Help me pick out a xeon setup

Dual socket 1366 boards and cpu's are super cheap right now , and I want to replace my single i7 930.

Just want a little help picking a good 1366 board and cpu combo.

Must be:

Board must be atx and can not go past the I/O panel. For example , a z800 board is too large.
Have at least 1 pci-e slot for an r9 290
Have ddr3
ebay only
must support the current desktop ram I'm using , have no idea what that entails as far as how ecc works. but it's just 3 4gb sticks
budget is only 236$ , that's it.

the z800 board would have been perfect if it was smaller.

and for gods sake please don't get into the "are you sure you need a dual xeon setup?" "what about a single newer amd?" discussion.

I've already determined the dual xeon setup is the best route I just need some help picking out the components.

so you wanne buy a dual socket 1366 server grade board + 2 Xeon´s for just $230,-?

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yes. it's socket 1366 not 2011.

here's what I got so far


http://www.ebay.com/itm/231672044174

and two of these should be under 200$

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835203002&cm_re=1366_server-_-35-203-002-_-Product

looks good to me.
If that board and those 2 xeon´s are 100% tested and working.

I changed the board to a different one , same model just different seller as that board apparently has problems.

try to pick up an X56xx -- way better than X55. you may be able to pick up some 6 core X5650s for relatively cheap. I am still rocking a bunch of those in service. They're pretty great. Actually I have a few X5690s that, clock for clock, are better than most modern stuff.

Had one X5690 that was replaced with a 2640v3 and there was virtually no performance gain. For their app, 6 core @ 3.4 is about equal to 8 cores @ 2.6 even with the ipc gains. Wah wah. at least it uses less power, though, and runs cooler.

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Ah damn already bought the x5550's. At least they were only 24$. But if they suck too much I can pick up those x56's. thanks for the advice , even if I messed it up already. lol

$24 per CPU is hard to pass up, but if you're looking for a more powerful upgrade in the future, look into the X5675 or X5680s. They are the highest clocked 32nm CPUs of this particular lineup short of the X5690, but for some reason the prices shoot up for the X5690s, whereas the other two you can get for $120-130 on Ebay.

I'm running an X5675 myself, and it overclocks very well, however on a dual CPU board like yours, your overclocking abilities are going to be majorly limited, that's why I'd opt for the higher clocked ones.

it was actually 24$ for two of them lol

I'm still mighty jealous about your cool project if that helps ;)

@kerosin I think that is really a supply/demand thing. Since the prices do not adhere to performance really in the second-hand market the supply dictates the price. The lower-clocked ones were probably enough for mass-deployment and for any non-high-performance-computing scenario.

Shame you are not in the UK, I have a spare Z800 chassis with the last revision motherboard and 1100 watt PSU.

The Z800's can use non-ECC RAM so I imagine all dual 1366 boards are the same; but you will find that odd combinations won't work or will force the memory to run at 1033 instead of 1333MHz. 3 x 4Gb for 12Gb in triple channel should be fine.

May I ask what your intended purpose for this machine is? You may find that selling your existing kit and going for a more modern single CPU solution may be a better investment in the long run (lower power consumption, support for new instruction sets and better single threaded performance etc.) It is cool having a dual proc set up with shed loads of RAM though - especially if running lots of VM's is needed :-)

you mentioned a graphics card, just want to make sure you know the generation you are looking at is PCI-E 2.0 and not 3.0.

The z800 is too large of a board. I ultimately went with a supermicro X8DTH-IF

Also , I've already determined that this setup costs less then an equivalent newer amd setup and my programs I use can take advantage of several smaller cores then fewer larger cores.

It's pretty hard to max out a pci-e bus to the point where it becomes a bottleneck vs the cpu/ram/gpu , even if it is older or only 8x

here's what I ultimately bought

http://www.ebay.com/itm/262062597210?_trksid=p2060353.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

Guess what , the place I bought the x5550's from was out of stock , so they are sending me a free pair of E5540's and refunded me. So this upgrade was only 132$

The E5540 is pretty lame , but two will still be a major upgrade from a single i7 930. Plus I can't argue with free. I'm going to take wendels advice and get a pair of x5600 series when I get a bit more cash. till then these freebee cpu's will hold me over.

I was mainly just putting it out there in case you had plans to do more with it. pcie 2.0 x8 is plenty for a graphics card, but other things need more.
That does look like a good deal for a refurb board.

Plus look at all those pci-e slots , I can pretend that it's a quad sli/crossfire compatible board. lol

Not trying to get into a debate or anything, but what are you going to use it for? Again, not saying you don't need it or anything, I'm just kinda curious.