Would it be worth it to buy a 2nd hand X5650 at this day and age for a price of ~200 dollar? What you guys think? Thinking its a cheap upgrade to a 6 core Westmere 32nm cpu. Dx12 + 6 cores = happy couple no?
No, not really. As you can see new upcoming Skylake i5/i7 are 4 core and it will probably beat any past gen 6 core when it comes to gaming. Higher per-core performance and higher core clock your best bet. I'll say wait couple of months and make a real upgrade.
200quid???? They're around $80 on eBay, for an upgrade on the ageing x58 platform they're fantastic, less power, over clocks to 4ghz+ very easily. Yes its a great upgrade while we wait for skylake etc. Probably better to get a 5670 for the higher multiplier for higher over clocks if you want to do 4.5ghz+. Last I checked they were around $120 on eBay. You probably won't notice ant performance difference in dx 11 over your current setup but the extra cores should bring something to dx12. Then again by the time devs adopt dx12 skylake will have been out for a while. With your current setup, for $80-$120 it would be cheap enough to mess about with.
Yah your right they are much cheaper on eBay I am sorta tempted, but I guess it might be wiser to simply wait some more. I am planning on getting a 980 ti when they come out and have a system to match that. Probably my old X58 with the W3520 could still run with that GPU without being bottle necked to a point were it matters.
Yeah, probably better to wait, i doubt there will be much of a bottleneck with your current setup and a 980Ti, depends on your resolution of course. I went from i7 920@3.8Ghz -> 5650@4.4Ghz so for me it was huge difference. Half tempted to get a 5670 myself just to play around with, and try for 4.7Ghz 24/7 lol.
I bought a Xeon X5670 on Ebay for $140 including postage and customs to the UK to replace my I7-950 after learning that this could be a good upgrade for my X58 system. I had the I7 950 at 4.2GHz using a BCLK of 200MHz and it idled at mid 40s C and hit 90C with Prime95. The X5670 runs at the same speed and idles lower than 30C with temperatures never exceeding 70C but I couldn't get it higher than 4.2GHz using 200MHz BCLK with any voltage and I had to maintain a QPI/DRAM volatge lower than 1.35V given the equivalent UCLK speed of my I7 to protect the internal memory controller. For gaming, the performance increase was not massive but it's an excellent upgrade and when I do move the system on to No.2 PC, it will serve me well for video encoding and whatnot. I would give this thread a read: http://www.overclock.net/t/1461359/official-xeon-x5660-x58-review-discussion-and-xeon-l5639-benchmarks-inside I had a long read and decided it would be a good experiment to have a go.
Yah I was pondering the same. But after a 2nd thought it might not be worth it since in the end core to core performance is what will matter with games, even come dx12 parallell improvements. My current W3520 does 4.5 ghz and the game I am to be playing as my new shiny is Star citizen, I already play in the "alpha", and the system handles it OK on the CPU side, I am in a desperate need of a GPU upgrade though, waiting for the new line to roll out etc. When SC is released, probably end of 2016 (for the full game) I suspect/hope the new tick in intels snail road map will be on its way, and I guess I can live with my current sys until then. After all it is quite capable when up on the 4.5 ghz ranges due to the (at the time of release) excellent core to core performance. Might differ 10-15% from 2500K to "i7900" line at the same clocks, give or take a few depending on the app running. If push comes to shove I guess after I gotten a new gpu I can dimension the rest of the system after that if the cpu bottleneck drops below 50 fps too often.
Depends how much you can get it for, I got my Xeon used for $40 and for the price I paid it's been the best CPU I've ever bought considering its years and features.
I had a bad experience. The MB failed after replacing NB, SB and CPU cooler. It isn't under the warranty for sure.