Intel CPU with stickers on two of the capacitors? Safe to remove?

[WaveZero]

I brought a used Intel Xeon W3680 off eBay to bring new life to my old X58 computer. I just got it to today and haven't had time to test it yet (free after Thursday), but I noticed that it had two stickers on the capacitors of the CPU. This is something I never seen before and I know some vendors may put a bigger sticker over those capacitors and resistors, but never two small ones over those capacitors.

 

Is it safe to remove? Or did I get ripped off and brought a lemon? If I did, is it even possible for a temporary fix like that to even work? Guess I will find out soon...

 

Image:

Spoiler

As you can see there are two stickers on each of the capacitors.

 

[xendrome]

Maybe ask the seller? Someone added them there and it wasn't at the factory.

[n_K]

Wouldn't happen to have an engineering release CPU would you? Probably doesn't mean anything, maybe even just a mark applied by the seller so they know if you return the same item or another one.

[Cyberkiller]

These stickers actually increase the speed of the cpu, I would leave them on. 

[Jim K Global Moderator]

Beats me.  I've only seen stickers to modify LGA771 Xeon CPUs to work in LGA775 mobos ... but this isn't it.  I would just try it out ... see if it works (it either will or it won't).  

 

Like n_K just posted ... it could be a marker for the seller....or as xendrome said ... ask the seller.  The stickers wouldn't cause any problems with their location regardless.

[WaveZero]

19 minutes ago, xendrome said:

Maybe ask the seller? Someone added them there and it wasn't at the factory.

I already asked, will see what they say...

4 minutes ago, n_K said:

Wouldn't happen to have an engineering release CPU would you? Probably doesn't mean anything, maybe even just a mark applied by the seller so they know if you return the same item or another one.

It doesn't seem like it, the front side is a normal Intel CPU one you normally see on W3680s. Though you may be right about the markings, though I was under the impression the serial in front plate is unique.

Just now, Cyberkiller said:

These stickers actually increase the speed of the cpu, I would leave them on. 

lol?

Just now, jjkusaf said:

Beats me.  I've only seen stickers to modify LGA771 to 775 ... but this isn't it.  I would just try it out ... see if it works (it either will or it won't).  

 

Like n_K just posted ... it could be a marker for the seller....or as xendrome said ... ask the seller.  The stickers wouldn't cause any problems with their location regardless.

Yeah, true that they won't cause problems with where they are located.

 

Anyhow, will post back if it works or not and what does the seller say about the stickers.

[WaveZero]

Status update:

Turns out there is nothing wrong with the CPU. I removed the stickers and cleaned the resistors/capacitors & pads at the bottom with alcohol. Seems to be working with some stress testing and runs very cool compared to my old quadcore i7 920 (low 20C with ambient temps of 16C on my air cooler).

 

On the other hand, I brought some brand new RAM and they were defective, initially didn't notice it since I was running 24GB, but thank god I had time to do a memtest. It found over 300 errors (at the 16GB mark) and if I run that defective stick by itself it BSODs Windows. Got screwed over my Crucial and Amazon though. Both of them want me to ship back their item to them in USA, shipping from Australia is ridiculously high well about ($30 AUD with tracking and insurance) and the RAM stick itself was only around $30 AUD. Every other manufacturer I dealt with, their RMA was a lot better than Crucial, they would prepaid a shipping label and ship me a new item at their expense. Not to mention that under the Australian consumer rights they should be reimbursing my shipping fees, but then again you have Companies like Crucial that doesn't honor that, even though they quote the Australian Consumer rights under their warranty policies (probably so they won't get sued at first glance).

 

I guess on the good side, I did got a partial refund from Amazon, though it's still my lost in the end as they won't cover shipping fees. Though I'm a lot more comfortable with losing $10 AUD over $30 AUD, that's two days worth of lunch for me.

 

Anyhow, sorry for the long rant and back onto topic. Thanks for the replies and turns out to be needless worry about the CPU, in short the stickers was there for no reason...

 

Edit:

Forgot to mention that seller never reply back at all. That's what made me suspicious in the first place, if he just said you can remove them and it's on there for no reason, I wouldn't be making this thread in the first place.

