Another Build project : LGA 1150 Gigabyte GA-Z97-HD3

Sometime during the odd year that was 2020 I purchased a modern, new Rosewill "TYRFING" tower case ($35) and it has been under the stairs for some time, nice case, great price, two fans. No purpose.

So, several of the eBay acquisitions needed a home : a Gigabyte GA-Z97-HD3 motherboard ($80) that I populated with an Intel LGA-1150 i5-4570 ($60) and a cooler ($10) dropped in a new Corsair CX450M power supply ($60) 8GB of DDR3 12800U ram ($30) and I will be installing an ASUS Radeon R9-370 Graphics card ($85)

That is $360 so far, and a Samsung EVO 850 250 GB SSD ($35) is on the way from Ontario for a grand total of $395 - all of which is recycled eBay money from this ongoing hobby. 

This is the first photo, just to show some of the wiring routing, I will take some more project photos when the SSD arrives. 

I may have mentioned it before, but these computer builds are a form of therapy, almost a meditation for me during these odd COVID times and I am pleased that I am learning not to rush things like I did when younger. This particular build has no real purpose besides the satisfaction of completing something, making things fit, almost like LEGO for geeks. It is of course "older" technology but still very much capable for gaming and general computing and will quietly sit under my bench in case it is needed, along with several other silent soldiers. 

Heart Transplant, and then back again

This is quite a funny story really, I changed the CPU in one of my Thinkstation S30 machines, and then changed it back. So I thought I'd take some pictures along the way.  The original CPU was a XEON E5-1620 and on eBay I "scored" a really good deal on a couple of E5-2640 processors. The E5-1620 being a quad core, and the E5-2640 a hexa core, or six cores. I made the assumption that the latter was faster, and swapped the CPU.

More about that after the pictures to swap it back.

A lesson learned, well, two lessons learned regarding Intel processors. Six core, twelve thread processors are not necessarily faster than four core, eight thread, especially when the base clock speed is taken into account. It is also worthy of note to check the "single thread" performance of the new CPU.

The pictures show original heatsink, then removed with E5-2640 with (quite new) thermal compound on, then the two levers unlocked to release the CPU cage and the E5-1620 re-installed, with new thermal compound. The heat sink and fan re-installed and then a check with CPU-Z to see if all is well.

A quick note, changing these processors is not for the faint of heart, or those with shaking hands and bad eyesight...

If you compare the two CPU versions, the overall performance of the E5-2640 may, on first review, seem better than the E5-1620, however, on closer inspection, the latter is the better CPU.