What do you think of these crazy speced eBay workstation PCs for ~$500?

[Canada EH]

4 minutes ago, MEC-777 said:

Bought a Z600 last year with dual X5650's 8GB ram, Radeon HD 3850 and 2x 250GB HDDs for $200. Was worth it at that price. Planning to do a project with it in the next few months. 

  

Don't think that is worth $500 though. Even with so much ram and 3x 120GB SSDs, IMO. 

What do you use it for?

[MEC-777]

44 minutes ago, Canada EH said:

What do you use it for?

I was using it for mining monero and ETH (with a GTX 650Ti boost) for a while. Will be using it for running VMs and some experimenting, mainly. 

[Zando_]

1 hour ago, Spotty said:

Systems like this aren't great for gaming. In games the 12c/24t threads won't be able to be properly utilised and the old CPU architecture, low clock speeds and slower DDR3 memory will all hurt performance.
Instead of buying an old workstation dual core Xeon system for $500 and then buying a GPU to add to it, you would be better off just spending the $500 on a brand new Ryzen 2200G or Ryzen 2600 system and then adding a GPU. You'll get warranty on all the parts and it will probably perform better in games anyway.

 

Ryzen will defo do better, but if you go with a single CPU setup you can match an R5 1600 in gaming so long as you get a good overclocker. An X5675 at 4.5Ghz will match the R5 1600's stock performance, at a much lower price. If you can't OC then they're kinda meh unless you get an X5690 (highest stock clocks IIRC), though depending on what card you match them with they'll still be good. And DDR3 vs DDR4 isn't really a thing in real world use from everything I've read, DDR3 has slower speeds but a much lower latency so it kinda balances out. 

[Spotty]

33 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

Ryzen will defo do better, but if you go with a single CPU setup you can match an R5 1600 in gaming so long as you get a good overclocker. An X5675 at 4.5Ghz will match the R5 1600's stock performance, at a much lower price. If you can't OC then they're kinda meh unless you get an X5690 (highest stock clocks IIRC), though depending on what card you match them with they'll still be good. And DDR3 vs DDR4 isn't really a thing in real world use from everything I've read, DDR3 has slower speeds but a much lower latency so it kinda balances out. 

I really doubt that dual socket Dell OEM motherboard from the eBay link even allows for overclocking tbh. But yeah, increasing the clocks would help those CPUs a huge amount in games.

 

How much power will a X5675/X5690 use at 4.5GHz though to match the Ryzen 1600 performance? Good luck trying to keep those things cool. Kind of diminishes the cost saving efforts of buying the old Xeons if you have to spend an extra $80+ on a good enough CPU cooler to keep them from overheating

[Zando_]

25 minutes ago, Spotty said:

I really doubt that dual socket Dell OEM motherboard from the eBay link even allows for overclocking tbh. But yeah, increasing the clocks would help those CPUs a huge amount in games.

 

How much power will a X5675/X5690 use at 4.5GHz though to match the Ryzen 1600 performance? Good luck trying to keep those things cool. Kind of diminishes the cost saving efforts of buying the old Xeons if you have to spend an extra $80+ on a good enough CPU cooler to keep them from overheating

At stock speeds my X5675 hits 60C or so max, IIRC when I had it at 4.5GHz (couldn't really get it stable tho, I kinda don't understand what most of the settings do) it was hitting 80s or so. Definitely cooler than my 5GHz 8600K for sure though. If you follow the thread in my signature there's a lot of dudes there who know way more about OCing than me and they could answer all those questions. They are pretty big CPUs compared to LGA 1155/1151 and so on, so they cool quite well since they have more surface area to contact the CPU (an 8700K I had with an H5 Universal was hitting 85C at stock, and my 8600K hit 93C or so on the same cooler, so I got an NH-D15S for that rig).