Dual L5640 for a new gaming rig?

oscar7601 · March 21, 2018

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to ask what you would think about a dual Xeon L5640 setup for a gaming rig.

Given the ridiculous prices of these CPUs on AliExpress (21€ each) and the availability of decent dual socket motherboards on the market (used of course) for about 120-140€, I thought this would make for a very impressive 12 cores - 24 threads setup with quite decent clock speeds (but not as high as recent CPUs unfortunately).

Do you think this would be a good value for money? 180€ for a mobo + a 24 threads setup makes my mind go boom.

ProximaOfZeal · March 21, 2018

For a gaming rig, eh. Honestly, doesn't make much sense to go for a dual for a gaming rig, 6c/12t should be plenty. Keep in mind you will have to OC this CPU as much as possible to make it any good for gaming --- can you even overclock on a dual LGA 1366 mobo? I imagine on most of them, especially the cheaper ones - not. And if you can, a dual OC 12c Xeon setup is gonna eat sooo much power I imagine.

Alternatively, if it matters to make it cheap, you could even go with a single LGA1156 Xeon x3440 (4c/8t), of course also overclocked as much as you can. The bonus is that mobos for that are so much cheaper, you can get a decent mobo+cpu for like 80€ total. So it'll be good for you to give it a good thought what do you need all those cores and threads for.

Electronics Wizardy · March 21, 2018

For a budget system something like a g4560 will be faster almost all the time. The extra cores really won' thelp you here, and the L sku's are low clocked. Also some games don't like the dual numa nodes.

IsaacThePooper · March 21, 2018

If all you're doing is gaming, it's not the best option. But if the prices are decent and you can't find any other good deal (like even a Quad Core chip as old as like an i5 2500k or Ryzen 3 would be better) then I would consider it. Although you can't overclock dual socket motherboards. You'd probably be better off with a higher end Xeon chip (like a E5-2670 comes to mind) that's at a decent price and a better clock speed, then just get one of those and a X79 or another single slot motherboard that supports overclocking. (if you wanted to go with that route)

Just get a used i5 2nd gen+ chip or something that's better than that chip at a decent price, honesty a 2.3GHz clock speed is pretty terrible.

oscar7601 · March 21, 2018

Alright then, I'll give up on that idea.

It would have been neat though!

Ground · March 21, 2018

There are few cases where x58 xeons are still worth it nowadays.

a) You already have an x58 board
b) you found a good deal on an x58 board (<100$) (Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, EVGA)
c) You really like tinkering with your PC (this is me, I find overclocking this platform is lots of fun)
d) You need lots of multi core performance for as cheap as possible.

If none of these apply, a used 2600k+board+some RAM can usually be found for about 200$ and can achieve about 80% of the multi core performance and higher single core performance then x58 xeons at a usually lower price.