[T3X4S]

So are you going to buy more RAM to get back up to 24GB ?

I had an X58 Core i7 950 with upgraded/updated parts and it was still fine - Im thinking you are doing something totally different with this system though

[WaveZero]

8 minutes ago, T3X4S said:

So are you going to buy more RAM to get back up to 24GB ?

I had an X58 Core i7 950 with upgraded/updated parts and it was still fine - Im thinking you are doing something totally different with this system though

Yes, I will be buying more RAM to get it back onto 24GB. Some people said it would run with 48GB of RAM, but Intel specs says max of 24GB. I really don't have time and money to be wasting to see if it runs more than 24GB. 3X8GB DDR3 in triple channel is good enough for me.

 

Well I run a lot of VMs for testing (network testing, security pen testing and Cisco IOU), somehow I was able to make due with 16GB of RAM on my laptop. But was getting annoyed at how 4 mobile cores on my laptop wasn't cutting out for the amount of crap I was running. I had my old desktop laying around collecting dust for years now and with a bit of research I concluded I could save myself $2000 AUD on a new workstation PC if I just upgrade to a Intel Xeon hexacore on the X58 platform. As it's the old X58 platform, I can easily overclock using BCLK unlike these days and luckily I can also OC using the CPU multiplier as the W3680 is unlocked on the X58 platform. I have seen people running it at 5GHz on watercooling, but I'm looking at a more reason 4.5GHz OC and it seems like a lot of people was easily able to get into using the W3680. From benchmark scores, it probably perform as well as newer generation CPUs in the market right now if overclocked.

 

I suppose if anyone is interested, I will post the OC results later in a few weeks as I wait for some new RAM to come in.

[T3X4S]

What are specs of other components ?

 

 

[WaveZero]

4 minutes ago, T3X4S said:

What are specs of other components ?

CPU: Intel Xeon W3680 Hexacore (old CPU was i7 920 D0 OC @4GHz 1.2V)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R rev 1.6
RAM: 24GB Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR3 1600MHz  (One stick is defective)
GPU: Asus NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 DirectCU II OC @ 1.25GHz Core 7GHz Memory 
Case: Cooler Master Storm Scout II Advance 
Storage: Samsung 840 250GB SSD and lots and lots of HDDs (about 10TB) 
PSU: Thermaltake TR2 700W Bronze 80 PLUS
CPU Cooling: Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme 

 

It's my really old system (early 2009 upgraded GPU over the years) which I haven't touch in a long time.

 

This here is my daily system here which does the job as I take it with me everywhere:

Laptop

Manufacturer: Lenovo 
Model: Y50-70 
CPU: Intel Core i7 4710HQ -90mV UV
RAM: 16GB DDR3L 1600MHz 
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M Maxwell 4GB OC @ 1.233GHz Core 6.27GHz Memory 
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO 500GB SSD with Rapid Mode Enabled 
Display: AU Optronics B156HAN01.2 Wide Gamut IPS 1920x1080 15.6" Panel

[T3X4S]

Nice laptop.  Pretty speedy Im sure.

With all those HDD(s), and considering this sounds like it is a work-related computer - I would consider getting a better PSU.
It might be fine - but I dont like to take chances and always try to get the best stuff, if not the best - close to it.

A thermaltake bronze makes me a little nervous - but that is me.  Never liked them - seen too many crap out.
 

[BinaryData]

13 hours ago, WaveZero said:

Status update:

Turns out there is nothing wrong with the CPU. I removed the stickers and cleaned the resistors/capacitors & pads at the bottom with alcohol. Seems to be working with some stress testing and runs very cool compared to my old quadcore i7 920 (low 20C with ambient temps of 16C on my air cooler).

