System Upgrades

[TechTiger]

Hi all,

 

I am currently planning to upgrade a system with the hardware I have laying around and was wondering what would be the best combination for use with VR games and normal gaming. I have 2 processors and 2 boards I can use:

 

Board 1 is a MSI H61M-P23 (B3)

https://us.msi.com/Motherboard/H61MP23_B3/

 

Board 2 is an Intel S1200BTL

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/53557/intel-server-board-s1200btl.html

 

CPU 1 is an i7 2600, not the K version

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/52213/intel-core-i7-2600-processor-8m-cache-up-to-3-80-ghz.html

 

CPU 2 is a Xeon E3-1230 V2

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/65732/intel-xeon-processor-e3-1230-v2-8m-cache-3-30-ghz.html

 

The MSI board has the advantage of taking non ECC RAM which I have plenty of laying around but only has SATA 2 while the Intel board uses ECC memory but has SATA 3. During testing and research the Xeon scores slightly higher in benchmarks than the i7 but I'm not sure if that will translate into better gaming performance since it is a server CPU.

Both systems will have the same amount of RAM (Minimum 16GB, Max 32GB due to processor limitations) and the same graphics card, A MSI RX480.

 

MSI RX480 8GB Gaming X

https://us.msi.com/Graphics-card/Radeon-RX-480-GAMING-X-8G/Specification

 

I can update with further information if required.

Any help appreciated.

[Guest]

You're going to want the i7 2600 over the Xeon E3-1230 because it has more cache and higher frequency.

You can get a Sata 3 PCI-E 1x card pretty cheap. 10 bucks maybe? So that's non-issue.

GL and Have fun!

[TechTiger]

Thank you for your reply, I suspected that the 2600 was better but the benchmark kinda made me wonder. Unfortunately due to the graphics card covering over one of the slots I have no room left for a SATA 3 card after the others are installed.

I could swap the boards over and have another PCI slot and SATA 3 but not sure if that is worth the effort?

 

Edit: I also forgot to mention in the first post that the PC is using a SATA SSD for the boot drive.