What Xeons would y’all recommend for picking up used for a desktop build? What are the best price/performance options out there?
I have a buddy who is gonna do a passthrough Linux build, or at least upgrade a lot of his current rig. He was thinking this would be a good option for saving some money and getting a good setup.
socket 2011 and 1366 stuff should fit the bill.
find an electronics recycle place, or better yet, a DRMO place. you can get servers for pennies on the dollar.
For me it was the E5 2630L v3 Xeons (engineering sample) as they are common and usually ~$100.00 - 8C 16T.
I also bought 3 X99 boards for ~$120 and built 3 systems in 4U server cases. Only problem now is the DDR4 RAM kits I bought have gone up 250% and SSD/M.2 drives have doubled at least.
There’s also the E5 1650 v3 6C/12T (ES) processors that have the same DDR4 cost problem but they run a bit faster on the cores.
Otherwise older versions of those on DDR3 based chipsets.
E5 2680V2 ES or E52670 ES, they are 10 core chips witch, when put in a x79 board, can be overclocked for extra performance. they go for about $150 on ebay. if you get a propper board like a x79 E-WS you can (i believe) put ecc memory in witch is dirt cheap these days
I will just run down with what I had experience dealing with and what platform it’s on:
x5460 used for the 771 server platform but with the stupidly easy 771 mod to 775. You can run a 4 core 4 GHz OC on 775 chipsets that have FSB 1600.
Look here for more info: http://www.delidded.com/lga-771-to-775-adapter/2/
x5650 for 1366 motherboards. Look for those MBs that have sata3 and usb3.
E5-2670 as far as I know the best CPU for price to performance on eBay on the LGA 2011.
I forgot about these as I have some dual CPU systems running but they are in 1U servers so not very home friendly but uber reliable as they’ve been running for ~7 years 
I just got an E5-2683v3 Engineering Sample for ~300 Euros.
Running an ES isn’t that legal but hey, nobody cares! Even intel isn’t doing anything about that.
Also registered DDR4 is cheaper than “normal” DDR4 at the moment.
If you want to be sure the CPUs are running, I would recommend you to stay away from ASUS Mainboards. I was running into trouble there with downgrading BIOS and stuff. I am now running an Asrock X99 Taichi which is just perfect!
Greetings,
Matthias
I run a E5-1660 which is basically a higher binned 3960X. Clocks to 4.6Ghz and performs ON PAR with a Ryzen 5 1600x. 1210 Cinebench Multithread was my last score.
DOD surplus office?
That’s what I read about Asus and Xeons not so friendly but no problem with any Gigabyte or MSI boards I tried.
If you already have a 1366 motherboard getting an x5650 (can be gotten for ~$50 – if you want to mess with overclocking) or a W3690 (can be gotten for ~$110 – if you just want to drop it in and go) is a no brainer. I went the x5650 route to replace an i7 920 (i think, maybe 950?) and got it up to ~3.7Ghz from the stock 2.9. It took quite a bit of fiddling with BIOS settings though.
The 771 to 775 mod is easy and quite gratifying. I got a E5460 off eBay for £12 (+ an extra £2 for the little pin-swapper sticker). On a P35 board I’ve got it up to 3.6Ghz, despite a silly zap-strap cooler situation. I feel like 4ghz would be achievable with a proper cooler. Not fast by today’s standards, but a very capable quad core system for pennies.
Exactly. Best bang for the buck. You can even find brand fucking new shit unboxed sometimes because some tard didn’t do the right job and ordered the wrong thing that ends up in DRMO.