 

On the other hand, I brought some brand new RAM and they were defective, initially didn't notice it since I was running 24GB, but thank god I had time to do a memtest. It found over 300 errors (at the 16GB mark) and if I run that defective stick by itself it BSODs Windows. Got screwed over my Crucial and Amazon though. Both of them want me to ship back their item to them in USA, shipping from Australia is ridiculously high well about ($30 AUD with tracking and insurance) and the RAM stick itself was only around $30 AUD. Every other manufacturer I dealt with, their RMA was a lot better than Crucial, they would prepaid a shipping label and ship me a new item at their expense. Not to mention that under the Australian consumer rights they should be reimbursing my shipping fees, but then again you have Companies like Crucial that doesn't honor that, even though they quote the Australian Consumer rights under their warranty policies (probably so they won't get sued at first glance).

 

I guess on the good side, I did got a partial refund from Amazon, though it's still my lost in the end as they won't cover shipping fees. Though I'm a lot more comfortable with losing $10 AUD over $30 AUD, that's two days worth of lunch for me.

 

Anyhow, sorry for the long rant and back onto topic. Thanks for the replies and turns out to be needless worry about the CPU, in short the stickers was there for no reason...

 

Edit:

Forgot to mention that seller never reply back at all. That's what made me suspicious in the first place, if he just said you can remove them and it's on there for no reason, I wouldn't be making this thread in the first place.

Everyone says Crucial is good, but there's a reason why I don't use them. I've had more DOA Sticks than anyone else. Now I roll G.Skill. Same set of memory in my rig from 2009. Runs like it's brand new. LGA775 Socket too. I'm in the middle of building a new PC. It's going to be freaking amazing.

 

I would suggest having my friend take it to the states for you, but he already left, haha. He lives in Sydney I believe, and the other in Perth.

[WaveZero]

8 hours ago, T3X4S said:

Nice laptop.  Pretty speedy Im sure.

With all those HDD(s), and considering this sounds like it is a work-related computer - I would consider getting a better PSU.
It might be fine - but I dont like to take chances and always try to get the best stuff, if not the best - close to it.

A thermaltake bronze makes me a little nervous - but that is me.  Never liked them - seen too many crap out.
 

Not really work related, I have all my work data in the cloud via a dedicated server. Most of those hard drives stores a lot of ###### I don't even know about anymore (spring cleaning time?). Mostly media and steam games which I can afford to lose. On another note, when I was looking for a new PSU a couple of years ago, since my old quietly died after 3 years of usage. I was under the impression that the Thermaltake TR2 700W Bronze was decent, at least at the time of purchase via this review http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/thermaltake-tr2-700-w-power-supply-review/11/

 

I guess the price of PSUs has really gone down, as now I could get a Silver or Gold 80PLUS for around the same price I got my Thermaltake PSU 4 years ago...

 

8 hours ago, BinaryData said:

Everyone says Crucial is good, but there's a reason why I don't use them. I've had more DOA Sticks than anyone else. Now I roll G.Skill. Same set of memory in my rig from 2009. Runs like it's brand new. LGA775 Socket too. I'm in the middle of building a new PC. It's going to be freaking amazing.

 

I would suggest having my friend take it to the states for you, but he already left, haha. He lives in Sydney I believe, and the other in Perth.

You know the funny thing is, I remember reading an article a few years ago about how Crucial has the lowest RMA among RAM manufacturers. But maybe it's due to the fact of how they handle their RMAs, you did be pretty insane to send back goods if it costs more or the same to ship it back and the amount of time you waste isn't worthwhile if you ask me. I guess a lot of people would rather not RMA their products if the service was like that. Kinda wish I kept with Corsair and Kingston memory, never had issues with them.... I purchased the same Crucial RAM, as I like to run the same type of RAM (recommended by others as well? I personally don't know why), but it will be my last purchase of Crucial memory for a long time.

 

I have an old Quadcore LGA775 system as well, still a great PC for casual gaming and web browsing. Though all I use it for is to run Kodi in my living room. You new PC specs in your rig looks pretty amazing, I was thinking of getting one of those 6 cores as well.

 

Thanks for the offer about asking a friend to send it to the states for me, but I don't think it's worthwhile effort. That RAM stick is only $30. If the value was twice or more I would do the RMA process and cut my losses.

