X58 Xeon CRAZINESS? back up gaming build

[pritch]

I frequently stay at my folks' place on vacation and have a mATX tower there to pretty much keep me sane.

 

It's a lot of bits from my 2009 main build, which was eventually killed off by mobo failure. I'd sold all the DDR2 but when I was resurrecting found an MSI mobo combo with an E8400, 8GB DDR3 @ 1333 for very cheap, like £35, so I took out the E8400, popped my old faithful Q6600 in, with an SSD, my old 640GB HDD for games lib, and my old R9 270.

 

It's.. ok, surprisingly not too bad at low settings. I'm fairly certain the CPU is the bottleneck in anything remotely triple-Aish. It's G41 chipset, not so great (does anyone on here even remember Socket 775?!) - the only overclocking is the FSB and while the Q6600 gamely runs at 3GHz all day long (I had it at 3.2 back in the day on its proper board), it's hot (I admittedly should've changed the cooler anyway as I think it's 65w solution for that E8400) and quite noisy.

 

At this point I'm thinking, nice as it's been to resurrect a great old chip, I may need to retire that mobo and CPU intact to a place of honour, and drop in a slightly newer replacement, reusing everything else - key word here is slightly, I don't want to pay much (not used too often) and yeah it's still only an R9 270, so.

 

The sensible thing might be to find a circa i5 2500 bundle, but that's kinda boring. I looked into dropping a modded Xeon 5450 in to the existing mobo, but I've ruled that out due to breaking up the current board, bios and other issues with the 771 in 775 thing, and a 120w TDP for relatively marginal performance, so that's out.

 

X58 and Socket 1366 just appeals somehow, I've never done a Xeon based build and I kinda like the irony of an old ghetto PC build having more cores and 3x the threads of any main PC I've had (upgrade path was/is Q6600 to i5 6600K). I say this because the X5660 can be had for real cheap, like much cheaper than a 2500 for similar perf, and is 6C/12T.

 

The issue is definitely boards. There's a lot of Chinese X58 mATX boards on ebay but I really don't know about these. If anyone has any experience at all I'd be interested to know. I can find very little info. They're certainly cheap, I could pair it with a X5660 for like £50ish, but would I just have a £50 tea tray.

 

So I'm also looking at old workstation boards like HP Z400. Can also be had cheap, quality should be good, only issue here is ATX not mATX and I don't really want to buy a new case, but *sigh* I might if I have to.

 

Am I nuts? What would you do here. Let me know, and if you see any issues with this as I'm out of my comfort zone a bit here. But yeah, I kinda want to build a Xeon. Just because!!

 

 

 

 

[pizapower]

The hottest thing is X79 right now.

[Zando_]

3 minutes ago, pizapower said:

The hottest thing is X79 right now.

^^^ X58 is showing its age now, X79 isn't much more, still uses DDR3, and has a beefy performance improvement. If you love tinkering and are gonna run older games, then X58 comes into its own. It's the last platform to do its style of OCing AFAIK that still performs well. 

[pizapower]

2 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

^^^ X58 is showing its age now, X79 isn't much more, still uses DDR3, and has a beefy performance improvement. If you love tinkering and are gonna run older games, then X58 comes into its own. It's the last platform to do its style of OCing AFAIK that still performs well.  

Quad channel DDR3 isn't slower than dual channel DDR4 and you can overclock locked CPUs like the i7 3820 on X79 platform

[Zando_]

Just now, pizapower said:

Quad channel DDR3 isn't slower than dual channel DDR4 and you can overclock locked CPUs like the i7 3820 on X79 platform

Also some Xeons. The 1680v2 (usually $300-350, same as the 5960X on X99) is an especially good one. 8c/16t, hands a 2700X it's ass on a silver platter when OCed to 4.5-4.6Ghz, and fights a 9900K pretty damn well on the core point, beats it for latency. 

 

If you wanna run DDR4 X99 is a pretty solid platform if you shop around though. I got my X99 Classified B-Stock for $99 and my i7 5280K for $160 (runs 4.4Ghz easily, will do 4.5, above that I have to add more voltage than my cooler can handle), run it with 32GB quad channel 3200Mhz DDR4. 

[pritch]

36 minutes ago, pizapower said:

The hottest thing is X79 right now.

Yeah I did take a look at X79, I just think it might be overkill at this time for what I'm doing here. It would be more future proof if I come to drop in a newer GPU or do something other than gaming with this theoretical build, but it's also quite a bit more money right now if I'm looking to individual parts, mobos are even more than X58 and they're already pricey. The CPUs are a lot more. There are one or two i7 bundles floating around, I wouldn't rule one out but I'd have to get a really good deal.

31 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

^^^ X58 is showing its age now, X79 isn't much more, still uses DDR3, and has a beefy performance improvement. If you love tinkering and are gonna run older games, then X58 comes into its own. It's the last platform to do its style of OCing AFAIK that still performs well. 

Yeah again, an X5660 already represents a quantum leap over any Core 2 Quad, and can be had for £12. Oh yes, I do like to tinker. That's half the fun, right? I see you have a link to X58 info which I will check out, but can you recommend any boards?

[pizapower]

5 minutes ago, pritch said:

I see you have a link to X58 info which I will check out, but can you recommend any boards? 

Be sure that you choose a board that supports Xeon and hexa core CPUs. Not all X58 boards support them.

[pritch]

19 hours ago, pizapower said:

Be sure that you choose a board that supports Xeon and hexa core CPUs. Not all X58 boards support them.

Thanks for the heads up. Ain't that always the way..  

[pizapower]

And not all X58 boards support Sata3 and USB3.