After 7 years of continuous use the 4930K has had enough. I’ve run it at a all-core overclock at 4.5GHz for pretty much the entire time. For the first 5 years all benchmark results were pretty must on par, but at the 6 year mark I noticed the rig was getting slower. Games ran OK, but it was the day to day stuff like compiling that really appeared to slow down. The rig became ‘jittery’ where at times the same task would run smoothly where as on other occasions it would be anything but. The clock speeds, voltages and temperatures looked OK. The CPU was always under water and the only time it go over 80 degrees was when I was trying to find the max overclock. With my settings in place the CPU would temperature would hover at 55-60 degrees under a full load even for extended periods of time.
I came to the conclusion that the end has neared. Since the 4930K sat near the top of the CPUs available on the X79 platform, I obviously chose to upgrade to a much newer setup. The upgrade aside, I was still left with a partially functioning CPU (and at this time I still didn’t have solid proof that the CPU was indeed the problem, but it was the only thing overclocked so the CPU was my educated guess) and all the bits that made up the Beast. Most of the components couldn’t be re-used as DDR4 is now the norm, the motherboard is clearly out of the picture and so is the PSU. To be fair, the PSU could be reused as it’s a good one, but I figured it’s best to get a new one for the new rig. That left the SSD and the case. I ended up getting a new NVME drive so the SSD could stay behind. I felt the case was too big for my new rig and if wanted to still play with the Beast I would either have to use a box or find another case which supports E-ATX. Therefore the Beast stayed in its case along with pretty much everything.
Now what? I could sell the motherboard and RAM, but that’s a pain, so did some research to see what the motherboard could support and found that it can handle some Xeon CPUs, the E5-26XX v2 series to be precise. I never really looked at Xeons in the past so doing the research was actually really fun and I ended up learning a fair bit. The E5-26XX v2 series looked good on paper with the 2697v2 sporting 12/24 c/t with a boost of 3000 MHz (6 or more cores). Sweet! But the price of these is high, even though they are from 2014. Even at the start of 2022 they are going for 100 EUR. The E5-26XXv2 series has a bunch of other chips, and I noticed that the E5-2695v2 and the E5-2697v2 were far cheaper, but the Ramage 4BE doesn’t support them. There is a specific type of this board that apparently can support these chips, but mine doesn’t. With the 12/24 CPUs out of the picture I settled for the e5-2670v2 at 70 bucks. As of 2022 you can get them for 35-40, but I got mine at the end of 2020.
The specs: E5-2670v2
The Beast has now become a donkey. The CPU can easily handle multiple virtual machines, giving me the ability to run a fully fledged Kubernets cluster for test purposes. It also runs our NAS with a RAID 1+0 made up of 4 drives (soon to be 6). I’m also running a build server, ad-blocker and a database on this machine. I’ve replaced the cooler to the trusty old 212 Evo and the CPU only hits 50 degrees under full load!!
In conclusion I have successfully ‘recycled’ all of my old rig and extended its life significantly. Sure, if the motherboard pop then the whole lot will go, but I have to put a bit of faith in the Rampage 4BE. At the end of the day this rig runs 24/7 365 so the odds are reasonable. I’m quite proud of this result as I was not looking forward to selling all the stuff online given how much of pain it is. I doubt I’d get much at all for any of the bits perhaps apart from the motherboard. Having said that it could take a long time before someone would buy it as its not that a common of a board.