Is an Intel Xeon E5 2670 nice choice for gaming?

[CoolViper]

Now i have i7 2600k. Idk why(fanatism) but i want to change it to e5 2670. I have found it on ebay and mobo on ali. I can sell my i7 2600k + ASUS P8Z77-V LX for 300$ and buy e5 2670 + mobo on x79 for 250-300$. But i couldn't find tests in games and i dont know that xeon is a good choice or not

 

[Rookie_MIB]

Xeons are good processors, but the only thing to watch for is:

1) clock speed. If your game prefers high core speeds vs multiple cores and/or hyperthreading, your performance might suffer a bit. Reason why is Xeons are locked down, and clocked lower than associated consumer i7 CPUs. This allows them to be rated at their max speed 24/7. And they'll handle that just fine. As long as you're getting about a 3ghz Xeon, you should be fine.

2) RAM. Some motherboards prefer and/or require very specific ECC RAM. Double check your motherboard documentation to make sure it can use either unbuffered NON-ECC RAM, or it will list in their RAM support list very specific part numbers for ECC RAM which has been tested. That's burned me once or twice with my servers.

3) Good thing is that the Xeons are higher binned in general than their i7 counterparts. They'll run cooler overall as a function of processor max clock.

4) Downside, wild overclocking is has been pretty much eliminated with everything after the Ex-xxxx Xeons. I have an X3470 which has a base of 2.93ghz, I had it up to 4.0ghz on air. You can possibly adjust the BCLK a few percent (maybe to 105), but no more 195 BCLKs like my CPU is at.

 

[CoolViper]

I know it. In Arma 3 i will get less perfomance than with 2600k, but in the future(2017-2019) i get more perfomance with xeon. When i had 2600 (non k) i could oc that to ~ 4.2 Ghz. Can i get on e5 ~3.5-3.8 Ghz, because 2600 has x38 multiplier, but it can up to 40( im not sure that im right). Can i up e5s multiplier to 35 and blck to 106 on MSI X79MA-GD45 or on X79MA-SD40( i think GD45 is better)?

 

[Rookie_MIB]

Remember what I mentioned? Multipliers are locked. It does support turbo - and the turbo set is 4/4/5/5/6/6/7/7 and it is an 8 core hyperthreaded part (16 logical cores!). Base clock is 2.6ghz, so as long as it has the thermal headroom, on any loads with 7-8 cores, it can hit 3.0ghz. On 5/6 cores - 3.1ghz, on 3/4 cores - 3.2ghz, and 1/2 cores - 3.3ghz.

So - if you slap a really good cooler on it - like maybe a high quality water setup... you could keep the thermals lower than normal, and thus have the thermal headroom to keep the turbo state higher.

Overclocking will not be good on that chip, it's locked, leaving you to BCLK -only-.