PCIE gen2/3?

[da na]

My friend is building a pc for reeeeeealy cheap bc we're all tired of dealing with him being on a switch and us on PC.  Budget of $350 usd, can extend to 400 if needed, I'm giving him some extra parts.

Getting an old Dell Precision, with a 6 core Xeon. 2.93-3.3 ghz range, my only concern is that the Xeon X5670 is a 1366 CPU, and only supports pcie 2.0. A low end GPU will be fine, right? Along the lines of a GTX 960. 

Also, is 12GB ram okay? Thinking of 2gb in each of the 6 mem slots (triple channel ddr3 mem support)

Thanks!

[Moonzy]

gtx 960 wont face much issue on pcie 2.0 x16 (pcie 3.0 x8 bandwidth), i would say u can even step up the gpu to a 1070 perhaps, but then it depends on the games/applications, on whether the CPU can fully utilise the GPU or not

[Rainbrew]

Can confirm pcie 2.0 x16 is completely fine. I've been using a 1060 on a 2.0 slot for years now and it performs well enough in games, and it's more powerful than a 960 so you should be just fine there.

[da na]

1 minute ago, Moonzy said:

gtx 960 wont face much issue on pcie 2.0 x16 (pcie 3.0 x8 bandwidth), i would say u can even step up the gpu to a 1070 perhaps, but then it depends on the games/applications, on whether the CPU can fully utilise the GPU or not

OK, thanks. Only reason I was going 960 was bc anything above a 960 is relatively valuable for mining and therefore 10x the price it should be. 

[Moonzy]

6 minutes ago, wat3rmelon_man2 said:

OK, thanks. Only reason I was going 960 was bc anything above a 960 is relatively valuable for mining and therefore 10x the price it should be. 

In that case, the 970/980 should be safe from the mining craze, because of the 4gb VRAM and old architecture

[Fasauceome]

900 series is good, in the future you wouldn't have to mind PCIe 2.0 vs 3.0 very much because that amount if bandwidth is only relevant for the most high end of high end GPUs like a 3090 and such. A GTX 1080 in a system like that will have appropriate bandwidth (barring CPU performance bottlenecks)

[svmlegacy]

26 minutes ago, wat3rmelon_man2 said:

My friend is building a pc for reeeeeealy cheap bc we're all tired of dealing with him being on a switch and us on PC.  Budget of $350 usd, can extend to 400 if needed, I'm giving him some extra parts.

Getting an old Dell Precision, with a 6 core Xeon. 2.93-3.3 ghz range, my only concern is that the Xeon X5670 is a 1366 CPU, and only supports pcie 2.0. A low end GPU will be fine, right? Along the lines of a GTX 960. 

Also, is 12GB ram okay? Thinking of 2gb in each of the 6 mem slots (triple channel ddr3 mem support)

Thanks!

I ran a GTX 780 on PCIe 2.0 for a long time without issue. You can even go faster than that. You'll probably want more than 6 GB of memory if you can swing it. The X5670 is a beast of a CPU and will happily perform today.

[da na]

45 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

In that case, the 970/980 should be safe from the mining craze, because of the 4gb VRAM and old architecture

They are over $100 on ebay, looking for like a $80 gpu

[small guy64]

56 minutes ago, svmlegacy said:

I ran a GTX 780 on PCIe 2.0 for a long time without issue. You can even go faster than that. You'll probably want more than 6 GB of memory if you can swing it. The X5670 is a beast of a CPU and will happily perform today.

Can confirm. I have a 780ti in a x58 system with a x5687 and it runs grate.

just keep in mind the lga 1366 chips don’t always play well with higher ram clocks. Don’t be amazed if you cant get over 1600mhz.