Intel Xeon E5-2670 Deal and Price Tracking

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Boddy

Active Member
Oct 25, 2014
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144
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Those who purchased those Intel passive heat sinks and air duct kits from OEM XS.

Pictures look like there is a lot of free space inside the retail boxes of these items.
Do you think I could squeeze two heat sinks one on top of the other in one box?
Intel Passive Heat sinks.jpg
And similarly with the Air Duct kits.
Air Duct Kit.jpg
I would save a lot in shipping overseas?
Many thanks in advance.
 

RyC

Active Member
Oct 17, 2013
359
88
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When I bought from OEM XS/kalleyomalley, they put the air duct kit and two heatsinks into one big box anyway
 

Roy68

Member
Apr 13, 2016
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Need to get myself an nice SSD for my S2600CP build. One option is one of those fast PCIe mounted drives for best performance, but would it be bootable and if so which brand? What are you guys using? Thanks
 

fagiano

Member
Feb 5, 2011
43
7
8
Singapore
Did you buy from Natex?

Sadly there is no solution. The motherboard is shorted
I bought from ebay but I think is natex. It seems very strange that is a short in the mobo, it worked 2 weeks ago outside the chassis( doesn't work outside the chassis anymore). Is thins a known fact? what is shorted exactly?


Alberto (lol I misspelled my own name in the previous post)
 

Awesomesauce

Member
Apr 20, 2016
77
7
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I bought from ebay but I think is natex. It seems very strange that is a short in the mobo, it worked 2 weeks ago outside the chassis( doesn't work outside the chassis anymore). Is thins a known fact? what is shorted exactly?


Alberto (lol I misspelled my own name in the previous post)

I suggest doing return through ebay now. Look up the seller feedback see if it happens to other buyers
 

fagiano

Member
Feb 5, 2011
43
7
8
Singapore
Yep, I checked the mobo, indeeed, one 12v and one 3.3V rails are shorted to ground at the 24pin ATX connector!
Shit, probably its a 20 cents capacitor failed somewhere, but it is impossible to tell without schematics and there are no obvious cosmetic defects. :(

Let's see if I get a replacement, it has been a while since I received the board.

thank you
Alberto
 

zanechua

Member
May 6, 2016
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Here are some pics of my build in a Corsair Air Carbide 540. It was very tight, you can see how close the RHS RAM fasteners are to the fans. I thought I would need to hack away at the fan cases and /or memory fasteners to get it in, but it just fits as is. The case comes with 2x140mm fans at front but had to change these to 3 x 120mm budget Artic fans to get the board in, this allowed me to change from 3 pin to 4 pin PWM fans so these now plug directly into the board (basically I used all the blue fan sockets on the S2600CP board, 3 front +1 rear), the placement of these sockets is perfect for this build so didn't need to use any fan cable extenders. Once I had worked through the BIOS/FRUSDR etc updates the fans are really quiet.

I took a chance on 64 gig of new Samsung 1600MHz, 8 DIMMS Reg ECC from China, no issues.

Haven't done any cable management yet, I'm still waiting for I/O shield to arrive so it will all need to come out again to get that in. I used a Fractal design Newton 800w platinum PSU, this is a semi modular design, there is a lot of spaghetti in the back so fully modular would have been neater, but this was the best UK price I could get on a decent PSU which included a second CPU power 8 pin socket, the cables as shipped are long enough to stretch to corners of board for these CPU sockets.

Only 3 of the standoffs nearest the PCI slots lined up, so I had to drill the backplate and insert some M3 bolts, with 3 nuts on each, 1 to clamp the bolt to the backplate 2nd for height adjustment and 3rd to clamp the board.

I have borrowed a half height GT 720 GPU from my other PC to get this up and running, it's just a basic card, but still much better than the Matrox video from the board which is pretty naff. Note I had to disable the onboard video output in the BIOS before my card was recognised (took me a while to figure that out!).

I recommend you unplug your GPU for the BIOS/FRUSDR etc updates and use the onboard video. I left my GPU in the board connected to monitor, started the updates and the screen went black, this may be obvious but this is my first build. So I shat myself, thought the MOBO had died and I'd lost everything! But I think what really happened is that the board had updated the BIOS and selected onboard graphics by default. Also make sure you write down the fan socket numbers you are using beforehand because the FRUSDR update dialogue will ask you for them.

Overall the cooling is great, maybe even overkill, with all cores to 100% load it's still very quiet and doesn't get anywhere the full fan speeds I saw before the FRUSDR update. I'm seeing CPU2 nudging 70 deg C on full load all cores, around 6 deg higher than CPU1. Ambient 20 deg C. I tried rotating the CPU fans 90 deg (blowing upwards) so each processor gets fresh air, but in the end I decided it is better to move the air through the case as fast as possible, because that's what this case is designed to do.

In terms of the system performance, I've seen some mixed reviews on You Tube, people who are video editing generally don't seem very happy with the performance gain (or penalty) from this system, it's clear that packages such as Adobe Premiere and Sony Vegas are not optimised for multi core use (or maybe the process itself is just not parallel friendly?). But in my use case (rendering Blender files, which I believe is an embarrassingly parallel task) this system really flies, it's around 3x the speed of my i7 4790 and about 55% faster than the dual X5650 Xeon HP Z600 Workstation I just flipped on fleabay.

