DunePilot

It will work but isn't needed. I'd be buying some standard Corsair vengeance or Avexir core sticks if it was my board. Buying 1866-2200 sticks and running them lower in the 1600-1866 speed and tightening the timings to cas 7.

You want GPU usage in the 90%-100% range most of the time, that means you are getting your money worth out of it and that it isn't bottlenecked by the CPU. That means you want your CPU to not be struggling... which means you want low CPU usage, that can be pretty much any percentage, as long as it isn't 90-100% and isn't keeping your GPU from being maxed out (bottlenecking). As someone just mentioned, could be hitting your thermal limit so look at your tempts. Download Real Temp and play a game and see what's maxing out at. If temps are hitting the upper 90s you're going to be thermal throttling.

Only go with the Xeon if you have a X58 motherboard already or can find a complete build for 400-500 bucks on craigslist. Otherwise just build something new and spend a little more, but yeah the performance is still great on those chips.

Definitely go 6 whether you think you need it now or not.

X58 is really fun to OC so you definitely will learn a lot. Worth the $100 to get one and mess with for that reason alone imho.

The X56XX Xeons are a great upgrade for anyone on X58, if it can push off a future build for a couple years. So if you have a 1080p monitor and want to get a medium grade GPU and a $100 Xeon then that should be able to hold you over for awhile. A $2000-3000 budget for an entire new build will buy you something much better two years from now than it will right now. Right now it might get you 1440p 100hz+, (which you will have to have a 1440p monitor to enjoy), 2 years from now you'll have 4k 100hz+ for the same price.

Though they were binned higher the X5680s and 90s might not get you any higher of an overclock. If you can find the 80, 90, 98 as cheap as an X5675 then sure get one of them as they were binned slightly higher. That is why the stock clocks are higher but usually even with the cheapest of the bunch the X5650 you can get 4.3GHz which is what you should be shooting for, then possibly 4.5GHz but you usually have to ramp the voltage up some more to get that. The most basic of decisions for people on LGA 1366 is choosing between the X5650 or the X5675, with the 75 you have a few more multis (25 I think) and on the X5650 it is limited to 22 (I think, don't quote me). Everything above a 75 has more than enough multis, the big deal is the gap between the 50 and the 75, since the 50 is limited to 22 that means you have to have your bus running at least 200 to get a 4.4GHz OC. Now, perhaps your chip and board combo can do all the way to 220 bus, but in the case that it doesn't then you might be limited on your overclock. By having more multi's it allows you to have the option to get the higher overclocks with a lower bus speed and a higher multi. You can achieve it either way and they will run the same, it's all about what can you get out of your CPU and motherboard with it being stable and 200-220 bus speed can be a crap shoot. Example, for a 4.5GHz OC on the X5650 I would have to have at least 205 bus speed because it is limited to 22 multi. 205 X 22 = 4510 For 4.5GHz OC on the X5675 I could get away with a bus speed as low as 180. 180 X 25 = 4500 The only difference is you have more options and more possibilities to overclock with a lower bus. My specific chip could boot in the 200-210 range but I found it most stable at 196 X 22 with turbo off. That means you could achieve that fine with either chip, but if you wanted to push it to 4.5GHz or 4.7GHz all you would have to do is change the multi on the 75, with the 50 you would have to go increase your bus instead since you're multi is capped at 22. BTW if its not 22 and 25 I'm sorry, the explanation is still the same. I used to have most of those chips memorized but have been on X99 platform for awhile now and no longer have my X5675 setup, I sold it to a friend.

What motherboard do you have? What graphics card do you have or plan to get? You can get a X5650 (or 75, 80, 90) if you have decent cooling and overclock it to about 4.3GHz pretty easily and they perform really well. Perfectly fine for a single 980Ti or 1070, or 1080. If you plan to go with a 1080Ti or any of those configs in SLI though then you might want to build a new system.

I gotta disagree and say avoid Prime 95 and run AIDA and IBT, when you run IBT run a 10 pass of extreme.

Can you go into more detail... did you have an overclock, does it give you error codes, does it not do anything, does it come on for a few seconds with fans full speed and shuts right back off. Do case fans turn on and run normal if you unplug the 24 pin and CPU power?

34" curved widescreens are amazing. I would personally wait for 4k 100hz or 1440p 144hz curved widescreens to pop up on the market, right now they are limited to 100hz but they've been out awhile and I'm sure we will be seeing some new ones pop up next year. Maybe we have another year or two to wait but we should have some really nice screen tech hitting the market in the near future. I play 1080 144hz surround until then when I will replace my center monitor with something along those lines.

If you want to do a big expensive desk build with full watercooling I would build an entirely new system but if you simply want to upgrade the one you have then I would get a 1080Ti in January or February when it launches. The 4790k you have can handle the newer cards in SLi and is just barely behind a 6700k, your GPU on the other hand is pretty dated and you will gain a lot by swapping in a new top tier GPU. Vega or 1080Ti in a few months imo.

Asus has some cheap option for $20-30 in either USB or PCI-e but if you are wanting to game or download tons of stuff you might want to drop some money on their higher bandwidth ones which are more in the $100+ range.

Perhaps on the top tier models but probably not on the 6700k, look at the 4790k for reference and you will see that prices don't really drop much on the mainstream i5 i7 line-up.

i7 920 is crap compared to an X5650 or X5675 that you can get for 1366. Because the Xeons perform so well for so cheap most 1366 boards still go for over $100.