The Xeon W3680 - This 12-Year-Old 6 Core CPU Can Still Game?!

No they won’t be cheaper in half a decade. Right now they’re plentiful and not many people want them. People will wise up and in five years they be hard to find and 4x the price. They’ll never be priced lower than they are now.

I am currently using an Xeon X5680 on my "MSI X58 PRO" with OC to 3,8 Ghz on 1,45 Volt.
Gets a bit "toasty" under stress, up to 85°.
Simply OC this one via Multi seems way easier to do then testing the voltage via trial and error to get to 4,0 Ghz.
Maybe I get an Xeon W3680 as well.

Got it for $12.66, and gotta say this piece of silicon rocks, yeee, overclocking beast, running at 4.7 and drawing 260 watt, eating power like no tomorrow 😂

I dont know any other platform even close to longetivity of x58 at least since video games became a thing in early 80s.

You should revisit this but using 1866 or higher ram and OC to 4.5Ghz. Pretty sure the bottleneck here is the slow ddr3. Adding faster ram and bumping the clocks to 4.5ghz will bring it closer to a ryzen 5 1600. I was able to overclock mine to 4.8ghz all core. these old xeons are real beasts! You might need better cooling though, probably a 240mm aio minimum....

My 15 yo motherboard has 6 ram spots and i can do 8gb ram on each if em, and it has 2 graphics cards spots..... this thing can mine bitcoin

Hey I’m building a pc on some older hardware and this video helps a lot, thank you!

So cool😢

See if you can try the 8 core version too

change bitrate 1080/50hz max

Your a hero man I was looking for something just like this....
32gbram
8gbvram
This vid
And graphics card ddr4 3200 👍
Yea so guys is this good for gaming????? 🤔

Still rocking my w3690

I know you didn't intent to max perform the platform here, but those things should do at least 4.4ghz quite happily with some extra voltage on that kind of cooling. Also having ram run 1600-1700mhz should be easy on most boards, and you can usually set uncore to run 3600-4200mhz depending on how good your chip and motherboard is, which also gives a little performance boost. X58 with 6core xeons are really fun to tune, so much performance to gain, and with all those pcie lanes you can stuff modern usb controllers, a good nic, soundcard and a m2 ssd with a pcie to m2 adapter card without even stealing from the 16x gpu lanes!

To anyone who still has one of those in a dell precision T3500: Contrary to what i initially thought it is possible to overclock on the standard motherboard! I run it on 4ghz stable to play elden ring now (the game kept crashing with 4.1ghz/31x multiplier). The way to do it is via throttlestop with it being set to be run at Startup via task scheduler. Enjoy! :)

I just received a HP Z400 for free from work. It came with a W3550, 16gb of ram and a Quadro 4000 gpu. I replace the W3550 with the W3680 and the Quadro 4000 with a GTX 1660 ti. It works great for 1080p gaming. I haven't OC'd it yet and I'm looking to upgrade the HDD to a SSD and add ram to make it 24 gb.

don't you know? you have to upgrade bruh yeah you have to because there is no avx support bruh who cares if it runs games
at more than playable framerates there's no useless avx bruh.
who else hates the pc dude bros saying that crap?
I know I hate them.

holla the xeon 3680 works on the x99 mae board

Still one of my most favorite platforms of all time. I have the x5675 clocked to 4.44Ghz stable on air. You can grab 'm for around 15,- euro's if you're lucky. It has been my main game pc and audio workstation for over 10 years and still going strong! 💪 My Ryzen 5800x is only 2.5 times as fast in this configuration. :)

Could we see an i7 870 running modern games?

That frame time figure is high. Would be bad on fps like warzone

what about testing it on 2160p resolution? frames should not be that much inferior to 1080p ones

Just brilliant. I agree though. However, if like me, you got it new and kept it, or use it, good time and options for upgrading. Clock for clock , the W3680 does as well as the amazing X5675, just a tad warmer. 4.3Ghz easy on air. I landed on the W3690 & 24g RAM w/ tight timings & capable of a Strix 2080-Ti. Equally as amazing is the dual socket variants in i5500 / i5520 w/ those X5675''s or X5690's if more creative media workstation. This is essentially the base of the 2008-2012 Mac Pro duals which I & many still use today. It's just a workhorse.

im running xeon x5660 at 4.2 ghz 16gb 1600mhz ddr3.ssd and a gtx 1080 .... everything runs well . single core performance looks to be around stock ryzen 1600 levels . ill upgrade at some point to 3rd gen ryzen but for now its gaming fine..

