Short Round

Not really. Look in eBay and look for a decent LGA775 board... People think they are made of gold. I did the LGA771 mod on my existing LgA775 board and added a Xeon X5470, replacing a QX6850. Money well spent.

I did the same with my Asus P5Q Deluxe. I threw in a Xeon X5470 for $46, after modding the socket. I added a SanDisk Ultra II 960GB SSD and even though it's not running at full speed (SATA II vs SATA III), it's quick enough and extended the life of my old LGA775 platform.

Howdy folks. I've been hanging on to my LGA775 based system for quite sometime but am finally getting around to upgrading it, slightly. Out goes the QX6850 and in goes a Xeon X5470, with the LGA771 mod for 775 motherboards. It has a slightly lower TDP of 120W, down from 130W. I do plan on overclocking this chip and want to know if I should upgrade my 7 year old Corsair TX650. It was 80 Plus, back when it was released. Or should I upgrade it for something like the EVGA G2?

Interesting. I guess it makes sense why AMD has been unable to compete. No sales means no R&D.

Odd cylinder banks FTW. V10s just sound exotic. The exception would be the Ford Triton V10. I wish Volvo wasn't phasing out their 5 cylinder for the Ford Ecoboost clone.

Thanks. I have an X5470 ordered, along with the stickers for the LGA771 to 775 conversion. Having to modify the socket scares the crap outta me, but I'll just be extremely careful. I've got the SSD and new cooler on order as well. The old ZeroTherm tower is awesome, but the fan controller died, so it spins at maximum velocity. For $30, a Hyper 212 EVO will be good for my needs. I'm also getting rid of my IDE bus DVD/RW drive, making cable management much easier. I hope I get another year or two out of the old girl.

Thanks! Honestly, I'm long overdue for an upgrade.If this gets me through another year, or two, I'll be golden. An X5470 is $40 or so. I'm sure Cyber Monday deals will have some sort of SSD. I'm limited in performance due since my system only supports SATA II. PCI-E Based SSD would just be overkill.

I can see both ways. I don't build PCs very often and when I do, I "Go Big, or Go Home". But I'm trying to be more responsible now. If the worst comes to worst, I'll buy a Xeon, use it for another year or two, then make the upgrade. I would like to see what Intel does with the LGA-2011v3 platform now that Skylake it out. Skylake-E should be awesome.

Not even in the instructions per clock increases? CPU Benchmark shows a 20-25% improvement.

Here's the deal. My wife and I just had our first kiddo. We made the decision to have my wife stay home, as a full-time momma. Despite working in tech, the computers in our home are outdated and to be honest, we don't use them enough anymore to warrant the X99 or Skylake build that I want to pull the trigger or the Dell XPS 13 that I would love to have. I can spend the money, but would rather keep it in a rainy day fun, now that we are a single income home. As a big fan of scrapyard wars, I'm thinking of going the route of upgrading my system on the cheap: Current system: Core 2 Quad Extreme QX6850, running at 3.6GHz 8GB DDR2 Corsair XMS2 RAM EVGA GTX960 FTW 2GB 2 - 500GB SATA I (yes... SATA I) Segate drives... some WD Black or Raptor competitor at the time.. in RAID 0 Upgrade: X5470 Xeon (if I have the guts to mod the LGA775 socket for this LGA771 processor) or the X3370 Xeon, designed for the LGA775 socket Samsung EVO 500GB, with a fresh system install We currently use Lightroom CS6 and Photoshop CS6 and the system is just dying. My rationale for the upgrade would be to maximize the system for the lowest amount of money.... while I love building computers and can afford to spend more, I just don't see the value in it, at the moment. At the most, I'm looking at around $200 for a fairly significant boost in performance. The 45nm, E0 stepping chips are a huge boost, clock for clock, compared to the 65nm chip I currently run. And the Xeons have 12MB Cache. Thoughts? Opinions? Just build the damn X99 or Skylake machine?