View attachment 2310 View attachment 2311 View attachment 2312 View attachment 2313 View attachment 2314
Do you have pictures of the holes you drilled for the standoffs and how you mounted them?

You couldn't fit the board in with the 2x140mm fans because of the fans blocking the board?

I'm interested in doing a similar build to yours

@Roy68
 

SINN78

Active Member
Apr 3, 2016
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I have a S2600CP as well and the exact same problem, have you found any solution yet?

Albertp
I never found a solution to this however natex was kind enough to send me a replacement board however i had already ended up buying a different board anyhow i have my system up and running just one problem



my sas ports are blocked by the hard drive cage (cant plug cable no space) anyone have any ideas on a solution?
 

Roy68

Member
Apr 13, 2016
67
26
18
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Do you have pictures of the holes you drilled for the standoffs and how you mounted them?

You couldn't fit the board in with the 2x140mm fans because of the fans blocking the board?

I'm interested in doing a similar build to yours

@Roy68
Probably best to forget the 140mm fans I think you will struggle to get the board in with them in there without some serious hacking away at the fan case and memory fasteners on the board. The 140mm fans (including rear) are only 3 pin fans (voltage controlled) so may not play well with the board anyway since it's designed for 4 pin PWM fans. I just used Arctic 120mm PWM fans 3x front, 1 x rear, really cheap, good reviews on Amazon, nice and quiet.

Sorry don't have a pic of the backplate before I put the board in.

To find the right spots to put the holes I put the board temporarily into place using the three standoff positions nearest the PCI slots that already line up correctly, then I used a sharp point to mark the positions of the other holes through the board onto the backplate. Take some time here to get this right. After drilling, when I came to mount the board I found a couple of holes I drilled were a couple of mm out of position, so I noted the amount and direction of error on each and used a needle file to open up those holes into slots.

Hope the attached diagram will help show how I used the bolts, I just used one of the spare standoffs to set the height of each middle nut. I also used a couple of washers + spring washers on each bolt, but probably only necessary if you have to open up a slot. This is a heavy board with my T4 heatsinks so I have more confidence in the bolts than I do the original standoffs that came with the case.

There is one board hole (bottom right) that lines up with one of the large cable holes in the backplate, so you can't drill a hole there. I thought about making a plate to fill the cable hole, but the board seems secure enough already so I'll probably never get around to it!
 

Attachments

Awesomesauce

Member
Apr 20, 2016
77
7
18
43
I never found a solution to this however natex was kind enough to send me a replacement board however i had already ended up buying a different board anyhow i have my system up and running just one problem



my sas ports are blocked by the hard drive cage (cant plug cable no space) anyone have any ideas on a solution?


Make friend with a dremel?
 

zanechua

Member
May 6, 2016
78
12
8
30
Probably best to forget the 140mm fans I think you will struggle to get the board in with them in there without some serious hacking away at the fan case and memory fasteners on the board. The 140mm fans (including rear) are only 3 pin fans (voltage controlled) so may not play well with the board anyway since it's designed for 4 pin PWM fans. I just used Arctic 120mm PWM fans 3x front, 1 x rear, really cheap, good reviews on Amazon, nice and quiet.

Sorry don't have a pic of the backplate before I put the board in.

To find the right spots to put the holes I put the board temporarily into place using the three standoff positions nearest the PCI slots that already line up correctly, then I used a sharp point to mark the positions of the other holes through the board onto the backplate. Take some time here to get this right. After drilling, when I came to mount the board I found a couple of holes I drilled were a couple of mm out of position, so I noted the amount and direction of error on each and used a needle file to open up those holes into slots.

Hope the attached diagram will help show how I used the bolts, I just used one of the spare standoffs to set the height of each middle nut. I also used a couple of washers + spring washers on each bolt, but probably only necessary if you have to open up a slot. This is a heavy board with my T4 heatsinks so I have more confidence in the bolts than I do the original standoffs that came with the case.

There is one board hole (bottom right) that lines up with one of the large cable holes in the backplate, so you can't drill a hole there. I thought about making a plate to fill the cable hole, but the board seems secure enough already so I'll probably never get around to it!
I already have 2 x NF-F12 iPPC 3000 PWM 120MM Fans in my old case, I'll probably pull them out and put them in this one.

Thanks for the drawing, It'll help a lot. The case looks good so fitting a server board in there will make it look even stunning.

I see that you have two Hyper T4's in there. I'm planning for 2 x Noctua U9DXi4, I think they'll fit fine.

Does the board itself have a PWM Controller?

Thanks for all the info. :)
 

Roy68

Member
Apr 13, 2016
67
26
18
56
I already have 2 x NF-F12 iPPC 3000 PWM 120MM Fans in my old case, I'll probably pull them out and put them in this one.

Thanks for the drawing, It'll help a lot. The case looks good so fitting a server board in there will make it look even stunning.

I see that you have two Hyper T4's in there. I'm planning for 2 x Noctua U9DXi4, I think they'll fit fine.

Does the board itself have a PWM Controller?

Thanks for all the info. :)