Can you add hoi4 to CPU benchmark

I have two X5670 paired with a RTX 2060 and 24 GB of RAM. For 400€ is good, except for the power efficiency

3690 are 45$ now and been thinking about getting one to pair with a 1660 or even a 2060 2070

this is like a i3 10100f...ddr3 1333mhz bottlenecks it severe..
if you used faster ddr3 it would be much better

As someone who owns one. A game that will not open is COD Vanguard. Gives an error message due to the CPU missing an instruction set.

I think a cpu in 2022 is very cheap and affordable thee old cpus are just useless these days

As the original owner (going back to November of 2010) of a Core i7-980x, the consumer labeled version of the W3680 (they're virtually identical), I can tell you these Gulftown / Westmere CPU's were absolute monsters for their time. The biggest contributor to their ability to run modern games relatively well (if not in very power efficient form) is the 12MB of unified L3 cache shared across 6 cores and 12 threads. Furthermore, Intel tended to bin the Gulftown CPU's pretty carefully, so they easily OC to ~4.10+ Ghz while still well within Intel's 1.35v Vcore spec.

I actually didn't replace the machine as my primary desktop until November of 2020, when I moved to a R9 5950x based box. Today my kids use it to play games in my office (it currently has a GTX 980), but it still runs great almost 12 years later. It cost a lot of money, but I got a lot of use out of that machine, it served me really well and I'll probably never scrap it... it'll just become "vintage".

I just upgraded this board X58A-UD3R 2.0 with 48GB 1600mhz DDR3L ECC registered RAM with a Xeon W3690 and working just great :)

I've xeon w3680 and I'm about to buy GTC 1070 8 gb with it. What do you guys suggest, should I go on with it ?

I am about to get my dads old PC - with a Xeon W3690.
What is the best graphics card to pair with it in 2022? I have an old GTX 580, but what modern GPU (10xx and above) would pair best with the processor without causing to much of a bottle neck?

I don't demand ultra graphic games, just League of Legends, World of Tanks/Warships and Warthunder.

I got one for 10€! And wow, we have an Identical motherboard! I got the motherboard and the rest of the parts for free!

Impressive, but it would really benefit from faster memory, 1600 MT/s at the very least. GPU usage was really low across the board, which denotes platform limitation, but since CPU usage was not terrible as well, i'd say memory bandwith was a limiting factor, at least partially. For sure a 2080 is not an adequate pairing for a daily budget gaming system, but i'd still watch out for a good memory matching

Forgot to add that it draws 275W

Im still running w3690 on GA x58a ud7 4.6Ghz on 1.47V and i absolutely love it

crazy. this is almost my exact build! I have only 16gb of ram and am using a 1660 ti. Runs everything i through at it. thanks for the video!

Something like an RTX 2060 is about as good as I'm willing to suggest to people who acquire an X58 PC.

I got an ASUS P6X58D Premium board with an i7-920 and 6 x 2 GB sticks of DDR3 from a scrapper for 50 bucks a while ago. Yesterday I swapped in a Xeon W3680 I got for $20 from another scrapper and made a fun little x58 bench rig with it. It's a lovely platform and it also has great compatibility with Windows 7 and even Vista and XP64, and even 2000 if you want to use Excore and Exkernel. Btw, the Xeon W3680 is basically a rebadged i7-980X, likely with ECC support added, and the W3690 is a rebadged i7-990X

This is excellent news I can keep my Ryzen 5 5600x for another 10 years with my RTX 3060ti and play at 720p. Love watching these vids

I’m still using the xeon 3450 and i can play new games

do escape from tarkov pls

cpu ok memory ram slow

dude i play games at 13 to 60 fps and its still playable. its like if it drops to 59 fps you will slam the pc off your desk and jump it

you have to pair it with a cheap dell t3500 and overclock with throttlestop for 4ghz on the stock dell motherboard

wow thats pretty sick for a 12 year old processor. I'd love to upgrade my 12 year old cpu, a 3570k I keep at 4.6ghz

I seen the motherboards for this cpu at like 25~30 dollars. You can get the cpu for 20, motherboard for 30~35, and 16gb ddr3 server ram for 30. When GPU prices finally come down, you can make a nifty PC for pretty cheap.

That's weird. My system down stairs has a e3 1245 v4 xeon and a rx 470 and I average 50 to 60 frames on low 1440p in Elden Ring.

it doesnt have AVX Instructions.. so Horizon Zero Dawn doesn't work lastr timew i checked on that chipset. but most games have fixed that requirement issue