i'm so happy. tonights project was a huge succes!

for those who didn't know, i recently had my passion for pc building re-ingited, and i have ordered a supermicro board and i will order 2 Xeon X5650's to create a monster main machine. 

but until that arrives i didn't want to be stuck with my i3 8100, which has become a very irritating cpu. it spikes to 100% just browsing the forum and because it's only 4 threads multitasking is almost impossible. 

so, i went and dug around into one of my "known faulty" bins, and i found a board that i knew had issues (an Intel S5520HC) and i grabbed my box of cpu's and grabbed 2 Xeon E5620's that were known good. initially the board didn't post at all which is what i expected, since it was in the known faulty bin and i'd had a lot of problems with it. the main issue is i bought it used of course and it arrived with broken sockets. i attempted to repair it at the time but failed. however, now i jsut went ahead with a small knife bending back pins, and eventually i got it to post, but it didn't want to detect any memory on CPU 2. with another hour of bending back pins i managed to get 2 ram slots working on CPU 2, which is good enough as i have 4 2gb sticks in it which is fine. i had 16gb in my 8100 build but i always ran out of cpu power before i ran out of ram. and, when my new stuff arrives this setup will be a secondary machine anyway. 

so, final config for now is the dual E5620's, 8gb of ram (4gb per cpu), some coolers zip tied to the sockets (i always do this and it works well) and an RX460 i had spare as i didn't wanna risk my 290X with a known faulty board. if it fries this gpu i don't care. also i plugged my 850 EVO into it as i knew the sata ports work fine, it's just cpu and memory that is still a bit sketchy. 

but, i have now installed Ubuntu on it, did some app installing and web browsing and i'm very impressed by this system and these cpu's. like, look at this: 

7% load approximately web browsing with discord open, my 8100 would be at 50% at least. like, this system is doing really well. 

now yes, it's not amazing at everything. i wouldn't try to run many games on something like this for example, 2.66ghz max turbo on a 10 year old architecture is pain for single threaded tasks like gaming. but for what i intend to use it for which is some VM's, heavy multitasking and in general just having a lot of cpu power available when i want it, for example when editing a video it's gonna be awesome.