Current Xeon price/performance sweet spot? (LGA1366)

[rkagerer]

Hi folks,

Where's the current price/performance sweet spot these days for a Xeon CPU in an LGA1366 form factor? How well can they overclock? (Note I'd like to stay above 3.2GHz)

My primary machine is an Asus P6T6 with an i7-920 overclocked to 3.3GHz on a Noctua air cooler. When I first put it together it passed >24hrs of Prime95 (and Memtest86) at 4GHz, and I used it 24x7 like this for several months, but later backed things off to give a comfortable margin for reliability - particularly with regard to my memory sticks.

I've been using 6x 2GB OCZ Gold 1600MHz 1.65V memory, which had a great price at build time but has since proven a bit of a challenge. I've had to RMA two of the sticks (they started failing memory tests after many months of use; note failure of each did not occur at the same time). Either I didn't realize I ought to be using 1.5V, or the stuff didn't exist at 1600 back then or was way more expensive. (Note I did have the Vdimm very slightly raised to achieve stability with all 6 sticks).

I'm running more and bigger VM's these days and want to upgrade the RAM and at the same time switch to ECC (which entails swapping out to a Xeon). Will also need a good cooler. Any recommendations would be helpful, although I don't want to get into an argument as to why I do or don't need ECC.

Thanks!

[rkagerer]

Bump

[zanzabar]

socket 1366 single processor xeons are identical to the i7, the only difference is that they have ecc enabled. so just get the cheapest one with a multi so you can do 166-175 base clock to get were you want.

[rkagerer]

Thanks!