Best 775 board for Xeon 771 mod and 16GB DDR3?

[newParadigm]

Okay, so there's this little mod you can buy for like $3 to allow use of a Socket 771 Xeon on a regular desktop 775 board.

Does anyone have experience with this? And if so, what is a good socket 775 board that would potentially support this?

I am thinking of doing this because I can get a 2.8GHz 12MB cache 1600MHz FSB Xeon (E5462) for $25 on eBay.

I want to start with at least 8GB probably 12GB of DDR3 RAM, and I need obviously to be able to run the FSB at 1600MHz.

Please advise... I was thinking of the P5E64 WS Evolution, but I cannot find one anywhere. Would the P5E64 WS Pro version of that board be a comparable?

 

[PhIlLy ChEeSe]

here is a link to one that has a Q9550, just dump it. Your not going to find any socket 775 boards cheaply, least none that anyone wants.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/ASUS-P5E-WS...960?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item20fc976220

 

[XavierMace]

That mod is only worth it if you already have the board. It's completely not worth buying that old of hardware. An X58 board with a 5600 series Xeon gives you far more bang for the buck.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Why bother at all when a Haswell Celeron can give similar, or even better, performance?

 

[newParadigm]

Why bother at all when a Haswell Celeron can give similar, or even better, performance?

I guess that's something I should've asked as well...where would performance sit compared to present (Haswell/Ivy Bridge) i3/i5?

 

[XavierMace]

To put it in desktop terms, the Xeon 5000's, 5100's, 5200's, 5300's, and 5400's are Core 2 Duo's/Core 2 Quads. The Xeon 5500's and 5600's are first generation i7's. The latter are substantially faster than the former, use much less power, and generate much less heat.

If you're doing single threaded work, it's a waste. If you doing something that will take advantage of 4/6 cores, it MAY be worth it. While the processors are cheap ($40-$150) the boards often are not that cheap and you're still missing out on a lot of modern niceties (USB3, PCIe Gen 3, etc). It's a niche market in short.

What is this system being used for and how much are you looking to spend?

 

[newParadigm]

Cheap as possible as far as what I want to spend, and what it's used for...

Logitech Media Server, SolidWorks 2014, MATLab 2014b, maybe some gaming, but not much, Visual Studio 2013...

I'm a bio-engineering major with a minor in Software Engineering

 

[SPBHM]

I've been running g31/g41 boards with the mod for over a year, currently running an asrock g31 with an e5420+sticker and OC to FSB 375 (it goes higher, I'm limited by memory, DDR2 667 lol)

the ideal board is a good p45 board... but p35 is also pretty good, and g31/g41 can work well...

forget about x38/x48 and that's it

if it supports at least a q8200,q9550 or whatever it should take the mod well, but do your research on the specific model before trying (some have microcode problems, both the boards I used had 0 problems)

edit; 16GB? that's a problem, perhaps just some p45 or p43 board in that case (I think p35/g41 is a little more limited in terms of compatibility with DDR3 memory)

 

[jihe]

Cheap as possible as far as what I want to spend, and what it's used for...

Logitech Media Server, SolidWorks 2014, MATLab 2014b, maybe some gaming, but not much, Visual Studio 2013...

I'm a bio-engineering major with a minor in Software Engineering

For pure number crunching get X58 with a hexcore X5650.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

I guess that's something I should've asked as well...where would performance sit compared to present (Haswell/Ivy Bridge) i3/i5?

The stock performance of a Pentium G3258 is somewhere between a Q6600 and Q9550, but with around 2x the single thread performance.

That's not factoring in overclocking of course.

If you move up to the i5/i7 line, its not even funny. You can get 2-3x the performance of a Q9550 with a 4790K, and that's just with a rough comparison using Cinebench 10... :awe:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/50?vs=1260

 

[SPBHM]

The stock performance of a Pentium G3258 is somewhere between a Q6600 and Q9550, but with around 2x the single thread performance.

That's not factoring in overclocking of course.

