Broke tech wizard here. I’ve seem to have found a motherboard that most people write off as e-waste. The gamers nexus channel on YT has an interesting video explaining some details about it called “Mystery Motherboard from China: Salvage Chipset & BIOS Hacks” . From what I can gather you can pair this motherboard to the old E5-2660 processors. There is also a russian overclocking scene dedicated to this hardware for what I assume are performance to price ratios. I’m just curious if anyone would be willing to go down this rabbit hole with me, in planning a build on a machine that can run comfortable and reliable clock speeds, good amounts of virtualizations, compile at a decent pace, and cost less than $1000. Better nerds than I, feel free to tell me how stupid I am now.
So, let’s see what we have here. The E5-2660:
Is this worth it? Compared to an 11700, not really. Unless you need the Xeon to unlock some features Intel has removed in their consumer lineup, here is an 11700 system that should do precisely what you want with less power draw, probably cheaper, and with pretty much more bang for the buck overall:
This is assuming the 8 core variant of the E5-2660 though that was discontinued in 2014.
The only “major” downgrade would possibly be ECC memory but given the age of the hardware I’d also say look att something more recent especially since you have vulns hampering VM performance.
If you’re willing to sacrifice ECC you can even go for i7-12700 which beats the i7-11700 in every way except for AVX512 instructions 
MSI PRO Z690-A DDR4 ATX + i7-12700 is even doable (drop the cooler, get a slightly cheaper case)
…if ECC is a requirement then Ryzen it is
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