LGA 2011-3 Xeon gaming pc suggestions

[tacticalgnome]

Hey, I recently have learned that old xeon cpu's can be had for dirt cheap, I want your suggestions on them, should I build a budget gaming pc with them? Are there any overclockable 6 and 8 core Xeons?

What is your opinion on the Xeon E5 2667V4?

[Agall]

4 minutes ago, tacticalgnome said:

Hey, I recently have learned that old xeon cpu's can be had for dirt cheap, I want your suggestions on them, should I build a budget gaming pc with them? Are there any overclockable 6 and 8 core Xeons?

What is your opinion on the Xeon E5 2667V4?

No, buy a Ryzen 3000/5000 or Intel LGA1700 platform instead. Its simply not worth it buying old Xeons for gaming.

[Needfuldoer]

Bear in mind that these processors are 10 years old or more. Even overclocked, they're not going to keep up with today's desktop processors. (v3 / v4 Xeons are Haswell and Broadwell, respectively.)

 

That said, registered ECC RAM on old Xeons are a gateway to tons of cheap RAM. An old workstation is great for a homelab machine, not a gaming machine.

 

5 minutes ago, tacticalgnome said:

What is your opinion on the Xeon E5 2667V4?

They're reasonably fast. My home server has two.

[Zando_]

3 minutes ago, tacticalgnome said:

I recently have learned that old xeon cpu's can be had for dirt cheap

The CPUs sort of can, but the cost of a good motherboard is too high.

4 minutes ago, tacticalgnome said:

should I build a budget gaming pc with them?

No.

3 minutes ago, tacticalgnome said:

Are there any overclockable 6 and 8 core Xeons?

A couple, I believe 16XX v3 Xeons are overclockable, or it may only be 1-2 SKUs in that line.

 

Ryzen has pretty much killed any value proposition from old Xeons for gaming, you are much better off getting a cheap Zen+ or Zen 2 chip and decent B450 board for the same price (and they'll use the same RAM too so there's 0 price difference there).

 

I like these platforms and use them myself, but they are not a good value vs modern hardware.

[tacticalgnome]

My budget allows me to get only an i3, or a ryzen 7500F if I compromise 1TB ssd for a 512gig one and a a650 motherboard for a a620, just thought I'd point that out since it's kind of stupid to leave this out.

[tacticalgnome]

9 minutes ago, Zando_ said:

The CPUs sort of can, but the cost of a good motherboard is too high.

I found chineese motherboards that are around 200 zł

[Tetras]

11 minutes ago, tacticalgnome said:

My budget allows me to get only an i3, or a ryzen 7500F if I compromise 1TB ssd for a 512gig one and a a650 motherboard for a a620, just thought I'd point that out since it's kind of stupid to leave this out.

They're still better options. Large core count old Xeons use more power (at least, when you're trying to make their performance competitive) and have significantly lower single thread performance, which is very important to gaming.

 

If you can get the CPU cheap and find an affordable motherboard, they're not a terrible option, but I'd take an i3-12100/H610 or 7500F/A620 over them (the 7500F is a better choice of those 2).

[Zando_]

Just now, tacticalgnome said:

I found chineese motherboards that are around 200 zł

With QA reject chipsets and bare minimum VRMs + a half-featured BIOS that may also have stuff that doesn't work even if it is present. They're usable, but not good OC boards if you want to whack hundreds of watts through a Haswell chip. If memory serves my j-bin 5960X was ~350W at 4.5GHz. The Xeons are usually worse bins than the i7s, and significantly worse than a j-bin (specific batch/series of 5960Xs that have above-average bins), so it'll need more voltage to hit similar clocks, meaning higher power draw. Which requires a beefy cooler and beefy VRMs.

 

Folks I've seen with the Xeons often end up running them at 4.2Ghz. A Ryzen Zen+ chip (2000 series aside from the -G APUs) will also do 4.2Ghz, and IPC is similar to Haswell. There's a slight loss due to core-to-core latencies being higher on Ryzen than Intel's ringbus architecture, but they're very close. Zen 2 onwards is much better, and you should be able to get those chips dirt cheap now. You should be able to get a good B450 board for the same or less than a good X99 board.

 

Also worth noting, X99 does not support registered ECC so you cannot use that cheap server RAM. You'd have to use a C chipset which does not support overclocking, defeating the point of the Xeon. You could use ECC unreg, but that isn't any cheaper than normal DDR4, and would run as non-ECC anyways. 

1 minute ago, Tetras said:

but I'd take an i3-12100/H610 or 7500F/A620 over them (the 7500F is a better choice of those 2).

^^^ 100%. The 12100 is a killer budget chip already, if the 7500F is even better then . Coworker has an i3 12100, he has 0 issues pushing 1440p 165Hz with a 3060/3060 Ti (I forgot which version of the 3060 he has). If you're purely gaming, the modern 4c/8t chips are nothing to sneeze at.

[tacticalgnome]

22 minutes ago, Zando_ said:

With QA reject chipsets and bare minimum VRMs + a half-featured BIOS that may also have stuff that doesn't work even if it is present. They're usable, but not good OC boards if you want to whack hundreds of watts through a Haswell chip. If memory serves my j-bin 5960X was ~350W at 4.5GHz. The Xeons are usually worse bins than the i7s, and significantly worse than a j-bin (specific batch/series of 5960Xs that have above-average bins), so it'll need more voltage to hit similar clocks, meaning higher power draw. Which requires a beefy cooler and beefy VRMs.

