this is what a stack 140 i5 i7 and xeons looks like

What condition are they in?

some are scuffed but most are in excellent condition (all operational). the ones you see that are "delidded" are for the laptop mobile sockets(hence why no lid. those press against laptop heatsinks directly)

Lmao, nice!

For 300 it's a good deal on paper, in practice though because it's Intel, for most of them you need to find super-specific motherboards for them since between those models they kept changing chipsets and shit over three months or so between processor revisions...

On the other hand, if you can find the motherboards easily then that can turn quite profitable if you flip them as completed builds Also, you might want to look into certain server motherboards for the Xeons, Xeon is one of the few processors that can work in multi-CPU motherboards with up to 4 in one system working parallel to one another, but haven't seen the motherboards for that in the market since like 2012...

Are those graphics cards?

haha. nah. cpu processors

@Fates-Blade-900 No, those are CPUs in stack trays

@ThoD With the Xeon's, would using, say, two 4 core CPUs allow for one to get, CPU clocks notwithstanding, ideal performance in something like RPCS3? Or am I assuming that video card SLI logic to CPU logic can work in a similar way?

This is just one of those theoretical questions that flew through my mind when you brought up that multiple CPU's could be used on the server motherboards you mentioned.

i might try my luck with that xeon 2687w. its apparently 8 core 16 thread. you got me curious how rpcs3 would run on it now. (its unrelated to the question I know, but hmm that might make a good gaming pc still)

@WD_GASTER2 What's the core clock that (and boost clock if those CPUs do that)? Because the Xeon CPUs, last I checked, cannot be overclocked, and RPCS3 is frankly the final boss of emulators until Spine or Orbital bring PS4 emulation to the table on PC.

BTW, love typing with the Steam Controller here!

• # of Cores8
  
• # of Threads16
  
• Processor Base Frequency3.10 GHz
  
• Max Turbo Frequency3.80 GHz

i guess if it cant emulate ps3 it might be able to atleast do some decent gaming ;p

Oof. Then again, I managed to play through the entirety of Persona 5 on an earlier build of RPCS3 in 2017 with an i5-4690k that I can't remember being OC'ed that much.

Also, RPCS3's RAM usage, last I checked, could get out of control, though that may be an issue they fixed ever since I played Persona 5.

@Silent_Gunner Using multi-CPU motherboards works roughly the same as having servers work parallel to one another, only with less space needed. Basically, 2 CPUs is around double performance minus ~10% due to various factors, then for 4 it's quadruple but ~25% (not really efficient and guzzles wattage like crazy, but can work well if you need to squeeze performance out of budget Xeons.

And don't bring up that abomination that is SLI in front of me, that shit is SO badly made that it can go from "works great with incredible boost to performance" to "why am I getting half the FPS and twice the temps" to "why are both my GPUs fried suddenly" while TRIPLING wattage needed... Crossfire is MUCH better in every conceivable way!

Anyways, as for your question, any good well-configured 6-core or higher CPU can emulate PS3 at least decently if you only want native resolution with no upscaling at 30FPS with some speedhacks enabled (might cause glitches), Xeon included even by itself. Going for an 8-core Ryzen though can run pretty much everything if it's supported. Xeon is intended for servers, that's why they were made in the first place (Xeons back in the day were the ONLY CPUs that supported more than 128GBs of RAM with the 8-core and up versions supporting 1.5TBs of RAM (yes, TBs), so at least you won't have RAM problems, be it with PS3 emulation or running a single tab of Chrome

@ThoD I'm fine on the CPU side of things for RPCS3 with my i7-8700k...for now. I never imagined the tables would've turned on Intel so hard so quickly in these past few years, hence why the slightly lesser IPC and RAM problems Ryzen 1 had me cheering for them with it not being an absolute shitshow like with Faildozer. Now? I may be siding with Team Red on my next build...for the CPU, anyways. AMD really needs to get their video card act together if they even want to lay a scratch on Nvidia, especially on the driver end of things.

"gonna call friends and family and ask them if they would like free upgrades."

Just family and friends?

LOL!

@Silent_Gunner I keep hearing people accuse Bulldozer CPUs of being bad, yet I never understood why, they have REALLY good performance, can be overclocked to like 180% without issues if you have a good cooler, fairly low TDP so they are efficient as well and generally great, with only two drawbacks being the stock cooler being loud and any cores after the first 2 being locked until you installed the driver to unlock them (which can be annoying if you don't know that they are locked). And it's not so much that Ryzen turned the tide, Ryzens are amazing, but the reason Intel lost was because they decided to randomly put all sorts of limitations to anything but the very top-end CPUs, with all the medium or budget range ones having locked cores, limits to how many RAM sticks you can have or how much RAM you can have, RAID support locked too, etc.. As for GPUs, I do admit AMD is behind NVidia in general, but I always go for AMD Sapphire GPUs, unlike the MSI/Gigabyte/etc. cards, the drivers actually DO work as intended and so does the overclocking. Basically, the reason AMD is behind NVidia is because NVidia is a bunch of pricks who steal tech and patent it or patent and lock anything they do invent, just to avoid having competition, so AMD has to re-invent everything themselves which takes time, only difference being that almost everything AMD invents becomes publicly available and part of public domain (meaning ANY company can use their technology) because they are a great company so even if you get a bit worse performance I want to support them, thus why I've always supported AMD as a company and been against Intel/NVidia!

Edit: I had a Piledriver. Sorry, I get the two confused. Still, that actually enforces my stance. As they were marginally better than Bulldozer.

@ThoD as someone who had a Bulldozer CPU, I can safely say that you're not entirely correct. Yes, you can overclock the CPUs to hell and back. However, that doesn't change how lackluster they were in comparison to similar Intel CPUs of the time. I had an 8350. While it was alright (at best) in multi threaded applications and even some rendering. The sandy bridge 2600k was better for gaming and even Photoshop. Not to mention, there was a class action against AMD for lying about the Bulldozer line of CPUs. I could never, in good conscience recommend any FX series CPU.

if i recall the instructions per clock cycle were terrible. That being said I would still use one today if it was just to do some gaming. Not the worse by any metric and hell I know of a friend that still uses one as a daily driver.
@Memoir the 2600k is considered to be one of the best cpus released by intel to this day tho. ;p

@ThoD I get that sentiment, but seeing as not everything out there has Vulkan compatibility yet *coughs in PCSX2 and Dolphin...?*, I like to have something that can do just about everything...which is admittedly why I am disappointed that my GTX1080 cannot seem to handle Vulkan in RetroArch, yet it seems to be fine in DOOM 2016.

I think I remember reading something about that with Intel. Is that more of a recent development or something? Because the last time I built a PC two years ago, I don't remember anything of the sort in the forums I browsed.

@Memoir That is NOT a Bulldozer/Piledriver issue, it's an architectural issue with old AMD processors in general since while they did indeed have multiple cores, they didn't have core management, but Intel CPUs did. That basically meant that for more heavy tasks, Intel CPUs could split the tasks between the cores, but AMD CPUs worked more like one very strong core instead, so the more complex the code, the slower AMD ones were in comparison. Ryzen fixed that, that's why they are able to get higher performance compared to Intel's, the one thing keeping them back has been fixed. AMD CPUs in general for single-core tasks have never lost to Intel, just the shift to more processes/tasks at a given time killed AMDs around 2009 (when the i's rolled out).