Has anyone had experience buying OEM Xeons off of Ebay? There are some amazing deals floating around, but the lack of warranty is always bit off putting. Just curious to know how others have fared.
Thanks,
Luke
Buying Xeons off Ebay
Srek
#2
Xeons in general are very reliable chips and even if they have been switched out against faster models after a bit of use they are very likely to continue to perform for a long time without problems.
However, beware what you want to use them for. If you are planning to build yourself a workstation using older Xeons then just don’t.
If you are planning to build a small CPU renderfarm do the complete math on it, including power consumption, cooling and check what noise to expect.
Yes, this would be purely for rendering. Do you know a good place to find notes on Xeon power consumption at full load? Most benchmarking sites focus on consumer processors, and the ones with Xeons list just a handful (or are relatively out of date). I know that Intel’s service pages list a wattage figure that’s related to heat, but I don’t know how to translate that number into full load wattage use.
olson
#4
Beware ES processors. They’re engineering samples that usually aren’t representative of the final product that gets launched to the public. Motherboard manufacturers make no effort to ensure their compatibility and they don’t patch microcode issues with ES processors. Most of the competitively priced Xeon processors on eBay are ES.
Srek
#6
To be fair, ES can be good or bad. Early versions are usually pretty experimental and error prone, later ones can be benefitial due to being close to production quality but offering a lot mor options for overclocking. Anyway, you should not use them if you don’t know exactly what you are getting.
Hmm, also good to know. At this point, ES’s sound like one of those things that’s just not worth the trouble at this point in time.