Best Of

My next build will probably be going a combination route. Some people here might remember the watercooled rig I put into a tiny NZXT case... I so enjoyed all the Dremeling and custom build I got to do for that project. A tiny watercooled powerhouse? Right up my alley.

$899 on eBay. There were some for less but they seemed a bit shady... No actual pics, shipping from overseas, etc. there was one that said it worked but had a damaged capacitor.

It's been established that I don't like to do a standard single CPU/GPU build because that's boring. The down side is that sometimes it's hard to find parts at a reasonable-ish cost. My now previous configuration, an i7-2600K, Gigabyte G1.Sniper 3, 3xR9 290, 32GB DDR3-1866 setup developed an issue... More specifically, the motherboard did - it refused to display video during POST or boot unless all GPUs were removed and the 2600K's GPU was used. Since the motherboard was just barely within its 3-year warranty, Gigabyte had me send it to them for service. A couple weeks later they got back to me with the bad news: the board is bad and they would be unable to repair or replace it with anything comparable. Instead, they offered to refund the full purchase price, shipping included. No complaints on that front, but it left me without options to use the rest of the system in its desired setup since there weren't really any Z77 boards available that support three GPUs plus a RAID card. Fortunately I have an AMD FX-8150 and Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD7 board that can do just that, so in it went. All was good until I started firing up virtual machines...then it wasn't so good. No big deal, virtualization works well on my laptop. Then I started doing some x265 transcoding and realized this wasn't going to cut it anymore.

Then I started looking for a new setup.

I've toyed with the idea of moving to an LGA-2011 setup for a while now. It would actually cost less for my requirements than a Skylake setup. While searching for a motherboard, I stumbled across something that was completely unexpected: many (if not most) non-server LGA-2011 boards would support Xeon E5 CPUs. And then I looked at Anandtech's Bench comparison of the 2600K and some of the more ridiculous Xeons. And then I looked on eBay...

Now for the fun part...the new system specs:
Motherboard: EVGA X99 Classified
CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2695v3 (14C/28T, 2.3GHz)
RAM: 64GB (4x16GB) G.SKILL DDR4-2400
GPU: 3xRadeon R9 290
Storage: 256GB SSD (OS), 12x3TB RAID-6 array

I'm also in the process of moving from flexible to rigid tubing for the water cooling system for a more clean look.

Some fun facts:

• Even though the i7-2600K is clocked 1.1GHz faster, in single-threaded benchmarks that Xeon is only marginally slower. Multi-threaded applications that I use every day (virtualization, video transcoding) heavily favor the Xeon.
• There seems to be a very poor market for used server CPUs.

Build and troubleshooting notes:
EVGA has gained a fan. They have 24/7 live tech support. This is a huge plus in my book. Also their standard 3-year warranty can be extended to 10 years (for a fee, but well worth it).

The POST process hung with a code 19 (a southbridge check of some sort). Called EVGA's 24/7 live support and spoke with a very knowledgeable tech support person. After a bit of troubleshooting, an overnight RMA was arranged. Second board arrived, same problem. Asked about the problem on the forum and it was suggested that the BIOS was an old revision. So I called the tech support line again and relayed the information. The company has a policy of sending any new/replacement boards out with the latest BIOS, but just in case, they would send me a new drop-in BIOS (one is replaceable on the board). Sure enough, a couple days later I had a fully working board that recognized the CPU. Somehow my replacement board got shipped without an update.

According to a couple of EVGA community members, the BIOS selector switch can be changed while the system is running, so I can update the other two pretty easily.