X79 in late 2013

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sphinx99

[H]ard|Gawd
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My i7-920 is nearing the end of its long and weary life. I share all the consternation over Ivy-E being so late, Haswell being so good, X79 being so old... but I'm doing an enormous amount of video encoding and threaded simulation these days, and I want the six cores... hence, 4930K and X79.

The question is the motherboard - my local Microcenter now carries the new Asus X79 Deluxe and this goes some way toward making up for some of the X79 deficiencies. But, at $400... whew. If you were looking for a "modern" motherboard to go with the 4930K for an entirely new build, is there anything other than the X79 Deluxe to consider? Has anyone done a direct comparison between it and the EVGA Dark, setting the EVGA QA history aside? Are there any other "refreshed" X79 boards out or planned for the near future?

Advice would be welcomed on what you would do if you were in my shoes, with a new build, and in need of a X79 board. I really wish I could wait for Haswell-E but I can't, so I want to make the best decision I can with the platform we're stuck with.

Oh, my criteria:
- minimal risk of glitches/stability
- mild/decent-OC under CLC (maybe 4.2-4.3; not looking to set benchmarking records)
- lots of I/O for a PC with at least 8 SSDs and HDs
- best USB 3 I can get in X79 for transferring lots of photos and video from high speed flash media
- modern BIOS similar to the fancy UEFI in my wife's Asus Z87 Pro board
- no issues heavy gaming with a single GTX780, sound card, etc. to start, and 2-way SLI GTX780 sometime next year.
- solid confidence in a 3-5 year shelf life, most of that as a primary rig
- good history of BIOS updates to support the platform
 
Microcenter jacked up the price of the dark and the Asus deluxe. Retail is $349 for the Asus and $399 for the Evga dark. I personally have an Evga dark as its a great feature rich board, and Evga has the best support in the industry in my opinion. I'm willing to take a chance on the quality if the board as I doubt they would let their reputation be further sullied after that horrible run of motherboards last year
 
Snag a sub $100 6 core xeon for you 1366 like they've been talking about here. You will get your hex core and probably a clockspeed increase too. Then you can wait for haswell-e.
 
Well, I broke down and picked up the X79-Deluxe alongside a 4930k. The $50 bundle deal made up for the markup on the MB, and the CPU is still cheaper at Microcenter than anywhere else. I'll post impressions later; I first have to find the LGA2011 screws for my H100i....
 
sphinx99 said:
Well, I broke down and picked up the X79-Deluxe alongside a 4930k. The $50 bundle deal made up for the markup on the MB, and the CPU is still cheaper at Microcenter than anywhere else. I'll post impressions later; I first have to find the LGA2011 screws for my H100i....
Click to expand...

Congrats. Nice upgrade. Haswell-E/X99 won't be out until the latter half of 2014, anyway - so enjoy!
 
I'm pretty much in the same boat, and very close to making the same decision. I do hate the whole thing of paying a premium for old technology though. With regards to updated IB-E generation motherboards, the Asus X79 DELUXE seems to be one option, but if I'm correct Asus has announced another - a ROG board, Rampage IV Black Edition. I can only imagine how much it will cost, and I hope Asus launches it soon. My Rampage II Extreme has served valiantly all these years and the ROG boards do have great features and OC stability. Anyone know anything about launch or price of the ROG Rampage IV Black Edition?
 
Xaeos said:
I'm pretty much in the same boat, and very close to making the same decision. I do hate the whole thing of paying a premium for old technology though. With regards to updated IB-E generation motherboards, the Asus X79 DELUXE seems to be one option, but if I'm correct Asus has announced another - a ROG board, Rampage IV Black Edition. I can only imagine how much it will cost, and I hope Asus launches it soon. My Rampage II Extreme has served valiantly all these years and the ROG boards do have great features and OC stability. Anyone know anything about launch or price of the ROG Rampage IV Black Edition?
Click to expand...

Look at the current RIVE price and probably add about $50.

