

[ButlerKevinD]

Well, after several years running a Quad-core 2.4GHz 775 on an EVGA (love this board) 132-CK-NF78-A1 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 780i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard, I have pulled the trigger and decided to upgrade. I came across a pair of Xeon 5570 LGA1366 procs (some moron got rid of a Dell T710 server and left them and 32Gb registered DDR3 DIMMS), and thanks to the power of NewEgg, I now have a pair of ASUS P6T WS Professional mobo's and 24Gb each of ram on them. Total cost here was around $700. Of course, buyers remorse is beginning to set in, and second thoughts have crossed my mind regarding my new workstations.

So the question I ask is, I realize that LGA1366 is on its way out in lieu of the shiny new LGA2011 chipsets, but for one who would like to be bleeding edge but not able to fully fund their wants and desires, was the aforementioned a good choice? The core components I specifically have are:

2x - ASUS P6T WS PRO LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Core i7 / Xeon motherboards
2x - Intel Xeon 5570 2.93Ghz Quad-core (total 8 threads) processors
3x - CORSAIR Vengeance 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)

I'm not looking to fire off Skynet and end all mankind (the Mayan calendar will do that at the end of the year rumor has it). Mostly I use my rig for web browsing, gaming, mp3/flac and movie encoding. The other board I am contemplating into replacing my pair of dual-core ESXi rigs with.

Thanks in advance for any comments.

 

[_Lunchbox_]

Hey man, I am considering that same board for a w3680 i have laying around.

Do you still have these boards? how are they working?

If you don't want them, might I one off your hands

 

[ButlerKevinD]

Hey man, I am considering that same board for a w3680 i have laying around.

Do you still have these boards? how are they working?

If you don't want them, might I one off your hands

No, these were my new purchases from NewEgg. I have one board up and running flawlessly with one Xeon 5570 proc. The other board I had to RMA back to the 'Egg, as after a week of burning it in, I was getting sporadic lockups and boot issues. Looking at the ratings on NewEgg, they're kinda all over the place. But, this was one of the few boards anyone had in stock at the pricepoint I was looking for short of dropping $500 on one of the EVGA dual-proc boards.

 

[_Lunchbox_]

Gotcha.

Yea, the reviews on newegg for that board sort of have me on the fence. I don't want to break the bank though

 

[ButlerKevinD]

Gotcha.

Yea, the reviews on newegg for that board sort of have me on the fence. I don't want to break the bank though

Yea, I waffled some myself. Both boards came with the latest BIOS (v1205), but i guess the first board was made on a Tuesday, and the other by slackers on a Friday. It doesn't make sense that the same proc and memory on the same board delivers different results (I even pulled the proc ouf of the "good" board and got the same results). Overall, regardless of the ratings on NewEgg, I am sufficiently happy with the board. Having a quad-core proc with 8-threads kicks ass! definitely noticed the difference when ripping and encoding stuff, along with WinRAR/WinZIP performance boosts.

 

[_Lunchbox_]

Awesome! I am thinking of using mine as a hyper-v server with a few VM's for various uses..

What memory are you running? Do you know if this board support 12GB or 24GB? The manual says 12, but the website says 24. odd...

 

[profit8652]

i have always wanted a xeon but cant seem to invest a good amount of money in that when i would never use the extra qpilanes

 

[_Lunchbox_]

i have always wanted a xeon but cant seem to invest a good amount of money in that when i would never use the extra qpilanes

I hear ya. I wouldn't have the xeon if didn't stumble upon it in some old equipment a company was getting rid of. I guess I'm lucky.

 

[_Lunchbox_]

Awesome! I am thinking of using mine as a hyper-v server with a few VM's for various uses..

What memory are you running? Do you know if this board support 12GB or 24GB? The manual says 12, but the website says 24. odd...

nm, re read original post..

 

[snclawson]

I realize that this is an old thread, but Newegg has these on sale right now for ~$140 after coupon and MIR.

Have you tried VT-d on this board? I bought a W3540 and an Evga SLI3 motherboard thinking that since it `supported' Xeons that I'd get ECC and VT-d, but neither actually work, so this is tempting, especially if it supports overclocking.