I am in a bit of a pickle. My Motherboard died. without replacing it I loss a 4930k and 32GB of RAM.
It was a machine I got second hand a few years ago. And while I knew that it would not hold out forever I still wished that it would had lasted until Zen 3.
But now I am here. I have a laptop for studies and a small theater PC with a Haswell duel core. I do not game very often. But I run Machine learning for my Data Science studies. So I need one machine that can host my GTX 980 to train models.
With 3600XT on its way that might be a good option. But would you In my situation wait out?
I think this depends, if for example you are able to pick up a replacement board for cheap then it’s definitely worth doing. There are cheapo Chinese X79 boards on ebay that could be worth a look - although they usually only have 4 Dimm slots so RAM could be an issue if you have 8 x 4GB Dimms.
I’m a huge fan of ivy bridge so sorry to hear it died. My thoughts on your options.
Zen3 is at least 6 months away do a long time to wait. If you don’t want to spend too much get a b550 board or if ready to invest go x570, which will be compatible with zen3.
You can get a cheap $100 CPU to fill the gap. The 1600AF may be an option. Clearly that needs investment in New ram etc. Cost $$$>
As a stop gap could you swap the haswell dual core in the htpc for an i5 or i7 and use 16gb ram and you GPU as an interim whilst you build your new rig? Sell the 4930k then. Cost about $150.
An Alternative is a ‘chinese’ x79 board from eBay for $80. These work and will keep you trucking.
Yea. I guees my only problem with a ‘chinese’ board is that I might want something the is reliable when running long training sessions. Say a 6 hours at full load at a time. Need to think about that myself.
Thanks for the video. Option 1 is also worth considering
I live in Denmark where availability of old parts are limited. I have not found any new boards on any danish site that is not a duel socket MB.
Right now I run experiments that can manage on my laptop. But at times I need to use a GPU. I also like to play emulated games. So a CPU with a high IPC and clockspeed is something I am looking into. For PS2 / PS3 emulation.
With all the answers I have received allready I should be able to find a good solution.
One thing I have not mentioned. My Motherboard has been very unstable for the last year or so. Random crashes both in windows and linux. Right now it is in a bootloop at startup where it wont post. It seems to have something to do with the USB devices as they do not light up at startup.
The PSU is new and have recently powered another machine for me to test some things.
So that is where it is at. Again thanks for the replies.
is it a Gigabyte board by any chance? My GA-X79-UD3 board with a 3960X exhibits this same behaviour. Has for years. Only solution I found was to back off the memory timings a bit but in the end I swapped the rig as I needed stability for my working day.
I had one of these boards running a server (stupid but it was cheap). Lasted 2 years running 24x7 in a cupboard. The core parts are original OEM parts, they are just remanufactured so don’t overclock etc.
If you still can find a decent X79 board,
then that will be the cheapest solution for now.
Avoid those cheap chinese knockoff boards.
They are garbage.
Depending on how much you can get for the Ivy Bridge CPU a switch to Ryzen might be interesting. 3300X or 1600AF, a B450/B550 board, replace the 32GB with DDR4 …
If you have money to spend I’d say get the spec that you want (or rather available on hand) and not wait. There will always be “the next cycle” it just so happens that we are near the end of one.
Consider that the release of Zen3 is not set in stone and you may be forced to wait indefinitely.
Also since you are on Linux, remember the early days of Zen? Whatever it is you are doing on linux, support for bleeding edge hardware will always suffer for the first few months and so will you use case. Best to stick to the established platform for work related stuff.