The "old" X79 boards all support IB-E and support it very well (check the manufacturer's BIOS page to make sure - but, my P9X79 Pro is rocking an IB-E with a great OC). So I don't know why you'd feel the need to get one of the recently released X79 boards if price is a concern. There's really not that much of a difference. The X boards have always had long lives and great support. So I would not feel bad about adopting it "late" in its lifetime. It's really the better option, still...if you're going multi-GPU and want more than 4 cores.

I actually have 2x X79 boards that I am going to sell soon. Although I may upgrade my 2nd PC with X79 and keep one. Probably my RIVE. The other one is an MSI Big Bang XPower II.
 
I have some impressions that I can make now.

Old PC was i7-920 (stock or @4.2 depending on how hot it was outside) with 12GB RAM (6x2GB) on a P6T Deluxe V2 X58 board, with a pair of Crucial C300 128GB SSDs in RAID-0, using a Corsair TX650.

New PC is a 4930k (currently @4.3) with 32GB RAM (4x8GB) on the X79-Deluxe board, with a pair of 256GB Samsung 840 Pros in RAID-0, using a Corsair RM1000.

I transferred a GTX780 from old to new, and kept the case, optical drives, a SB ZxR. H100i cooling both rigs. Impressions:

1. Having a modern UEFI BIOS is huge. For people who have been doing this for a couple of decades, and tooled around a lot of BIOS over the years, the modern UEFI BIOS is a major improvement. Although it's funny that it took me ~ 15 years to get from my Compaq Deskpro 6000 back to a PC with a GUI BIOS. This is worth a lot to me.

2. SSD performance off the two Intel SATA3 ports off X79 is incredible. Sequential throughoupt exceeds 1GB/sec on my RAID-0 stripe. Those two ports don't give up anything to Z87 or other chipsets, it's just that there are only two. This also is huge for me, I have some database work I do and between the SSDs and the plentiful RAM, things are much faster now.

3. The X79 Deluxe board reeks quality. It's solid, heavy, durable, and I had no glitches whatsoever during the build.

4. The X79 Deluxe is a great board if you need the SATA. I do: other than the SSD pair, I have six 2TB disks for various things, plus a couple of optical and the eSATA on the case. It's nice having so many drops. My X58 had an IBM M1015 because I had run out of ports; no such issue with the new board.

As far as usability and performance:

For day to day usage, Office apps, web browsing, etc. I notice no significant improvement. Games start and load levels slightly faster, but it's slight...nothing that justifies $2,000.

Handbrake encoding (one of the things I made the upgrade for) is ridiculously fast... it feels 3x, 4x faster than my 920. I'm encoding a ton of VHS captures to h264 with some noise reduction, filtering etc. and in some cases the processing approaches 5x improvement. Virtualdub with NeatVideo is just fantastic.

Some games are smoother. Guild Wars 2 runs smooth as silk; on the 920 with the GTX780, 60fps would not happen in areas with a lot of people, and it was clearly a CPU limitation.

My gut feeling at this point is that there isn't $2,000 worth of value in the upgrade over my i7-920 (that's what it comes to between the X79/4930/ram/SSD/PSU) but I have no regrets because my last PC served me for a long time and I expect this one too as well.

Oh - I couldn't run the 920 @ 4 half the time because of the amount of heat it generated. By comparison Ivy-E is incredibly cool, quiet and power-efficient.
 
This is great to hear. I upgraded from my i7920 last year to a 3930k and I agree with everything you posted, probably not worth the $2000 but a very nice upgrade indeed, oh and i love how fast handbreak is now.
 
Hey guys!!!

Sorry to re-open this thread. I would love your input here:

My system i7-930 O/C to 4.3 / 4.4GHZ, 6 GB of Ram 2 Titans Surround 1600p. Things run pretty good for the games I play. I was thinking BF4 but haven't done it yet.

