Best "budget" Aliexpress Xeon CPU?

[AntiSpiral]

Hellouuu there!! ^^

So I kinda wanna have a comparasson of a standard gaming PC and a Xeon one, but there is SOOO MANY models that I'm going nuts already. 
So I decided to come here for global wisdom. Budget for the CPU should be around 50-60$ so I'm open for the best models around that price.

Thank you all in advance

[jaslion]

What are you comparing it too? Most xeons have a fair bit lower ipc which makes them very poor gaming cpu's. Also what socket and board are you using as that widely varies it too

[Levent]

14 minutes ago, jaslion said:

What are you comparing it too? Most xeons have a fair bit lower ipc which makes them very poor gaming cpu's. Also what socket and board are you using as that widely varies it too

to be honest when it comes to aliexpress motherboards, motherboards matter more than CPU choice.

[ishapli8]

34 minutes ago, jaslion said:

What are you comparing it too? Most xeons have a fair bit lower ipc which makes them very poor gaming cpu's. Also what socket and board are you using as that widely varies it too

There is a way to get single core turbo to go all core on those xeons so it won’t be that bad.

[jaslion]

3 minutes ago, ishapli8 said:

There is a way to get single core turbo to go all core on those xeons so it won’t be that bad.

How? That is normally not possible at all.

[ishapli8]

6 minutes ago, jaslion said:

How? That is normally not possible at all.

I think tech yes city has a good video on it.

[ishapli8]

I think it was this video but I’m not sure it could be a different one from him.

[jaslion]

20 minutes ago, ishapli8 said:

I think it was this video but I’m not sure it could be a different one from him.

Neat but seems to be x99 only which is where the budget xeons kinda really suck

[AntiSpiral]

I found this one and looks pretty decent:

Kllisre-placa base X99 D4, combo con Xeon E5 2678 V3 LGA2011-3 CPU, 4 Uds. X 4GB = 16GB 2400MHz, memoria DDR4 ECC
https://es.aliexpress.com/item/1005001287701107.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.50c863c0VfOFEo

[AntiSpiral]

The idea is a CPU with decent high frequencies, ddr4 and price around 200$

[jaslion]

3 hours ago, AntiSpiral said:

The idea is a CPU with decent high frequencies, ddr4 and price around 200$

So a 5820k x99 combo basically?

[AntiSpiral]

14 hours ago, jaslion said:

So a 5820k x99 combo basically?

That's on response of what I said or a comparason to the mobo-cpu link that I said before?

[Yuri57]

The Xeon 2678v3 is the current value king.
You can buy a mobo-CPU-RAM combo for as low as 250 USD on Ali.

It runs every game, including Battlefield V, DOOM Eternal and Cyberpunk with flying colors.
I'm using it with a water cooled 2080ti and I get the same fps in 1440p as in the reviews using much faster/more expensive CPUs.

Cyberpunk even uses all 24 threads!

[Loki0111]

Slightly off topic but what is everyones experience with Aliexpress? Is it a reputable site to buy stuff?

 

I was looking at some 3U Server Chassis on there but always worried about getting ripped off.

[Blue4130]

11 hours ago, Loki0111 said:

Slightly off topic but what is everyones experience with Aliexpress? Is it a reputable site to buy stuff?

 

I was looking at some 3U Server Chassis on there but always worried about getting ripped off.

Aliexpress is just a directory, reputation of each store is independent of aliexpress. 

[Guest]

I would look in the direction of the E5-16xx CPUs as most (all?) of them have unlocked multipliers up to and including v3. v4 Broadwells are locked. With that in mind, the E5-1630 v3 is a $40 4c/8t that is slightly better than a i7 4770k. The E5-1650 v2 is a 6c/12t that is roughly equivalent to the i7-3970X. I am unsure if the E5-1630 v3 has an unlocked multiplier but the E5-1650 v2 definitely does. Obviously, the Haswell chip will have an IPC advantage over the Ivy Bridge one, but the Ivy Bridge chip has more cores, so pick your poison.

As someone mentioned earlier, you can do a microcode patch on E5-26xx v3 Xeons that will lock the all-core turbo to the single-core turbo, so there are some compelling options that don't even have an unlocked multiplier. As someone mentioned before, the E5-2678 is a decent option for multithreaded tasks but even if you lock the all-core turbo to the single-core 3.3GHz it will still be held back in games.

 

I would probably go for the E5-1630 v3 as it has better IPC and is on a newer platform (C612/X99) which means more modern motherboard feature sets like NVMe boot drive support (will probably vary by motherboard but technically is supported by the chipset) and a larger upgradeability path with both higher core CPUs and Broadwell-EP, whenever those come down in price. Personally, I started out on this machine as a lowly budget gaming workstation with a 6c/12t E5-1650 v3 and then upgraded to a E5-2697 v3 QS for a good deal a year later. Slowly this machine has become more and more expensive and I have been tasting more and more of the high-end desktop experience. I will probably replace this machine once AM5 CPUs come out, however, as my current CPU/GPU combo might be rage-inducing to some.

 

A good comparison would be against 1st- and 2nd-gen Ryzen as the above CPUs are comparable in terms of gaming performance. I think that the Xeons may come out on top as technically being the superior performance per dollar value, but I think most would agree that Ryzen would be the better buy because:

1. It's less janky to use as a consumer platform.
2. There are more upgrade options, and more significant ones at that. It's easy to start with a cheap Ryzen 5 1600 and then save up for a Ryzen 5 5600X, with over 50% performance gain in gaming, versus Grantley-EP where the gains from Haswell-EP to Broadwell-EP are negligible.

Those are my thoughts, anyway.

Cheers