AnthonyK wrote:Well thank you both again for some great insights.
I prefer however to go one more time the Win 10 route before even considering to try 8.1 Pro but at the moment I very curious at just two things that came up in my mind.
These things related to optimal performance and stability
My system will run DDR3 Registered memory sticks I know this, but I have two rated at 1600 mhz en two rated at 1333 mhz - all four of them at 4GB each and all DDR3 Registered. That would put my system to 16 GB of ram while I currently have configuration as I bought it with 4 DDR3 unbuffered single rank 2GB memory sticks and 4 DDR3 unbuffered dual rank 4 GB memory sticks. In total 24 GB.
I read that unbuffered and registered do not go well together, a shame but understandable.
Would it be wise to try to sell off the DDR3 unbuffered 2GB ones for 4 DDR3 4GB dual rank sticks or go fully in with the registered modules ?
One thing I know for sure is that my modules do not do well on the second hand market like they might do in the US or plainly on eBay, but although I have business account on eBay.de (Germany) i find selling hardware items there cumbersome.
Like to hear / read your thoughts on that one.
Regarding memory, there is a seller on ebay based out of Germany - Superfonse2000 - who iMHO has very good prices on memory for our machines.
I bought 64GB 1866mhz registered ECC kit (8x 8GB) for c.a. 200 EUR, the 1600mhz prices were even lower, although from what I see he has raised prices by quite a bit since then. Of course, I then had to sell my exisiting 32GB (4x 8 GB) unbuffered ECC kit, and as you say this took some time, not a whole lot of interest locally, but finally I manged to sell it for c.a. 110 EUR , so the upgrade wasn't very expensive all things considered. The main motivation was to have 1866mhz memory when I finally decide to upgrade to a Xeon v2 Ivy bridge CPU and also to run a 32GB Ram disk (very handy).
I think in your case it may be worth sorting out the memory situation. Both configurations you have at hand are not ideal - the registered one has two sticks running at 1333mhz so below the 1600mhz speed of the E5 v1 processors. The unbuffered configuration mixes single rank and dual rank modules.
From what I recall you have the boot block date of 2011 so or the time being you are restricted to the v1 Xeon CPU and 1600mhz. Therefore you do not need to get the 1866mhz memory, unless you plan on upgrading the bios chip or board to the v2 specs. The used Ivy Bridge v2 chips are still pretty expensive but prices will drop over time, so maybe its something worth considering at some point.
BTW can you let me know the type of bios chip you have in the Z620? Its probably a Winbond, would be interested in the exact chip designation.