[BinaryData]

37 minutes ago, WaveZero said:

Not really work related, I have all my work data in the cloud via a dedicated server. Most of those hard drives stores a lot of ###### I don't even know about anymore (spring cleaning time?). Mostly media and steam games which I can afford to lose. On another note, when I was looking for a new PSU a couple of years ago, since my old quietly died after 3 years of usage. I was under the impression that the Thermaltake TR2 700W Bronze was decent, at least at the time of purchase via this review http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/thermaltake-tr2-700-w-power-supply-review/11/

 

I guess the price of PSUs has really gone down, as now I could get a Silver or Gold 80PLUS for around the same price I got my Thermaltake PSU 4 years ago...

 

You know the funny thing is, I remember reading an article a few years ago about how Crucial has the lowest RMA among RAM manufacturers. But maybe it's due to the fact of how they handle their RMAs, you did be pretty insane to send back goods if it costs more or the same to ship it back and the amount of time you waste isn't worthwhile if you ask me. I guess a lot of people would rather not RMA their products if the service was like that. Kinda wish I kept with Corsair and Kingston memory, never had issues with them.... I purchased the same Crucial RAM, as I like to run the same type of RAM (recommended by others as well? I personally don't know why), but it will be my last purchase of Crucial memory for a long time.

 

I have an old Quadcore LGA775 system as well, still a great PC for casual gaming and web browsing. Though all I use it for is to run Kodi in my living room. You new PC specs in your rig looks pretty amazing, I was thinking of getting one of those 6 cores as well.

 

Thanks for the offer about asking a friend to send it to the states for me, but I don't think it's worthwhile effort. That RAM stick is only $30. If the value was twice or more I would do the RMA process and cut my losses.

That system in my BIOS was version 1, I made a post about the second build I'm doing. It'll be absolutely crazy, Intel i7 Skylake stock 4GHZ, with water cooling I and push it to 5Ghz if need be. It'll be an insane build.

[WaveZero]

Update:

I received my RAM this week, as I brought the same Crucial RAM as I did before. I must be really unlucky as I got another defective RAM stick. I'm not even kidding:

Spoiler

 

It BSODs after booting Windows.

 

Anyhow, I AM OFFICIALLY DONE WITH CRUCIAL! This is like winning the lottery (but instead of winning I'm losing money), the chances of me getting two defective batches of RAM twice in a row is super super slim. Seems like Crucial's quality controls need to be re-evaluated...

 

I played it safe, so that's why I ordered an extra 3 Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM sticks, in case a RAM stick dies later on so I would have a backup spare. I'm currently running 24GB @1600MHz CAS 9-9-9-24 in triple channel and this is what the RAM are rated at.

 

I wasted a lot of time running memtest86+ with a lot of different settings (frequency, CAS timings, voltage etc), this RAM stick works if I bump up the voltage to 1.65V and lower the timings/frequency, though I consider that as faulty and I wouldn't want to risk running into issues later on. As usual I'm cutting my losses and I hope I don't run into issues later with the current sticks of Crucial RAM I have installed (my confidence in their reliability is quite low from the experiences above). The amount of time and effort I wasted for troubleshooting faulty RAM is ridiculous! Especially when you consider the simple task of installing RAM sticks should be quick and easy.

 

I guess the good news is Amazon gave me a refund, but still lost out on shipping costs again! feelsbadmang

 

I will post another final update later next week with my final CPU overclocking results, as I currently don't have time anymore this week for stability testing... (Curse you Crucial RAM! lol)

[Jim K Global Moderator]

7 hours ago, WaveZero said:

Update:

I received my RAM this week, as I brought the same Crucial RAM as I did before. I must be really unlucky as I got another defective RAM stick. I'm not even kidding:

  Hide contents

 

It BSODs after booting Windows.

 

Anyhow, I AM OFFICIALLY DONE WITH CRUCIAL! This is like winning the lottery (but instead of winning I'm losing money), the chances of me getting two defective batches of RAM twice in a row is super super slim. Seems like Crucial's quality controls need to be re-evaluated...

