e3 1280 for gaming in 2019?

[drkknghtavngr]

Has anyone have any idea how it performs today? its pretty cheap in aliexpress, only $80 and is similarly spec'd to i7 3770.

[Jurrunio]

Good enough for a 60fps target gaming build.

[nephila]

Well, it will be slower than my old i7 2600k oc 4.5ghz but it will get the job done with 16gb ddr3, still 80$ is too expensive for outdated xeons, if it was board+cpu... Maybe  but only cpu  nha

[Slayer3032]

If you can overclock it maybe but $80 seems high when you could put more into the motherboard and get X58 or P55 and overclock one of those $25 xeons instead. You could probably get a P55 motherboard and a cpu for $80.

 

X58 also allows you to use ECC Unbuffered, like PC3-10600U or PC3-10600E should turn up some really cheap brand name server memory. I'd go for used server memory over that random chinese "AMD RAM" DDR3, some of it is extremely subpar memory. I got 3x2gb sticks of 1333mhz Samsung shipped to me for $18 off ebay, Aliexpess seems to be really brutal on ram pricing. You can get E5649's and X5660's for $12 and $18 though and if you get unlucky and the bios doesn't support westmere out of the box, E5540's and W3520's are $5 and most quads are under $10.

 

This is of course if you want to overclock your hardware.

[drkknghtavngr]

11 minutes ago, Slayer3032 said:

If you can overclock it maybe but $80 seems high when you could put more into the motherboard and get X58 or P55 and overclock one of those $25 xeons instead. You could probably get a P55 motherboard and a cpu for $80.

 

X58 also allows you to use ECC Unbuffered, like PC3-10600U or PC3-10600E should turn up some really cheap brand name server memory. I'd go for used server memory over that random chinese "AMD RAM" DDR3, some of it is extremely subpar memory. I got 3x2gb sticks of 1333mhz Samsung shipped to me for $18 off ebay, Aliexpess seems to be really brutal on ram pricing. You can get E5649's and X5660's for $12 and $18 though and if you get unlucky and the bios doesn't support westmere out of the box, E5540's and W3520's are $5 and most quads are under $10.

 

This is of course if you want to overclock your hardware.

Yeah I decided to not overclock since it uses alot of electricity and ill be paying more in the long run. Will you give any recommendations that performs similarly to an i5 6500 that doesnt require overclocking? thanks!

[Slayer3032]

Overclocking low end stuff to go faster doesn't have to mean it will always have to use significantly more power than comparable performing stuff. Power efficiency is much of the improvement that has happened over the last 10 years though.  

 

i5 6500 is going to be a pretty tall bar for anything stock and used. Maybe try to find a used 1st gen Ryzen off someone, and find a new/used B350 at a large discount over b450 and the upcoming refresh. I'm sure they'll start moving some more past June/July when Ryzen 3000 is expected to come out.