To the question I bought a RIVE / 32 GB of Ram then the RIVE black was announced. I returned the 3930K and need to decide in the next 12 hrs if I should:

A. Keep the Ram and buy the RIVE black / 4930K

B. Return everything, get my money back and wait for the X99.

What do you guys think? Full system specs are:

SLI Titans
1600p Surround (8050x1600)
I7-930 w/ x58-ud5 rev 2 @ 4.3/4,4GHZ
Raid 0 Samsung Pro 840 512GB
3 3TB WD Red
1 1.5TB Seagate

Also, money is a concern for me since I don't want to spend all this money to just get a SLIGHT upgrade. I am annoyed that there was no refreshon the x79 chipset, I want full USB 3.0, x16 on all levels, native SATA 6GB ports.

Please help me decide :cool:
 
Been reading around for input from some longtime first gen i7 users that made the recent jump to current gen. I think I'm still going to hang on to my current i7 930 setup a little longer. I only use it for gaming @1920x1080 and I don't think I'll gain much noticeable performance benefits by upgrading to the latest just yet. Anything substantially faster than Haswell in the near future?
 
you could also encode on your old rig at the same time. That would probably feel like a $2000 improvement!
 
TheMadHatterXxX said:
Been reading around for input from some longtime first gen i7 users that made the recent jump to current gen. I think I'm still going to hang on to my current i7 930 setup a little longer. I only use it for gaming @1920x1080 and I don't think I'll gain much noticeable performance benefits by upgrading to the latest just yet. Anything substantially faster than Haswell in the near future?
Click to expand...

Im hanging on to my 920 @ 4.2. The only thing I really need at this point is to get 24 gigs of ram and beef up my GPU. I havent maxxed out this board yet, so there is no point in me getting a new one. plus, my board supports hexcore, so I will probably grab one when I feel the need.
 
Thats a really good point. Makes more sense to buy more ram for this machine, than to spend 2k. Only thing htat runs slow is metrolight last light and thats running at 8050 x 1600. I just lower the settings and it is playable.
 
Having used this PC for a solid month know, I have a few observations to make:

1. For the majority of day-to-day tasks, this computer does not feel much faster than my old i7-920: web browsing, office apps, most games. If these represent your normal workload, only justify the upgrade to yourself based on age of existing equipment + interest/desire to try something new. Don't rationalize it in terms of performance.

2. There are a couple of use cases under which you CAN rationalize this IVY-E on the basis of performance:

(a) Video processing and encoding is spectacular. If this is all you do, day in and day out, don't wait a second, get this platform if you can afford it. For me, it's a benefit: I digitized almost 10TB of home videos from various film and analog tape sources over the last two years, and never got around to encoding them. Neatvideo + avisynth scripts + x264 are spectacular on this platform. NeatVideo (which I practically depend on) is amazing - maybe 3x faster than my 920.

(b) Disk I/O. If you're coming from x58 with older SSDs (closer to the time) and upgrade to X79 + a couple of modern 840 Pros or similar, I/O is noticeably boosted. Sequential throughput > 1GB/sec on the two native SATA3 ports, and starting apps, etc. is all around improved. For me, this isn't enough of a bang for a buck to justify the platform by itself (vs. buying a good controller for x58) but it's still a benefit because I come from an enterprise storage background so there's a "personal curiosity" aspect that is worth something.

(c) RAM and virtualization. If you're doing a bunch of hyper-v or virtualbox or similar (and I definitely do) the RAM limits are much, much higher. I went up to 64GB and boy is it nice in terms of breathing room. The value of this is also purely situational; most people probably don't need this kind of RAM capacity.

So in short I am very happy, because I happen to dabble in all three of the above to varying degrees, so in combination it's worth the $1,000++ price increase.

But, I feel somewhat lucky that my interests just happened to line up nicely with X79 and that feels like coincidence more than anything else. For most people, sticking with the 9xx series makes the most sense until Haswell-E (if you can wait) and if you can't but the above scenarios really do not matter to you, 4770k is much cheaper, about as fast on most loads (if not faster) and way more power efficient.
 
My hesitation with the X79 deluxe is the lack of Xeon and ECC support. As you get over 32GB, the need for ECC increases, and while I would probably get an i7 today, if I keep the board for a few years, as I expect (eventually turning it into a server), I'm concerned about Xeon / ECC support. Does anyone else have experience with Xeon support?
 
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