Does it make sense to assemble a powerful workstation on 771 sockets from used components?

Question

motherboards

I noticed that sufficiently powerful Xeon processors for 771 sockets are relatively inexpensive on Ebay, for example, a couple of these can be bought for $42. You can buy a motherboard for them, for example , for $72, and get 16 gigs of memory, for example, like thisfor $96. Fans for such processors will cost somewhere else $40. As a result, for $250 it seems to be quite a decent device in terms of performance: 16Gb of memory + 8 quite powerful cores + 24Mb of processor cache. I think that it will be possible to take any video card, disks, power supply and case suitable for a specific task, but even if you take new ones, this is still about $400. Throw in $50 for unexpected expenses and end up with a $700 system unit with performance comparable to newer but much more expensive systems.
It is interesting to use such a workstation for video editing, rendering complex scenes, video encoding, etc. etc. Those. for tasks where significant computing power is needed and which can well parallelize the load on multi-core processors. I picked up the configuration t.s. "Offhand", perhaps there are more profitable and "correct" options.
It is actually interesting to know the opinion of people who understand this issue - will it be possible to run 64-bit Windows or OS X on a similar configuration with processors under 771 sockets? Will there be tangible savings in terms of power?
UPD. Because in the comments there is some misunderstanding of what I am asking about - I will explain my t.s. computer classification:
Office desktop: an "intelligent" typewriter that can correct errors in the text and is connected to the Internet. Used by one person for office tasks.
Home desktop : a universal mixture of an office desktop, a game console and a media center for the entertainment of one person, the performance requirements in a wide range of tasks are maximum, the reliability is minimum, the main thing is to have a lot of FPS in your favorite shooter and high-definition video can be easily “turned”.
Workstation - a computer for making money by doing any complex work on it, used by one person. Reliability and performance requirements are the highest in their class of tasks.
Server- the same as a workstation, only used by several people at the same time. Because client computers are used as terminals, there is no need for any significant graphic system.
And so I in this question speak not about a desktop or the server, namely about a workstation. Please take this into account in your answers.
UPD2. Thank you all for the comments, the financial benefit of using 4 year old processors doesn't seem big enough to me to justify building a workstation on them.
Because I don’t have any other arguments yet, and no one else supports this idea - I’ll postpone its implementation for now or refuse it altogether, and if I do, it’s probably just out of sports interest :-)
The question is closed!

Answer 1

1. You can run a 64-bit seven, in extreme cases Server 2008. I won’t say about MacOS, I don’t know, but it seems there were Macs Pro on xeons, so you can try to screw on a hackintosh.
2. In the power overshoot, you will win for now, and then you will lose on the possibility of an upgrade. Although here also the speed of memory can spoil the situation.
3. Iron is not new, so there is more chance that something will croak and you will look for old - new spare parts, instead of changing it under warranty.
4. But for fun, I myself would love to assemble such a piece of iron! :)

Answer 2

You are looking at the prices of the ebay auction, and not the real price for which the seller is ready to part with the goods, but this does not change the essence. For $400, it is quite possible to take a good server of the previous generation, which in terms of performance will surpass modern personal (desktop) computers in terms of performance. But the minus of servers is a high noise level and not a standard case, which cannot be screwed anywhere except for a rack (cabinet), but this can be solved with a server case for workstations (but it will cost more accordingly).
Recently I just bought 3 servers on LGA771, but with Xeon E5405 processors and 4GB of memory, not E5450 (which you are looking at). As a result, 1 server (fully assembled and equipped) cost 7000 rubles. The seller threw another 2sas disk on the server.
On 16GB FB-DIMM memory you will go broke ...
You can get old servers on one or two nuclear xeons (604 socket) for 2000r ...
In general, if you are interested, I can continue the topic and tell you where to start looking for old servers and about the pitfalls associated with their operation.

Answer 3

AMD FX-8120 8x4.5+ GHz - $170
ASRock 990FX EXTREME3 - $111
DDR3 16 Gb - $80
+ $400 per video card…
= $761
not to mention eight cores at 5 GHz with normal cooling.
CPU and MB are the ones I have, prices in local stores, on ebay, perhaps even cheaper.
Hence the question: why take the old, slow, and voracious?

