Cool perk from work

[PanchoVilla]

I work as part of the team that designed this part and so as a perk, we are allowed to borrow one with which to build our own personal system. The downside is that this perk ended up costing me about $1300 to buy the rest of the parts.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116491

The upside is that I know have a far more powerful PC than I would have ever paid to build myself.

Put it all together last night, get to do OS and software installs tonight.

[Rock6.3]

Please tell me you are going to be participating in the University of California at Berkeley's SETI project!

And congratulations on a very nice CPU.

[winnre]

Now you can crash that much faster!

[Merc1138]

"borrow"? As in, they want it back eventually? Lame.

[PanchoVilla]

The beta program we signed up for states that they can ask for it back if we quit, etc but its pretty much we get to use it for however long.

They have explicitly told people that they are not to be re-sold, only used to build our own systems. So by letting us "borrow" them its much worse if someone actually did sell the CPU since you just sold something you don't even own.

If they gave it to us there would probably be now way to prevent them being sold and also we might have to pay taxes on the value too. Since we are just Beta testing the CPU's then it would probably avoid those things.

I am guessing they only ask for them back if like you get terminated for stealing or if you quit like 2 days after you got the CPU or something. But technically yeah I guess they could ask for them back anytime, but that would probably be a bad idea since then there would be a bunch of people kinda pissed that they just wasted all the money on building these things. There are actually gonna be workshops so some people who have never even built their own PC are gonna build these machines.

Some people have even asked about what the cheapest machine you can build with them. So there is actually an example build with a $75 video card, 4 gigs of RAM, a 320Gig HD, and like a 400W PS. Its almost a crime to build that machine. Its like buying a Porsche engine and then installing it into a '83 Yugo....

And yeah, now I can crash so much faster. The good thing is since I uses an SSD I can also reboot and try to recover my lost data 4x faster too!

[pdq_wizzard]

I think you and I work at the same comp. who do I email to get one of these I have an old QX9650 that I would return.

[rockdogz]

I wonder if the 3960X is worth it or just overclock the 3930K...?

[PanchoVilla]

I would go look on forums. I think they sort the chips during testing to see which ones are 3960 and which are 3930. Other than speed I think the only other difference is the L3 cache size. The 3960 has 3 megs more but the speed thing is more the concern if you want to overclock. You probably have a better chacne of getting a smoking hot chip with the higher speed version.

[ldivinag]

i had an EE machine once...

i loved that machine. sure it took dell an extra 2 months to get the machine to my work due to low avail of the EE cpu then...

it was worth the wait.

[Peter.Steele]

Oh jesus, you're a lucky bastard.

I've got a Xeon E3-1280 in my workstation, and it's amazing. I can't even imagine how much fun that will be.

[JDay]

Borrow? Does this mean you have to give it back at some point?

Please tell me you are going to be participating in the University of California at Berkeley's SETI project!

GPUs are much faster at this task.

[PanchoVilla]

See my guess at why we are "borrowing" the CPU above. I don't expect they will ever ask for it back. It screams. My limiting factor is now my monitor. Ie, I turned everything to max in my games and at max resolution of 1650x900 something there is never even a stutter or skip. Smooth as glass for fallout and deus ex.

I will have to go thanks the thermal protection circuit folks though. My one snafu during the build was that when I hooked up the CPU cooler it looks like all fan headers are not equal. The CPU cooler fan was fine, but the pump was not turned on and I couldn't tell. It lasted about 40 minutes and 90% of a windows install before it shut down. Once I figured that out and fixed it no problems since. I also can't believe how big a difference SSD makes. Windows boots to full usable desktop in under 30 seconds.

Now in about two weeks I get to help a bunch of PC building newbies build their systems at work. We are having a workshop to help people build them that have never done it before.

[Digital_Boy]

le sigh! must be nice to work somewhere like that . wish it was in northern SD county, so I could apply.

[ExtremeX]

Very sweet proc!

Im still rocking out with my i7 920 and a E3-1230 Xeon in my ESXi server.

Both still plenty fast to get things done, but id love to get one of those in my desktop.

Make sure you play around with VMWare workstation if you havent already. Processors like that are what makes software like that even more amazing.

I really hope gaming isnt going to be the primary use for a processor like that!

[JDay]

Make sure you play around with VMWare workstation if you havent already. Processors like that are what makes software like that even more amazing.

I really hope gaming isnt going to be the primary use for a processor like that!

The amount of RAM you have makes the biggest difference. I recommend 16GB+ if you're going to run VMs.