Current day best bang for the buck

[Emanbaird]

I remember back a few years ago you could get an Hp z400 for around $200 with 16gb of ram a 6C 12T xeon just no hdd or GPU, you could build a beastly machine for around $500

Is there any used or prebuilt hardware that has scaled like that over the past few years, i was looking into some precisions and the dell z420, but basically i am just trying to find the fastest multi-core system I can so i can run some pretty basic VM's 

I still need it to have decent single core performance, around 1500 passmark score for single thread, also the GPU's don't matter, i have multiple mid to high end GPU's laying around, 

also can you still overclock Xeons? i've been out of the server biz for a while

Thanks OwO

[Brooksie359]

Honestly with ryzen coming out it is hard to find deals that are worth it. You can get a new 6 core for cheap vs an old 6 core for cheap. 

[Imbellis]

As @Brooksie359 said, Ryzen has some pretty cheap 6 cores (The 1600 has a single thread score around 1800). The IPC is also better.

Honestly, I don't think it's worth it unless wattage is a major concern.

[Emanbaird]

2 minutes ago, Imbellis said:

As @Brooksie359 said, Ryzen has some pretty cheap 6 cores (The 1600 has a single thread score around 1800). The IPC is also better.

 Honestly, I don't think it's worth it unless wattage is a major concern.

Yeah, i'm rockin a 2700x right now, but i've been eyeballing the 2650v2, the 1600 isn't terrible but after i factor in that i'd have to do two builds it would end up going over $500, 

[Slayer3032]

You can't really overclock newer Xeons anymore as the base clock is locked with the pci-e clock with I think sandy bridge. I think there's a few which will overclock on X79 but after TechYesCity blew up X79 as an under rated platform, all of the good LGA2011 Xeons sold out on the internet almost over night.

 

There's still a good amount of budget performance to be had and ECC DDR3 is hilariously cheap, I just bought 6 4GB 1866mhz ECC Unbuffered sticks for $8.99 each off ebay.

 

It almost might be worthwhile to see what AMD is announcing at CES but there's always like dirt cheap used prebuilts around. You just have to find a deal like someone who's wanting to sell something like Haswell i7 SFF Dells on craigslist for $120 each. Workstations seem to bottom out in price around $250~ or so before getting tossed though in my area which is really irritating as everything from lga771 to lga2011 can be about the same price.