Thinkpads Forum

I have a whitebox pc I built myself. Its an MSI x79 board with that $100 Xeon e5-2670 8 core that is all the internet rage. Works fine.

But due to the $100 8 core hysteria, the availability of x79 parts of scarce.

A way around this is to buy ex lease workstations, remove the CPU and install your own e5 2670.

Does anyone actually own a S30 or any of the above. I would probably buy a S30 as a single socket machine is fine... a dual cpu machine is overkill and I dont beleive a compact C30 is worth it since you limit expandabiltity.

Of course you can go the other way and get the HP and Dell equivalents. I'm not sure what the HP one is (Z800?).

Also I'm a bit wary about getting brand named desktops as they may need custom PSUs and the like.

If you need multithreading, get D30. You will never know when you might need another 8-15 cores.
My major at university requires running some painful financial models.

If you are just looking at a gaming rig, get X79 and i7 3930k (or E5 1650), when OCed to 4-4.5 Ghz they will outperform E5 2670 or even E5 2687w in any circumstances.

And, one good reason to go to the dual socket D30 rather than single socket one, is the RAM.
You can get 128GB, yes, 128GB RAM for $160. (anything above 128GB (16*8GB) is still a bit expensive though)
I'm very happy with my D30 atm. It smokes i7 6950x without any effort

Regarding C30, it's biggest drawback is the number of RAM slots. I'm not sure about the GPU compatibility.

RMSMajestic wrote: Regarding C30, it's biggest drawback is the number of RAM slots. I'm not sure about the GPU compatibility.

The C30 is a slimline case I believe which IMO is too restrictive if you need high performance GPUs, which invariably you need for this class of machine.

I think for most of us we are getting into propeller head territory. I have another PC which is a quad core Xeon which is as fast as I'd ever need.

I do not need 8 cores but I had an old x79 chassis kicking around and a $100 spend for Intel 8 core was too much for me not to buy.

And so what is my 32Gb 8 core Xeon running ssds like? Its overkill. I have no need for that much firepower. I do kind of like the idea of a VM platform but I dont like the idea of pay power bills for it 24/7.

A D30 machine isnt too expensive. I have seen some around here ex lease for under $1,000 us which is admitted a bargain for something of this power. But who has a need for it besides the mathematicians, engineers and video processing people?