Hi, I’m looking to build a budget PC to try and get as much back for buck as possible and GPU wise now seems like a good time to buy
I remember Wendall installed some mounts a while back in a large ATX case to use a server motherboard and Xeon with a GPU
I was wondering if these still beat used Ryzen / Intel consumer CPU / board combos for price/performance
Has anyone bought any used Xeons recently to do the same and if so what did you buy / what would you recommend?
I’ve also seen those Chinese motherboards that are made for the purpose of using an old Xeon in a standard chassis does anyone have any experience with those?
Any suggestions on used CPU / mobo combos would be appreciated
What kind of workloads are you intending to run on it?
Asking as IME (see the CFD benchmark thread posts I made here and here), a v3/v4 2011-3 Xeon is roughly equivalent to a 5000 series AMD CPU, with the caveat being that if you’re memory bandwidth bound the x99 systems are going to do slightly better since they’re quad channel. The AM4 system is also going to have better access to faster storage, x99 is PCIE 3.0 only.
Price performance… last I looked, the cheap chinese x99 boards were $75-125, the xeon 2630L v4 and 5960X I’d picked up were like $20 each or so. That’s going to be tough to beat price wise. On the other hand, BIOS updates are going to either be sketchy or nonexistant, power usage is going to be high unless you’re shopping for the low power and slow xeons (i.e. cheap parts now, pay more to run them over their lifetime vs. the other way around). I went this path, but I wouldn’t recommend it for something more compute centric – I was building a typical all-in-one home server, mostly a file server, when I made the choice. I’d also already had an old Asus Sabertooth board lying around from a prior HEDT build.
Personally, I wouldn’t go older than x99, and I’ve put my x99 rig into ‘for lab use only’ (i.e. only powered on if i need to play with something or need the RAM capacity, not 24x7) because of the power consumption. Your power costs likely vary
Likewise, I can’t speak for any of the newer Xeons in any meaningful way, though first and second gen Epyc are starting to get into the right bracket to be considered, too. But without knowing what you’re wanting to run on it, it’s hard to know if these aren’t just supermassive overkill anyway.
To add on to what Molly has said, I personally wouldn’t buy anything older than a Xeon v3/v4 because v2 only has AVX no AVX2, and thus Xeon v2 does not support x86-64-v3 (see this section of the wiki page for more info x86-64 - Wikipedia), but Xeon v3/v4 do.
