New upgrade X79 board and 2011 cpu's

[Dartman]

Well my geek buddy got a bunch of older but slightly newer generation X79 boxes he built for a previous customer back for free so he built me a X79 with a 3820 I7 and 32 meg of DDR 3 with a 2tb drive and win 10 pro. I swapped it over to my big win 10 tower Corsair 750d moved the old I7980 over to my win7 tower old School Stacker 810 box. Surprisingly the win7 saw the new CPU and board and found all the drivers for the most part and updated itself with a bit of help and seems happy. The 3820 is only a 4 core CPU but newer then the 980 so almost as fast. Not being satisfied with that I found a used 4960x CPU that is the fastest CPU my Asus P9X79 Pro can take for $285 with a free but flaky Asus ROG X79 Extreme black edition board so I plopped the CPU over to my board and threw some extra ram from my old AMD 1090t board and fired up the bad board with my 3820, it does work but always tries to go straight to the bios screen on boot unless you disable the boot direct to bios button option on the board. I managed to bend a cpu pin on the board when I was swapping things around but it's still stable and works fine so must have either been a ground or not bent enough to not work. So now I have 2 very fast 6 core machines. I put my extra DDR 3 memory in the 7 box so it now has 24 gig and new one has 32. It's at least 25 percent faster then the 980 was and encodes videos even quicker. Might format my old 128 gig SSD and clone my win7 install to it for the old box and both will have fast boot drives. I'm still working things out but nice to have 2 really fast boxes now and enough parts for a third. I also put my Cooler Master Hyper 212 LED on it with Arctic Silver 5 and it runs 19c idle and 45c with all cores 100%, great air coolers for cheap.
So a happy camper with a bunch of new toys for not much money right now

[Ian]

My kids are into PC gaming now so I get their hand me downs. I currently have an i5-4570 on a Z97M-G43 with 16GB of ram. The only downside is that the M.2 slot is only x2 so I can't take advantage of the newer PCIe SSDs.

[Dartman]

I bet they used to get your leftovers. Sister HAD my old AMD 4 core Athlon that for some reason would only work stable on 3 cores once she got it, mom has a hand me down and I have my last two builds in towers in here. Friend built sister a I7 1155 setup a while back and for her it's UBER fast and stable. I'm debating whether it's worth swapping over to the monster board with issues that came with that CPU has it's got 10 SATA ports and all kinds of tweaks and adjustment most boards don't get, but the board I have now even with the bent pin is stable and fast. Unfortunately none of them are new enough to support M2 slots so all my ssd drives are 2.5 SATA units. I bet you can buy a M2 card that's up to date though if you otherwise like the board your using now. I had a nice SATA card with like 4 6 gig ports but it wont work with the 2011 board has it only has PCI slots now and I can't remember where I put it when I was swapping things around.