 

I played it safe, so that's why I ordered an extra 3 Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM sticks, in case a RAM stick dies later on so I would have a backup spare. I'm currently running 24GB @1600MHz CAS 9-9-9-24 in triple channel and this is what the RAM are rated at.

 

I wasted a lot of time running memtest86+ with a lot of different settings (frequency, CAS timings, voltage etc), this RAM stick works if I bump up the voltage to 1.65V and lower the timings/frequency, though I consider that as faulty and I wouldn't want to risk running into issues later on. As usual I'm cutting my losses and I hope I don't run into issues later with the current sticks of Crucial RAM I have installed (my confidence in their reliability is quite low from the experiences above). The amount of time and effort I wasted for troubleshooting faulty RAM is ridiculous! Especially when you consider the simple task of installing RAM sticks should be quick and easy.

 

I guess the good news is Amazon gave me a refund, but still lost out on shipping costs again! feelsbadmang

 

I will post another final update later next week with my final CPU overclocking results, as I currently don't have time anymore this week for stability testing... (Curse you Crucial RAM! lol)

Funny you are to say that ... I've been done with Crucial for a long time (see comments below from May).  I try not to badmouth them or anything though ... figured I've just had bad luck with them.

 

 

[Mindovermaster Moderator]

Never had a problem with G.Skill... Ripjaws was my fave.

[WaveZero]

Final update:

I managed to get this on 4.66GHz stable at 1.425V. Which I am quite happy with, as it was my goal to run this CPU at 4.6GHz. Even my old i7 920 D0 couldn't run at 4.6GHz (too much voltage and temps were horrible), this CPU is quite an amazing overclocker!

I actually can boot into Windows @ 4.8GHz but I would need to pump the voltage up to 1.45V or higher which is too high for my comfort and realistically I wouldn't run it 24/7. 4.66GHz is my 24/7 overclock.

 

Cinebench R15 benchmark:

 

I guess if i tweak it, I could get it closer to the i7-3930K (use higher QPI and RAM speeds) like what I saw other people do, but I'm more than happy with the performance as you can see it outperforms the i7-4770K OC @4.4GHz.

[Jim K Global Moderator]

19 minutes ago, WaveZero said:

Final update:

I managed to get this on 4.66GHz stable at 1.425V. Which I am quite happy with, as it was my goal to run this CPU at 4.6GHz. Even my old i7 920 D0 couldn't run at 4.6GHz (too much voltage and temps were horrible), this CPU is quite an amazing overclocker!

I actually can boot into Windows @ 4.8GHz but I would need to pump the voltage up to 1.45V or higher which is too high for my comfort and realistically I wouldn't run it 24/7. 4.66GHz is my 24/7 overclock.

 

Cinebench R15 benchmark:

 

I guess if i tweak it, I could get it closer to the i7-3930K (use higher QPI and RAM speeds) like what I saw other people do, but I'm more than happy with the performance as you can see it outperforms the i7-4770K OC @4.4GHz.

Cool deal.  I believe the two extra cores (4 extra threads) on the W3680 is why it beats the 4770k (the 3930K also has 6 cores) in this particular benchmark.  Not to rain on your parade or anything.  

 

Numbers look good!

 

[WaveZero]

2 hours ago, jjkusaf said:

Cool deal.  I believe the two extra cores (4 extra threads) on the W3680 is why it beats the 4770k (the 3930K also has 6 cores) in this particular benchmark.  Not to rain on your parade or anything.  

 

Numbers look good!

 

Yeah I know, but single threaded performance isn't really what I am looking at. I work with a lot of VMs, so having more cores = better, at least for my use case. I tweaked around a bit with the QPI link speeds, not gonna touch RAM as I'm not too sure about Crucial's reliability, but improved my scores by a little bit. Most of my time is wasted on stress testing for 1 hour and then I run a memtest86+, after to make sure everything is all stable. I will do a overnight stress test and see how that goes, if that fails I think dropping it down to 4.5GHz is ok.

 

From what people say, Cinebench likes higher RAM speeds. But I'm quite happy with the overclock I got now. Still a pretty good upgrade from my i7 920 which would've scored 600 CB points @4GHz.