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W3540 2015 Gaming

justin4pack

justin4pack

Senior member
Hello all. I am currently in negotiation for a W3540. I know nothing about Xeon CPU's. With today's games how do you think this would fair with a 760 or 290x if I decided to upgrade? I cant find any gaming benchmarks with this CPU. Having a workstation CPU, does it hinder games at all? I know some games verify your cpu before you can play, would this matter? this is just temporary as I will upgrade after the holidays but for now and to come what do you think?
 
That's the workstation version of the i7 940.

3GHz Nehalem is still quite good for gaming lately especially due to it having HT and games starting to make good use of all the threads available, you shouldn't have much of a bottleneck even with a 290x, if you can OC to ≥3.5GHz it should be just fine until you upgrade later.

If you end up OCing it, keep in mind these are power hungry CPUs (130w at stock settings...), have a beefy PSU and heatsink at hand.
 
If you have a board that over clocks, you're better off with an E5640. They're around $20 and are 32nm instead of 45nm, and 80 watts instead of 130 watts (over clocks better with less heat)..
 
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justin4pack said:
Hello all. I am currently in negotiation for a W3540. I know nothing about Xeon CPU's. With today's games how do you think this would fair with a 760 or 290x if I decided to upgrade? I cant find any gaming benchmarks with this CPU. Having a workstation CPU, does it hinder games at all? I know some games verify your cpu before you can play, would this matter? this is just temporary as I will upgrade after the holidays but for now and to come what do you think?
Click to expand...

According to research I did in this thread, CPUs from that era can do reasonably well (in certain modern games) against lower end modern CPUs costing more money.

Keep in mind though Current ebay price for that CPU is $15 shipped so don't pay too much for it.

P.S. Are you buying this CPU along with a LGA 1366 Workstation (eg, HP, Dell, Lenovo or will this be used on a DIY board?
 
Yes, forgot to mention it has one. If you need 2 you'd have to use an adapter..
 
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