Xeon motherboards compatible with ReBar
Xeon motherboards compatible with ReBar
Really bad guidance here. An Xeon E5 1660v3 can compete with a Ryzen 3700x when boosted. Saying Xeons are bad for gaming is incorrect. The E5 1650v3 scored 6/12, the 1660v3 got 8/16, and the 1680v3 also achieved 8/16 on the X99 platform with Haswell architecture. These chips are fully overclockable and have all PCIe lanes activated, just like the 5930k/5960x. They don’t slouch at all today—they can reach 4.5ghz and support quad-channel DDR4. A while back I personally tested this. Xeon E5 2000 and higher models weren’t overclockable, while E5 1600v4 chips also didn’t support boosting. These are the ones you usually want to avoid. The E5 V3 2000 chips have a turbo boost feature that’s somewhat helpful. The X79 E5 1650 and 1660 v1/v2 models offered 6 cores with 12 threads, using either Sandy or Ivy bridge designs similar to the i7 3930k/3960x/4930x/4960x. They’re old now, but they match the performance of top-tier i7 chips back then. In their prime, you could reach close to the first-gen Ryzen (though they lack AVX2, which has become a bigger problem recently). Moving down to lower-end models, the Xeon E3 1230 v1 and above are 4 cores/8 threads with Sandy Bridge architecture (like i7 2600), E3 1230v2 and above use Ivy Bridge (like i7 3770), and E3 1230v3 and above are Haswell (like i7 4770). These are outdated, but not worse than their non-K i7 counterparts. No overclocking is possible, but for very high budgets they’re still decent. Xeon E3 v4 and v5 aren’t practical anymore since Intel stopped selling them for consumer boards. If you somehow found one and had a board, they’d be similar to the 6th and 7th gen non-K series.
I understand the Xeon W processors can be overclocked (though not in the same way as regular cores) and they’re typically found only on specific motherboard models like the Core series. I hope I wasn’t expecting you to replace your entire setup because you lack funds for a full upgrade. Instead, you might consider swapping your current board for one that offers better performance. The systems you already own are from 2008, which is quite outdated compared to what’s available today.