@Mr Bill
Oh! Sorry if what I said came off as confrontational - I meant it as just a FYI kinda thing =D
I'm all about keeping old 'puters out in the field as long as possible. So many times people just trash old rigs when something as simple as imaging it over to an SSD gives those old machines new life!
Especially if an "old" system is something with as much promise as a 1366 rig. Just putting an SSD as boot drive is like... 90% there to a daily box. Maybe 5% if maybe the video card is just so old that you can't get modern drivers to accelerate web video - that honestly is a stretch. I'd actually have to look up what the cheapest Dell OEM 2010 PCIe vid card was? You'd have to get under Radeon 3000 series - honestly I dunno?
I do know one thing that has caught me off guard and we (???) as tweakers forget - so here at my workplace we have a few Dell Dimension T3500 rigs which are x58 with W3670? (whatever the i7-970 equiv xeon is) and they are still competent rigs but they poke a bit and then i forget... that's bone stock. No chipset overclock, 1066 mem speed - slowest SPD timings (CAS 12 @ 1066 wtf ??).
Reading up the thread where people had issues with the mitigations slowing their x58 rigs... also happened to be running stock BCK at 133. Maybe that makes a difference?
Anyway sorry for the ramble - just wanted to clarify that I wasn't trying to be a jerk about non-gaming use.
NP...My advice is to go for the some of the cheapest 6 core Xeons like:X5650,X5660,X5670,X5675......I personally owned before E5645(weakest 6 core) that I managed to OC to the 4,2Ghz those Xeons are basically the same except their multiplier and the base clock difference so those a bit more expensive(higher numbers)are easier to OC due to the higher/better multiplier and their base clock but sometimes even those with lower multiplier can hit great OC speeds....in short almost ALL of them should easily hit around 4Ghz......GL.....
Yea the 32nm 1366 procs - at least for the fully enabled 6/12 core ones - I've had like 6 I've personally gotten to play with, their official speed ratings don't mean anything. They're all fun, but the variation is crazy.
I guess tl;dr is don't get hung up on trying to get the absolute highest model number xeon.
The best clocking chip I've personally had was a mult locked W3670 - but that clock was ironically being able to run 3900 uncore. The W3690 I got later sucks in comparison, 3600 maybe but.... it has unlocked multiplier, so it's easier on my mobo to let me run 170'ish BCK. But it also hard walls at 4450 cpu clock ;/
Another W3670 I had was perhaps the leakest chip i've seen other than the original 930 I had. I could not cool that chip. AT ALL. Same stepping as the other W3670, wildly different behavior.
I guess that's my long way of saying, don't get obsessed with trying to get the top SKU in the hope for more clock headroom - my experience is it doesn't help AT ALL.
Mostly look for unlocked mult (I think that's W3680 and above, also ... actually I don't know what that is in the X series???? someone help?. Then there are the E and L series but I don't know enough on those)
