Originally Posted by
psyclum
the only reason to get xeon is if you are seriously going to do some real CAD work on it "professionally" that means you'd be looking at professional graphics card too and those are more expensive then titans
the primary difference between xeon and consumer stuff is registered ECC RAM. if you are rendering something that takes 2 days to render, you want it done right the 1st time around
any way you look at it, the xeon stuff is just not worth it as a student. after you graduate and get a real job and are doing this professionally, then yes by all means, but i doubt you'd be doing anything that would require that level of precision as a student. and IF for some reason you DO need something that powerful, your professor will likely allocate some time on a supercomputer for you to work on
as far as delidding... it's up to you whether you decide to do it. as you've mentioned, the benefits are MASSIVE.
now... to put things into perspective. a sandybridge 2600k is a 95w TDP chip, an ivybridge 3770K is a 77w TDP chip and a haswell 4770K is a 84w TDP chip. so both the ivybridge AND haswell
uses LESS POWER and
put out LESS HEAT then a sandybridge chip... as an engineering student you should understand heat and temperature are mutually exclusive concepts. a needle heated to a bright yellow color has HIGH temp, but LOW heat, whereas a bathtub full of bathwater has HIGH heat but LOW temp. it's the THERMAL DENSITY that is the cause of the temp being high. NOT the amount of heat produced.
thermal density problem is a heat TRANSFER problem NOT a heatsink problem. you can have a heatsink the size of a building and it still wont do any good if you are unable to effectively transfer that heat ONTO the heatsink. THIS is the problem of the TIM inside the IHS is causing. the high temp and the resulting thermal throttle is caused by its inability to TRANSFER the heat away FROM the chip ONTO the IHS/heatsink. it's NOT the ability of the heatsink removing the heat. in fact a heatsink doesn't even have to work as hard these days since it's actually putting out LESS HEAT then a 2600K...
even a lowly hyper212 is capable of handling a 2600k on reasonable OC... so why do you think a chip that puts out less HEAT would cause a problem?
do NOT confuse the terms HEAT with TEMP. TEMPERATURE is the problem NOT heat. solve the problem, don't be confused by it.
you SURE you want to be an engineering student?