Yeah, things always seem to cost more than you expect them to. I had considered most of those issues. I wasn't planning to use the ECC ram that's in the Dell. I have 4 2GB sticks of Corsair Dominator 1600Mhz 8-8-8-24 memory. I'll use the Corsair 750W PSU from the E8400 machine. The Dell came with a 350W. I'll use the 550Ti and put my 8400GS back in the E8400. What I hadn't considered was the cooler. The Dell has a pretty big heatsink on it but the mounting bracket looks different than the ones I've seen online. It has screws instead of those 1/4 turn fasteners. Maybe they're 1/4 turn screws, but I might need a cooler too. I guess if I'm going to overclock, I'll need one at some point anyway, but I was hoping to use the stock cooler for a while first. The thing that worries me most is the motherboard not being compatible with the X3440. I've read that it might be detected as an i7, but still work. Hopefully the newest bios will see it as an X3440.
So here's the whole build:
Xeon X3440 + Hyper 212 or similar cooler
Asus P7P55D motherboard
8GB Corsair Dominator memory@1600Mhz 8-8-8-24
GTX550Ti
Corsair 750W PSU
Is this something you would have put together a few years ago?
Here's something else I was thinking about. Since the X3440@2.5Ghz gives me about the same performance in Dolphin as the E8400@3.0Ghz, can I assume that the performance per clock of the X3440 = 1.2 times that of the E8400? Or, if I can get the X3440 up to 3.6Ghz, will it be 20% faster than the E8400@3.6Ghz? That would be a lot of fun.
So here's the whole build:
Xeon X3440 + Hyper 212 or similar cooler
Asus P7P55D motherboard
8GB Corsair Dominator memory@1600Mhz 8-8-8-24
GTX550Ti
Corsair 750W PSU
Is this something you would have put together a few years ago?
Here's something else I was thinking about. Since the X3440@2.5Ghz gives me about the same performance in Dolphin as the E8400@3.0Ghz, can I assume that the performance per clock of the X3440 = 1.2 times that of the E8400? Or, if I can get the X3440 up to 3.6Ghz, will it be 20% faster than the E8400@3.6Ghz? That would be a lot of fun.