Hey guys, been browsing this thread for a while as I wanted to build my own server/workstation for rendering, game servers, off site file hosting, and other stuff. My plan was to go with
2x E5-2680 a
C8220 MB(actually a C6220, more on that later),
32GB of ECC DDR3-1333 RAM & some storage. After reading literally everything on this thread I decided to buy the parts & build this thing! Im happy to say after a few days of configuration & mainly waiting on extra parts, i've gotten it up & running & benchmarked! I still need to install the GPU, finish cable management & build a case, but this is a great milestone for me!
All in all this cost me only around $300 as a friend gave me a GTX560 GPU, 1TB HDD, & a 500W PSU. For the cost im really happy with the performance as my current tests have shown it slightly beating my Ryzen 7 1700x desktop which totals at about $1000. The motherboard I bought was advertised as a C8220 W6W6G however when I received it the BIOS said it was a C6220, which after updating the bios to 2.5.6 I can confirm. As mentioned by many others the onboard SATA ports do not work & I even tried the
@Wictar front panel connector pin short & that didn't do anything. To be fair I didnt short the pins, I jumped them with a 220Ohm resistor as I didn't want to burn anything, so who knows maybe it would work shorted, but im not trying it lol. Do note however that Wictar does have a different motherboard version so that's probably why it didn't work for me. Because the onboard Sata ports do not work I bought a
PCIe to Sata Card off Amazon for $14, but its capping my SSD at about ~350MB/s so I bought the
PowerEdge Rear Backplane card so I can use those Sata ports.
To get power to the board I simply bought the same
Amazon Patch Cable as
@drabadue mentioned on page 1 and connected it straight up. I haven't done the 12VSB mod &or the PS-ON mod, but when I do I will post about it. I installed the relevant I350 ethernet drivers for my board from
HERE & got the updated BIOS from
HERE. While the BIOS installer doesn't say it works with Windows 10, it opened and installed fine for me. The AST2300 onboard graphics does have a
website with drivers, I could not figure out how to install them and I didnt invest much time into it as im going to use an external GPU anyways. Also for controlling the fans I took the
$10 fan controller out of my desktop as I dont use it and im going to install it into the case I build for this thing.
I've only ran a few benchmarks so far, but the performance is impressive;
PassMark:
Score on my Ryzen 7 1700x Build with a GTX 1070:
Rating: 4,290
CPU Mark: 16,172
Memory Mark: 1,951
Score on Dual 2680's (No GPU)
Rating: 3,572 (Lower due to no GPU)
CPU Mark: 16,483
Memory Mark: 2,027
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My DIY Fusion 360 Render Benchmarks:
File #1 Somewhat Complex Render:
Ryzen 1700x: 40 seconds
Dual E5-2680: 33 seconds
File #2 Complex (Lots of objects & surfaces) Render:
Ryzen 1700x: 1m 43 seconds
Dual E5-2680: 1m 23 seconds
Finally
HERE is a link to an Imgur gallery with all the images I have so far!