PCIE gen2/3?
PCIE gen2/3?
He’s planning a budget PC around $350, maybe up to $400. He wants an old Dell Precision with a 6-core Xeon processor, running in the 2.93-3.3 GHz range. He’s worried about the Xeon X5670 being a 1366 CPU and only supporting PCIe 2.0, so he’s considering a low-end GPU like a GTX 960. He’s thinking about using 12GB RAM, possibly splitting it into two 2GB modules with triple channel DDR3 support.
Confirms that PCIe 2.0 x16 works perfectly. I've used a 1060 in a 2.0 slot for years and it runs smoothly, offering better performance than the 960.
The only reason I traveled to 960 was because anything above it is quite valuable for mining, making the price ten times higher than expected.
In that scenario, the 970/980 models should remain protected from the mining frenzy due to their 4GB VRAM and older design.
900 series performs well, and in the future you won't need to worry much about PCIe 2.0 versus 3.0 since that bandwidth mainly matters for top-tier GPUs like the 3090. A GTX 1080 in such a setup will provide enough bandwidth (unless CPU performance becomes a bottleneck)
I tested the GTX 780 on PCIe 2.0 for extended periods without problems. You can even exceed that speed. For better performance, more than 6 GB of RAM would be ideal. The X5670 is a powerful processor and will handle modern tasks well.
Confirmed. I own a 780Ti in an X58 setup with an X5687 chip, and it’s working fine. Just remember LGA 1366 chips may not perform well with higher RAM speeds. You might not reach over 1600MHz.