 

Folks I've seen with the Xeons often end up running them at 4.2Ghz. A Ryzen Zen+ chip (2000 series aside from the -G APUs) will also do 4.2Ghz, and IPC is similar to Haswell. There's a slight loss due to core-to-core latencies being higher on Ryzen than Intel's ringbus architecture, but they're very close. Zen 2 onwards is much better, and you should be able to get those chips dirt cheap now. You should be able to get a good B450 board for the same or less than a good X99 board.

 

Also worth noting, X99 does not support registered ECC so you cannot use that cheap server RAM. You'd have to use a C chipset which does not support overclocking, defeating the point of the Xeon. You could use ECC unreg, but that isn't any cheaper than normal DDR4, and would run as non-ECC anyways. 

^^^ 100%. The 12100 is a killer budget chip already, if the 7500F is even better then . Coworker has an i3 12100, he has 0 issues pushing 1440p 165Hz with a 3060/3060 Ti (I forgot which version of the 3060 he has). If you're purely gaming, the modern 4c/8t chips are nothing to sneeze at.

Do you think that having ram that's on the motherboard's qvl list is important?

[Zando_]

Just now, tacticalgnome said:

Do you think that having ram that's on the motherboard's qvl list is important?

Not for home users, no. ECC reg/unreg and non ECC have nothing to do with the QVL list though.

[OhYou_]

1 hour ago, tacticalgnome said:

Hey, I recently have learned that old xeon cpu's can be had for dirt cheap, I want your suggestions on them, should I build a budget gaming pc with them? Are there any overclockable 6 and 8 core Xeons?

What is your opinion on the Xeon E5 2667V4?

I would go for the highest single core performance chip, which seems to be the e5-1650 v4.
8 cores do not matter when the speed will be drug down by mid single core perf

sadly these were around the first chips that kinda killed overclocking.
you can maybe squeeze 8-10% out of them with BCLK oc. For that reason, I would not prioritize a oc capable motherboard unless its nearly the same price as a non-oc board

[tacticalgnome]

So if I shouldn't build a gaming pc using xeon, let me know how this will do instead. This setup fits within my budget just barely.

[bal723]

what is ur budget

[tacticalgnome]

6 minutes ago, bal723 said:

what is ur budget

3000 zł

[bal723]

4 minutes ago, tacticalgnome said:

3000 zł

what sites or shops u got access to?

[tacticalgnome]

2 minutes ago, bal723 said:

what sites or shops u got access to?

any pl domestic market shops i guess?

[PDifolco]

29 minutes ago, tacticalgnome said:

So if I shouldn't build a gaming pc using xeon, let me know how this will do instead. This setup fits within my budget just barely.

Can't you get a 6600 for less than a 7600?

But it's ok, check prices for a 5600 and b450 board, as it's more open to upgrades 

[tacticalgnome]

1 minute ago, PDifolco said:

Can't you get a 6600 for less than a 7600?

But it's ok, check prices for a 5600 and b450 board, as it's more open to upgrades 

It is cheaper, however the 7600 has better performance, b450 isn't compatible with pcie gen 4, and the 6600 is a 8x card.

[bal723]

36 minutes ago, tacticalgnome said:

So if I shouldn't build a gaming pc using xeon, let me know how this will do instead. This setup fits within my budget just barely.

https://www.komputronik.pl/product/790365/adata-legend-960-m-2-nvme-pcie4x4-1tb.html
https://www.komputronik.pl/product/830596/gigabyte-radeon-rx-7600-gaming-oc-8gb.html
https://www.komputronik.pl/product/675380/g-skill-aegis-16gb-2x8gb-3200mhz-ddr4-cl16-xmp-2-0-dimm-.html

[tacticalgnome]

1 minute ago, bal723 said:

https://www.komputronik.pl/product/790365/adata-legend-960-m-2-nvme-pcie4x4-1tb.html
https://www.komputronik.pl/product/830596/gigabyte-radeon-rx-7600-gaming-oc-8gb.html
https://www.komputronik.pl/product/675380/g-skill-aegis-16gb-2x8gb-3200mhz-ddr4-cl16-xmp-2-0-dimm-.html

I'm unsure about that Gigabyte GPU

[bal723]

1 minute ago, tacticalgnome said:

I'm unsure about that Gigabyte GPU

it just has way better cooling compared to others and costs just 50 pln more

[Zando_]

59 minutes ago, PDifolco said:

But it's ok, check prices for a 5600 and b450 board, as it's more open to upgrades

How so? It's an older platform than LGA1700... the best chips you can upgrade to are older than the Intel offerings. And it's much worse than a budget AM5 platform, as those leave room to upgrade to current X3D chips down the line.

[PDifolco]

20 minutes ago, Zando_ said:

How so? It's an older platform than LGA1700... the best chips you can upgrade to are older than the Intel offerings. And it's much worse than a budget AM5 platform, as those leave room to upgrade to current X3D chips down the line.

Problem is with the budget 5500 or any older chip, I think that the value of a 5600 is better

But you're right a 12100 can be upgraded to a 14700K which is better than a 5800X3D, providing  the board is good enough to not throttle with 200W+ power, and the cooler is upgraded as well; otoh a 5800X3D can be dropped on any AM4 board  and work efficiently at stock settings