Cheap and expensive X79 Xeons

[Faisal A]

Hi. I am looking to buy an X79 motherboard. After deciding to go with X79 rather then X58, the motherboard are a bit more expensive, so I will buy a cheap CPU to begin with then upgrade later. Please can someone recommend me a Xeons CPU for around £10-15 and then a better one for around £50 I can upgrade to later

[porina]

I'd really stretch to go straight to the £50 CPU rather than jump from a lower one if possible. CPU choice also depends on your use cases, so I'm balancing cores and clocks below.

 

At up to £15 in a quick look on ebay I see E5-1607 which is a quad core running at 3.0 GHz. Or E5-2640 6 cores at 2.5 GHz base 3.0 turbo.

 

At up to £50 there's the E5-2670 with 8 cores at 2.6 base 3.3 turbo. I went with the E5-2667 (£40) in my cheap X79 build, with 6 cores at 2.9 base, 3.5 turbo. E5-1620v2 if you want more clock in exchange for fewer cores. 4 cores at 3.7 base 3.9 turbo.