If you move up to the i5/i7 line, its not even funny. You can get 2-3x the performance of a Q9550 with a 4790K, and that's just with a rough comparison using Cinebench 10... :awe:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/50?vs=1260

yes but to be fair the 771 quads are much cheaper, you can buy the 3.16GHz one (almost a QX9770) for $30 and it overclocks nicely,

 

[cbn]

A good place to start would be the following link:

http://www.delidded.com/lga-771-to-775-adapter/2/

Here are some more links with info about LGA 771 to LGA 77 mod:

http://www.delidded.com/lga-771-775-cpus/ (Resource page comparing LGA 775 Core 2 quad prices to LGA 771 Xeon quad core prices)

http://www.overclock.net/t/1431723/mod-lga775-support-for-lga771-xeon-cpus

My experience detailed in the following post:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=36890787&postcount=39

 

[VirtualLarry]

The stock performance of a Pentium G3258 is somewhere between a Q6600 and Q9550, but with around 2x the single thread performance.

That's not factoring in overclocking of course.

You forgot "at half the power consumption". Seriously, the G3258 is a powerhouse, compared to the old Core2Quad CPUs.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

yes but to be fair the 771 quads are much cheaper, you can buy the 3.16GHz one (almost a QX9770) for $30 and it overclocks nicely,

In my opinion you get a much better overall platform by going with a newer Celeron/Pentium. Not to mention you get a "free", and quite capable too, IGP. The best you can hope for on 775 is the X4500HD, which is effectively obsolete. It isn't even DX11 compatible, and has poor support for HW video decoding.

You forgot "at half the power consumption". Seriously, the G3258 is a powerhouse, compared to the old Core2Quad CPUs.

One can't remember everything... :biggrin:

To me, C2D/Q's where effectively obsoleted when the 3258 shoved up. The performance/$ is simply mind boggling, even without OC'ing it.

 

[SPBHM]

well, still you can get a x5460 (let's call it "Q9750") for less than half the price of a g3258 and even with both OCed the g3258 is going to have a hard time on MT

I agree with the massive platform advantage for the 3258, but the xeons are interesting if you already have a 775 board and VGA, it's so much better to run the best the platform has to offer (4 cores, 2x6MB l2, high FSB, 3GHz and more) than some average C2D, and one of these Xeons at 3GHz+ is still viable for playing most games with a current VGA for example;

 

[cbn]

Regarding the 16GB RAM, I would go LGA 1366 or newer.

If not planning to overclock, I would look at used Windows 7 LGA 1366 Workstations. These can definitely support 16GB and beyond and the processors for these are pretty cheap too (~$20 quad cores are available).

Example:

LGA 1366:

X5570 (45nm 4C/8T Xeon, 2.93 Ghz base w/ 3.33 Ghz turbo) has a passmark score of 5560 for Multi-thread and 1345 for single thread ---> http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+X5570+@+2.93GHz (It starts @ $21 shipped in the ebay "buy it now" listings)

vs.

LGA 771:

X5460 (45nm 4C/4T Xeon @ 3.16 Ghz) has a passmark score of 4450 for Multi-thread and 1341 for single thead --> http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+X5460+@+3.16GHz&id=1297 (It starts @ $28 shipped in ebay "buy it now" listings)

 

[Insert_Nickname]

I agree with the massive platform advantage for the 3258, but the xeons are interesting if you already have a 775 board and VGA, it's so much better to run the best the platform has to offer (4 cores, 2x6MB l2, high FSB, 3GHz and more) than some average C2D, and one of these Xeons at 3GHz+ is still viable for playing most games with a current VGA for example;

Definitely agreed. If you already have a 775 board with support laying about, a cheap Xeon can be a good upgrade.

But again, if I had to buy "new", I'd go with the Pentium.

 

[newParadigm]

Thank you everyone, looks like I'll be either looking for a used 1366 workstation, or build my own haswell-e with a lower end cpu and invest in the platform (that way I can upgrade later)