Ivy bridge xeon compatability

Hardware
1

So here I am again making another ‘scrap yard wars’ pc for a friend and im really trying to wring every frame per second out of it as I can.

So I got a used system for £95 with an asrock h61 dgs motherboard and an i5 3330 and 2x4gb of 1333 which instantly overclocked to 1600 with no issues. Sold the 3330 for £35 and was looking at i7 3770 but then noticed it said on the asrock site the board will accept xeons so im looking at e3 1270/80/90 v2 kind of processors but having never done anything with them im worried about compatibility.

Basically im looking to pick up a comparable xeon to the i7 3770 for less cash than a 3770 costs and if I can do that I will.

So my questions are these.

1 will I need to swap out the ram for ecc or will I be ok with non ecc?

2 is there anything I am overlooking with regard to the xeon that would cause me an issue and stop the build moving forward?

3 hould I forget about a xeon and just get an i7 3770

2

Got a zotac gtx 970 for £90 too which I think is a screaming deal

3

Xeons work fine with non ECC ram.

Make sure to update the BIOS or UEFI on the motherboard to the latest before you get rid of the i5. Some of the 1155 Xeons do not have the Intel HD Graphics iGPU, this may or may not matter for you.

I would get whichever is cheaper. The E3-1275 v2 is the equivalent for the 3770, but everything from the 1230-1290 v2 has hyperthreading. See this Wikipedia article for models+specs- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Xeon_microprocessors

4

I have done this on Wikipedia. the bios is done. im not bothered about the igpu id rather have the power saving.

so basically I just buy the xeon and drop it in like an i5 or i7 and im good to go?

5

yes drop in and go, just make sure you have latest bios, note that Xeons E3 v2’s that end in 0 do NOT have iGPU and ones that end in 5 DO have an iGPU.

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6
  1. You will be fine without ECC, Xeons can work with either.
  2. Not particularly. If it’s on the motherboard’s QVL it should work fine.
  3. Whatever is cheapest, if you’re not using the iGPU of an i7 or the server features of the E3 then the CPUs are effectively the same thing.

Side note: Most H61 motherboards, and really just about all other chipsets that aren’t C-series or X-series, don’t even support ECC anyways.

I’ve run a Xeon E3 1230 V2 on a Z77 motherboard before for a few years without a problem.

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