Buy an old 6 core xeon for 1366 and overclock it? I have a board.

I have 2 pcs, one haswell working as a server. one skylake with a 1080 for gaming. My first foray into pc gaming was on the lga 1366 platform. I still have a mobo with a 920 and 9gb of ram in it. Like the 920 at the time, I hear the Xeon X5650 can overclock to around 4.0ghz and I think my old board supports it. Is it worth it? I have an R9 290x collecting dust. Besides the new processor which goes for 50 bucks on ebay, I would need a new psu....which a I kinda want anyway as my media server is using an enermax psu that i can't stand the thickness of the wires. I mean I really don't need a 3rd pc, but it seems like such a waste of parts. Though if it isn't feasible for performance compared to what I already have built, I might just skip it.

A lot of what we do here is not practical or needed. Just fun and challenging. Nothing wrong with that. If you want to do it, do it.

The extra cores and cache is a nice upgrade over the quad.

I would go to the X5660. It has higher multipliers. I run mine at 4.37GHz.

If you don't really need it then it's waste of money. If you want to run something like F@H/BOINC then it's better to do it on graphics cards and then CPU doesn't really matter. This generation is already old and slow comparing to anything from new series. I just don't think it's good idea if it's only because you will have some spare parts. Better sell all and buy something for new PC. X58 motherboards are still worth something.

If you want a previous gen Xeon at least go for Sandy. The first gen i series chips were god awful compared to Sandy Bridge, and a Xeon from that era should still be relatively cheap.

You can sometimes find 8-12 core xeon 2011/DDR3 for about $100-200. The only issue can be to find good and cheap X79 board. On the other hand as I said, it's waste of money if you don't have good idea what to do with it. All Xeons and part of other server stuff which I thought I will use is collecting dust but prices are so low that I don't want to sell it. I have maybe 15x 1366 Xeons and I doubt I will use it for anything else than copetitive benchmarking ( I'm not even sure about it ).

iirc the 6 core 1366 stuff is still pretty beast in multi threaded applications, faster than most of the newer (quad core) i7's even i thought.

I doubt it's faster than newer quad i7. There are 4-5 generations difference while each generation had ~5-15% performance improvement at the same clock. Still my point is not the performance but for what can you use it. I would get 12-14 core xeon as they're quite cheap now but on the other hand ... for what can I use it ? If there is good purpose of one more PC then why not. 6 core 1366 is still performing good.

Here is my Gigabyte X79-UD3 with E5-1650 and GTX 1070.

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/10991810

What is the intended usage of the system, gaming? Encoding?
The answer to that will determine if it is "worth it" over a newer generation of hardware.

my wcing setup isnt the best tbh, its a CM 120x2 setup fans on med. it can do 4ghz with ok temps. when its not summer, other wise peps along just fine all day long @3.6ghz with not much of a voltage bump from what is at stock speed. i got the X5660 since i wanted better enoding and wanted to see how the hex core would do, got a deal on in here in the forums a while back. most of the movies i have are from my bluray disc's, made a few backup to how it would do. with max quality settings for mpeg2 i think what ever dvd container is, it rip through most movies with an avg fps of 180+. dont recall which movie but one hit avg 220 using handbrake to do the work. when it came to h264 avg was more around 140-160 with a reasonable quality setting.

since i already had the board and other parts to get it going the x5660 was worth it imo. now it just sits along with the other x58 board+cpu+ram i got off ebay for the cost of the board alone. i need to stop collecting...

Dam I want me an X58 setup! I miss mine