I have an old Foxconn G33M02 Motherboard and I'm going to replace the old Core 2 Duo with a Xeon X5460 and get a used Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO. Do you guys think that the GTX 660 would be a good option for such a cheap build.
So long as you have a power supply that can supply the 660 and you're not running anything insanely CPU-heavy, a 660 will work pretty well. Depends on your budget for the system, but it'll be decent. I've run an E5450 with a 7770 and it worked really well for how much the system was actually worth.
Two things to note:
1) One minor issue that you likely won't feel the effects of - because that motherboard is a G33 motherboard, it is operating at PCI Express 1.1, meaning that by today's standards you would be running at 2.0 x8 or 3.0 x4. For a GTX 660 running with a Core 2 Xeon, however, this is not a problem.
2) You probably already know this, but the X5460 needs a pin swap sticker to work in that board. That's not the main problem - it's fairly easy to do. The real problem you may encounter is that if the motherboard BIOS doesn't have microcode support for the Xeon, it will disable two instruction sets in the CPU: VT-x and cmpxchg16. If you're planning on running Windows 10 on this machine, it will not boot or install if it detects that cmpxchg16 can't be used. Win7 will work okay, as will any version of Linux, but Windows 10 won't boot without it. A BIOS modification will fix this, assuming the BIOS can be flashed by the end user.
Other than those two really very minor issues (they really aren't as problematic as I made them sound, trust me - I've been through this process before) that should make for a neat little budget rig there :D
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Crap I thought it was PCIE 2.0 oh well. And what is Windows 10. Linux FTW. I think I can flash the BIOS I will check though. Thank you for the reply.
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If your looking for a decent GTX 660 setup. I have a pair of GTX 660's that I use to run in SLI. They are sitting around collecting dust, if your interested in them PM me.
I don't see why not