Spare hardware

H0R53 · May 27, 2017

I have quite a lot of spare hardware, but I'm running in circles trying to figure out a good configuration for all of it.

CPUs (each has a specific mobo it has)

Core i3 2100 - Dell Optiplex 990 SFF mobo (DDR3, max 32GB)

Xeon X5460 - Dell Vostro 200 mobo (DDR2, Max 8GB)

Core i5 650 - Asus H55 (max 16GB)

GPUs (each has a PSU tied to it)

GTX 580 - 600W

Radeon HD 6750 - 375W

Quadro FX 3800 - 450W

and assorted sticks of RAM and spare HDDs.

Can anyone help me pair a GPU with a CPU to minimize bottlenecking?

closetcat · May 27, 2017

The i3 should be the most contemporary to the 580. They both support the same amount of pci-e lanes at 16, and both support pci-e 2.0 spec. The i3 has a faster bus speed at 5 GT/s DMI vs 2.5 GT/s DMI of the i5. the 2100 is only .1ghz slower on base freq, but does not turbo, wheras the i5 goes up to 3.46ghz. They're both 2 core 4 thread chips, so you're not losing cores going i3 over i5 here.

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-650-vs-Intel-Core-i3-2100/m340vsm41

this may help you decide, they're fairly evenly matched, and the i3 only really wins by a small margin. the xeon doesn't appear to support pci-e at all, at least according to ark, so i left it out. I'd choose it for the higher bus speed, and while they both seem to score very identically between single and quad core tests, the i3 wins out in integer performance where the i5 takes a slight lead in floating point. Of note, the i3 has support for the AVX instruction set, which the i5 lacks, as it came in with sandy bridge. This set helps parallelization in floating point processing in some instances, and is also useful if you, for instance use Blender. It's also incorporated into DirectX, specifically in its math functions, which you can read more about here

edit: this entirely assumes you intend to game on this machine.

Edited May 27, 2017 by closetcat
assumptions were made