Downgrading my computer

[4ghz]

Currently I have a custom rig built with EVGA SR-2, dual Asus GTX 580 DCII, and dual X5650 and it's a beast that rips 3D rendering in just few hours where a $250 Walmart junk would take about a month to do. 12 total cores, and with Intel Hyper Threading it looks like 24 cores.

However the last time I did anything that really used up a lot of processing power was many months ago. It's mostly playing games these day and rarely games can use more than 3 cores. It's like having a push mower with a Formula F-1 engine or something. Right now it's sucking an average of 11 cents per hour of electricity, which is rather pricey. It's quite nice in the winter time though but a $30 electric space heater is much easier to move around than my $3000 (at the time I built) system.

I was planning to revive an older computer that I also built just a few months before I built this dual XEON rig. It is Asus P8P67 Deluxe with Intel 2700k, I wanted to move the video cards and hard drives to it, and sell off the retired XEON hardware.

Would that still be decent computer or should I look for something a bit newer than 3 years old spare parts? I might consider selling the 2 GTX 580 if there's a comparable single NVidia video card for less power (780 maybe?) The money I get from selling XEON hardware will go toward the swap or upgrade.

 

[Vario]

2700k is plenty fast, probably faster than your xeon at gaming. They overclock very well. Perform about the same as haswell in games, maybe 10% slower in most productivity benchmarks,

 

[lowrider_05]

you will lose much money if you sell your Xeons and 580s compared to the price you bought them for and for that difference you can pay alot of electricity with, so i would advise you to sell the cheaper pc and pay the electric bills with that money instead of losing performance and money. just my 2 cents

 

[OnePostWonder]

you will lose much money if you sell your Xeons and 580s compared to the price you bought them for and for that difference you can pay alot of electricity with, so i would advise you to sell the cheaper pc and pay the electric bills with that money instead of losing performance and money. just my 2 cents

Maybe in the short-term this makes sense, but in the long-term it won't benefit him as the SR-2 build will still cost him 11 cents/hour. Since he isn't doing a lot of rendering, why not make use of the cheaper, albeit still good, PC?

 

[de.das.dude]

keep the card sell the rest

 

[4ghz]

Sounds like I am on the right track.

you will lose much money if you sell your Xeons and 580s compared to the price you bought them for and for that difference you can pay alot of electricity with, so i would advise you to sell the cheaper pc and pay the electric bills with that money instead of losing performance and money. just my 2 cents

Pretend I have a Ferrari and a basic no frill sedan cars but I have room for only 1. And these day all I do is just drive casually between home and work, no fancy racing or anything. Do I sell the basic car for maybe $200 which would get me a few months worth of gas. Or do I sell the Ferrari for a few thousands, get my basic sedan returned and souped up so it'd be good for a few years, and have extra money set aside for when I need to replace it in a few years. The reduced cost of using it would mean more pizza and beer for me.

​

 

[Nordic]

Save the sr-2 system till the winter and crunch for TPU. More efficient than the space heater.

 

[nunomoreira10]

I would recommend sell the xeons, the board and the 580s since 1.5Gb vram those days is not enough, and then buy a gtx780 for lower consumption or a amd 290
if you ever need to do renderings again just wait some more hours and think how much money you saved

 

[THE_EGG]

The P8P67-D and 2700k are plenty powerful enough for today's stuff. And as said earlier they overclock nicely too. I'd sell the xeons, SR-2 and both 580s and go to a 780ti. I recently moved from one 580 to a 780 (non-ti) and I was blown away by the increase in performance. My performance was limited by the 1.5gb of the 580 in games such as BF4 even at 1080p.

 

[lowrider_05]

Sounds like I am on the right track.



Pretend I have a Ferrari and a basic no frill sedan cars but I have room for only 1. And these day all I do is just drive casually between home and work, no fancy racing or anything. Do I sell the basic car for maybe $200 which would get me a few months worth of gas. Or do I sell the Ferrari for a few thousands, get my basic sedan returned and souped up so it'd be good for a few years, and have extra money set aside for when I need to replace it in a few years. The reduced cost of using it would mean more pizza and beer for me.

​

well i would sell the cheap car, i own a 350Z for my daily driving. I just told you what I would do if it was my pc but if you want to sell the powerhouse then go on.

 

[jcgeny]

xeon is cool for 7z or other things having a lot of code
with game only high Mhz is important .
your cpu are cool but ebay has a lot of them , i bought 2 x 5660 for 450 euro : the price of the cheapest xeon from intel .

i have 2 dual cpu , the old have 16 Go of ram , an ati 5400 and plenty of Go of disks . i made an install in a vhd with a slim win 7 x64 .
with grub4dos i load the 6.5 Go in ram . its very cool and stable as a file-server or torrent .
i made a vhd like that for a sabertooth x79 that has 32 Go of ram ,2 hd5970 and a gtx 570 ; i ll check how is gameplay and may start bitcoin mining with it
it has high Megahertz but the old pc with xeon at 2.2 compresses twice faster than the i7 3820 [and they were sold at same price 400-450 euros ]
in game its the opposite , games are not multithreaded or vga cards ;']
and vga cards should like plenty of x,y,z to draw images and nothing more complex .

to reduce the power your sr2 consume , check in bios if you can disable firewire , soundcard , one network card and may be update the psu for a platinium . that will not waste lot of energy .

 

[XSI]

sr2 dual xeons...yeah good stuff but, at least put them on sale and see how much you can get for them. If you get enough for 2x290 or 2x770gtx...I bet your 2700k can be used for 3 or more years.
At the moment I wouldn't mind 2500k myself but its hardware enthusiast site...so many beg to differ.

 

[EpicShweetness]

The answer is simple unplug one of the CPU's and it's RAM disable the socket in BIO'S and unplug one of the GPU's. Your power consumption will plummet.