Let's talk performance

AFAIK Xeons don't do much. They perform comparatively the same as consumer grade cpus of the same generation and your mostly not getting the error correction component of the chip which has no use in daily or gaming applications.

That said the X5670 Is a huge upgrade from the i7 920

 

The i7-920 I have is a 4-core, 8HT 2.6GHz, and X5670 is a 6-core, 12HT 2.93GHz, but they are otherwise almost identical in terms of architecture. The Westmere is just a die shrink of Nehalem mostly. Aside from 15% CPU boost (which is really just a more stable silicon part running faster) the significant improvement from the Xeon is the extra 2 cores. (4HT)

For titles that are optimized for multi-core PCs, the point is, 3GHz*12 = 36GHz, which is *almost* as good as what you get with a i7-5820, which would cost over $350. Yes, Haswell-E is a more efficient architecture, but it also requires a MB+RAM upgrade. If you happen to have a Westmere-compatible board, the Xeon is a totally valid and much cheaper upgrade path, and until Intel gets their head out of their collective butt and stops charging > $1000 for an 8-core machine, a 2010 CPU will continue to remain relevant.

I mostly bring this up to address the "OMG YOUR CPU IS TOO OLD" comments. It's simply not true. Processors are only improving incrementally year on year these days.

(It is true that starting with Sandybridge, Xeons are nerfed because they can't be overclocked, but that's yet another reason the Westmere remains relevant)

 

Well single core performance will matter on some games. I'd say on most games. 1st Gen i7s are far far behind skylakes on that count.

It's just on a lot of AAA games gpu tend to be the bottleneck if they don't even take full advantage of cpu so you never see any performance difference

 

You know, 5% per year adds up pretty fast.

100% * 1.05^5 = 128%
100% * 1.05^10 = 163%

So, even if every year for the last ten was only a 5% improvement, a new processor would still be about 1.6x as good as one from ten years ago. In reality, some years were a fair bit better than 5%.

 

Thanks again for this. I'll look into that. PSU is 1000W already so should be OK on that front.

 

1000w psu is way overkill but if already have it that is fine.

 

So while Civ runs 30+ threads only 2 seem fairly heavily used. It pretty much says to me you spends bucks for not a lot if you get the latest.

 

Power is cheap so again, something else I won't have to worry about