I have actually taken your comment into consideration, time traveled, and got an X11 board because of this. Thank you.I upgraded from dual X5650s (1366) to dual E5-2695 (2011) I did see a 100 watt power difference with all cores at 100% doing video rendering. 385watts to 285watts. Performance is better. Passmark CPU 8500 - 16000. I wanted to save the DDR3 memory I had. it is an inexpensive way to go. Best you can do is a 2011-v2 CPU. V3 an v4 are 2011-3 and DDR4, a lot more cost. Running CPU Temp you can see the e5-2695 power reduced when it idles. Hope that helps with your decision to do the cheap upgrade or not. Sometimes I wish I had put the cash out for a bigger jump/
Just wanted to let y'all know so far I've just been running the full badblocks script against all my drives and everything is looking solid so far. With my added three front fans the drives are staying cool and the whole system is actually extremely quiet now. I replace the wall fans with the lower RPM green colored drops in and I modded two back fans to slap 2x noctuas.
My next issue is IPMI reporting fan failure due to the noctuas sometimes spinning too slowly and thinking the fans are going 0 rpm. I know there are ways to fix this from googling so I'll be doing that once the badblock testing completes..I really don't want to mess with the system too much and interrupt it somehow hah.
Some interesting news. An eBay seller had 3x CSE-848XA-R3240B barebone systems up for $300 as well as the complete system with X10QBi board inside.
What struck me was I noticed the chassis said it had the BPN-SAS3-846EL1 backplane inside it. The SAS3 backplane sells for $245+$20 shipping cheapest on eBay and it seems that seller sells them frequently.
So obviously I was curious if I could use this chassis. However one day I got an alert that barebone chassis dropped to $200. Ok so now I'm getting the backplane for cheaper than if I bought it on its own, a whole chassis, multiple power supplies, cables, etc for only $200 Shipped?
I bought two of them. I didn't get to dig inside too much (need lift assist!) but I was able to verify the SAS3 backplane is indeed in there with 2x supermicro sff-8643 to sff-8643 cables connected.
Now they have the empty chassis back up to $300.
I figured worst case I could find a way to leverage these as jbods or just leverage whatever parts I can from them. Maybe power distribution units could be used in my 846? Certainly the SAS3 backplane. Heck even just having a bunch of extra drive sleds are nice.
Figured it was too good a deal to pass up.