Answer 4

Look at komok.com, they often just sell used servers, maybe something adequate will come across

Answer 5

I bought myself a Dell PE 2950 III for my home server just yesterday with two Xeon X5460 @3.16, 16 GB DDR2 FB-DIMM, 600W PSU, with a simple raid controller, without screws (4 places for 3.5"). It cost 11,000 rubles (I'm in China) However, how much he howls and heats up, it's just wildest that I returned him in horror and forgot forever.

Answer 6

Your processor has a performance index of 7.512, which is even lower than the Xeon L5420 pair, which is 10 times cheaper and comparable to it in a thermal case.

Answer 7

1. Forget OS X in this context
2. Are you utterly lacking in performance on your current system or on a new system for comparable money?
after 54 series there were 55, and then 56, and now E5 - and in each of them, Intel talked about at least a 30% increase in performance and many times better parallelizability and power consumption
IMHO the game is not worth the candle

Answer 8

Performance varies, just like cars have max. speed is acceleration. I don’t know about Ivy Bridge, but Sandy Bridge, both in comparison with 1156 and in comparison with 775/771, brought unrealistic changes “by eye”. I used to have water for the Q6600 at 775 and it was overclocked to hell. Now I bought a percent, put D14 in a liability and that's it. Of course, I do not argue that it will turn out to be more expensive (although if used, it’s not even a fact), but the effect will be completely different. 8 cores and 24MB of cache (firstly, the second level, not the third) is a fetish. With SSD drives 775/1366/1156 work differently than 1155. This is especially evident in the speed of loading the OS.
You can forget about OS X in principle.
Well, if you want to tinker with junk and have an extra $ 700, then welcome :)

Answer 9

Don't mess with old hardware. It will be cheaper to assemble a system on something, i7 2700K or similar, and you will get a significantly more productive machine, which, moreover, will most likely eat less electricity.

Answer 10

I'll try not to repeat, but still:
1. As already noted on eBay, this is not the final price.
2. There is no guarantee for used components
3. Used components are more expensive or slightly cheaper than new ones (for example, new 1GB-1000r RAM, when 2 x 4GB are offered for 2000r)
4. I will assume increased power consumption.
Now there is an interesting processor on LGA2011, this is the Core i7-3930K, it costs $569.99, its cpub performance is 13,580 points. For comparison, X5460 - 4575 points. Thus, in order to catch up with him, at least 3 processors. But there is a pitfall here, namely that modern processors have a number of new technologies (http://ark.intel.com/compare/33087,63697), for example, the same AVX, Turbo Boost, possibly SSE4.2. It is the same with the number of cores in the i7 6 cores, but due to Hyper-Threading there are 12 of them in the system. When, like the X5460, there are 4 of them.
Conclusion: There is no real point in buying a multiprocessor, but old machine. Processors more expensive than $300, in my opinion, are not inferior at all, and perhaps even outperform the old ones (due to new instructions and better optimization for them). The same I7-2700 is fine if the budget is severely cut (10385 points).

Answer 11

Have you looked in the direction of the old Mac Pro? A pair of Xeons in a decent and quiet building. They are now given not so expensive.

Answer 12

they are relatively cheap on ebay

Ships to: United States Only…

Answer 13

The author, do you consider that new instructions have been added to the new processors? The same Intel Quick Sync Video. In general, you should not rely heavily on the cpubenchmark.net test, since it is synthetic. I don’t know what video codec you will use, but for example , a test on the x264 codec . The average speed after two passes is indicated.
Dual Xeon 5430 - 64.46 fps
i7-2600K - 98.97 fps (and with overclocking, which is quite natural for 2600K, you can add 15-30% more)
moreover, even the i5-2400 has an average speed of 78.31 fps.
In addition, the i7-2600K supports 32 GB of memory, and given that 8 GB DDR3 sticks cost 40 bucks, you can put 32 GB of memory with 4 slots. Plus support for SATA-3 -> the ability to install a fast SSD. And of course, everything, this thing heats up much less (and if you don’t care about the consumed kilowatts, then you probably don’t care about the noise of the cooling system).
In general, if you are interested in a fast workstation, it is better to take it on a 1155 socket, less hassle, more promising in terms of modernization, and the guarantee is a pleasant thing.

Answer 14

You need to reformulate the question into this: “Does it make sense to build a powerful professional workstation on old, decommissioned, multi-year used parts without a guarantee?”