Atermiter x79 Mini-ATX Xeon bundle

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I needed to get some new PC’s for some temp workers, and I didn’t want to spend all that much. At the same time they need to work with fine Chinese programs like WeChat and TaoBao, which means they have to load up on all this spyware that bogs down damned near everything.

The old Celeron J3455 just wasn’t handling the load, and then I saw this cheap bundle, the Atermiter x79 Mini-ATX motherboard E5-2620 v2 Combo:

The kit includes the board, processor, and 16GB of matched DDR3 ECC RAM. And I was able to get the kits for 450 RMB ($65 USD) as I was ordering more than one. I don’t know if this kind of negotiations are available to anyone outside of China. Although I don’t know if doing this would be some kind of service to resell? It’s crazy enough that I already employ someone to help buy stuff, maybe I should turn it into a business.

Anyway, scoring the Celeron J3455 vs the Xeon E5-2620v2 shows that the Xeon is 2x as fast per core, and with 6 cores / 12 hyper-threaded vs 4 cores on the Xeon. So this should be great.

Atermiter Mainboard, Born for Gaming

The board showed up the next day, granted it’s because it’s from the province adjacent to Hong Kong, Guangdong so it didn’t have that far to go.

Box contents

Contents were pretty bare, the memory nice foam packed, a SATA cable, and a heat sink adapter to sit on top of the LGA 2011 socket to let you use other more common heat sinks. I went ahead and used a LGA1151 3 wire fan kit I had lying around.

Mini-ATX Xeon 2011

The board is TINY. It really is Mini-ATX. I don’t have any spare M.2 storage on hand, so that’ll have to be for another day, instead I just have a disk & SSD from the old Celeron, which booted up just fine in this board. Naturally bring your own CR-2032 as they are so scared of shipping lithium ion batteries for some reason. Xeon’s don’t have iGPU’s so you will need a graphics card. And I just used a super cheap NVIDIA Quadro FX 580. Not an awesome card, but you can see what you are doing, so it’s more than enough for back office work.

E5-2620 v2, 6 cores, 12 threads, 16GB of RAM for $65 USD!

So yeah. Another China Xeon special. I know it’s not that exciting, I should fire up the other one and see if I can get XP x64 on there. I have a GTX 970, it’d be a killer HL2 machine!

6 thoughts on “Atermiter x79 Mini-ATX Xeon bundle”

  1. Hi, I’m thinking of buying this bundle (right now is with 8GB of Ram, but it’s not a problem) build a lowcost home server (plex +vpn)…
    I’m just wondering which case do you suggest to use with this mobo?

    Thanks in advance

    • In the next post, I put the systems together. I am using the aigo mini. The closest one I can find is this one.

      Im using them as office machines, so with all the typical chinese spyware everyone keeps loading, I wanted machines with many cores. Obviously buy good PSU’s as the GTR’s I used exploded when I drove the GPU high (we bought some 3d milling machine, and need to do models).

      As I mention in the next page, I’m using AIO’s and some additional fans, I don’t care about the RGB nonsense, as these are work machines, but I do like the small cases as keeping with the small motherboards, it keeps them out of the way, maximizing my workspace area.

      It’s been two months now, one has the GTX 980, the other has that R9 290x, as I end up buying ‘5 year old, high end GPU’s’ for somewhat cheap-ish, and I wasn’t worried about it.

      Just remember that these are Xeon’s after all, so they do draw more than a consumer chip, but if you can get them cheap, they are still super attractive!

  4. I bought this bundle. Everything is fine. Just say processor drivers date is some month of 2009. Is it ok?. I tried lots of update utilities. They dont update.

    Any advice will be helpful.

    Cheers.

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