Tinkering with the old box...

I have my new box well on its way to being fully operational, so the question then is, what to do with the old one? Because it was run as a main box, I never wanted to risk instability so everything was at stock. The i7-2600k only officially supported 1333 ram, so that’s what I put in it originally. I did later upgrade it to 16GB by adding another couple of modules. Well, those modules are 1600. I don’t need 16GB of ram for a cruncher, so I just removed the 1333 and turned on XMP to get 1600 running. Giving it some memtest now before putting it to harder testing. Who knows, I might even try overclocking :slight_smile:

I also had a look at the mobo bios for updates. There was one for Ivy Bridge CPU support, and a beta UEFI one. This box pre-dates UEFI… it’s been beta for over 2 years though and I’m guessing they’re not motivated in making it final… if it ain’t broke and all that…

My main box, which runs a 1090T is the only one left with with the good old BIOS… it’s an old ASUS ROG Crosshair IV Formula and I’ve left it running one of the older BIOS’es. No plans on upgrading to FX so I see no reason to update the BIOS.

The main reason I might have for risking the beta UEFI update is boot times, not that it matters much for a cruncher. It would have been nice while it was an active desktop. I still have old Core era boxes which have no chance of any more updates.

While tinkering with the ram, I found out the box was never running at full speed. I don’t know what the old settings were, but when applying the new ram speed the bios offered to “optimise” the CPU for me and I said ok. Now it turbos to 3.8GHz up from 3.6 I had it on earlier. I suspect I might have manually lowered the turbo while troubleshooting early stability problems and just left it there for years.