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So, I've got a Xeon E3-1225v3 sitting in my desk at work gathering dust and I was thinking before it becomes obsolete I would possibly like to put it to good use and help my oldest son build his first computer. The best I can tell, the processor is essentially the Xeon equivalent of the Core i5-4460 Haswell processor, so Quad core with Turbo but no Hyperthreading.

The easy choice for me would be an Asus Z97-A board that I'm typing on right now, but it's more than I think is needed for this application. Since TR hasn't had a Haswell mobo in the system guide since 2015 and both those models are out of stock at Newegg, I thought I would check with you guys to see what you think. Does anyone have a go-to cheap Haswell board they like?

Price is a consideration but not the first, mATX might be nice for case flexibility, overclocking not necessary with that model CPU so Z97 not required. I'll fill in the other system blanks with my stock of things or I'll catch some decent stuff on sale, but the motherboard is always what takes me the longest and I've been out of the Cheap-and-cheerful Haswell-era loop for a while. I would love to get under $100 if possible. Thanks in advance.

It's tough to find old boards. Looking at 1150 stuff, this looks decent: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157586

Gigabyte was still good back then, but tended to be expensive.

Granted is 4c/4t 3.2/3.6Ghz with 8MB cache, but i bet the G4560/G4600/G4620 or i3-7100/i3-7300 wont be that much different in real world due to better IPC and higher Hz.

Lose money because you cant carry DDR3 RAM forward to current machines. Cant put cheap i7 off ebay in a year or two...

Yeah, even with a free processor it's not a good idea to pay over the odds for an obsolete board and DDR3 today.

Flip the E3 on ebay get him a cheap Gigabyte B250 board and a Pentium 4650 that you can load up with DDR4.

I can't imagine building a DDR4 machine right now. After all, I have all this old DDR3 memory looking for a home, it saves a ton of $ to stay on DDR3 for as long as possible...

Chrispy_ wrote:

Yeah, even with a free processor it's not a good idea to pay over the odds for an obsolete board and DDR3 today.

Flip the E3 on ebay get him a cheap Gigabyte B250 board and a Pentium 4650 that you can load up with DDR4.

Do you mean a Pentium G4560? I can't seem to find a 4650 on Newegg or ARK. That's probably a fair point about not spending more on older boards. I'll see what i can fetch for the E3 on Ebay to finance the purchase of some other components.

yup, typo; G4560.

You need three things:

1. CPU
2. Motherboard
3. RAM.

If you ONLY have the CPU, don't spend 2017 money on 2014 board and RAM.

If you have enough DDR3 going spare for this build then that changes things - a B85 motherboard will do the job without sacrificing too much over fancier boards like the H87, H97 or Z97 ones. Asrock, Gigabyte and MSI are your best bet for good quality budget boards and you'll probably have more luck with mATX form factors too. ECS and Biostar are just not worth the small savings and the Asus entry boards are quite obviously inferior components and more expensive than the entry boards from the other tier-1 vendors.

Try one of these for $65 delivered.

So this project took another turn as we need an extra desktop at the office for some help coming in next month. I went and spent what I felt was a small amount of cash at Newegg to put together a snappy little machine using the xeon as its brain.

1 x ($59.99) MSI B85M-E45 LGA 1150 Intel B85 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard
$59.99

1 x ($54.99) Crucial 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3L 1600 (PC3L 12800) High Density Desktop Memory Model CT2K51264BD160BJ
$54.99

1 x ($53.99) SanDisk SSD PLUS 2.5" 120GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) SDSSDA-120G-G26
$53.99

1 x ($34.99) CORSAIR VS Series VS400 (CP-9020117-NA) 400W ATX12V / EPS12V 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Power Supply
$34.99

1 x ($19.99) Hyper 212 LED with PWM Fan, Four Direct Contact Heatpipes, Unique Fan Blade Design, Red LEDs, Optimized Bracket Design by Cooler Master
$19.99

There's a $20 rebate on the PSU, so after rebate, tax, shipping, I'm looking at $225 or so. I've got a case that will hold the guts and I think a mouse, KB, and monitor so it didn't feel like I was throwing good money after bad and it should be a machine that will last at least 3 years for light office work.

frumper15 wrote:

So this project took another turn as we need an extra desktop at the office for some help coming in next month. I went and spent what I felt was a small amount of cash at Newegg to put together a snappy little machine using the xeon as its brain.

1 x ($59.99) MSI B85M-E45 LGA 1150 Intel B85 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard
$59.99

1 x ($54.99) Crucial 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3L 1600 (PC3L 12800) High Density Desktop Memory Model CT2K51264BD160BJ
$54.99

1 x ($53.99) SanDisk SSD PLUS 2.5" 120GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) SDSSDA-120G-G26
$53.99

1 x ($34.99) CORSAIR VS Series VS400 (CP-9020117-NA) 400W ATX12V / EPS12V 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Power Supply
$34.99

1 x ($19.99) Hyper 212 LED with PWM Fan, Four Direct Contact Heatpipes, Unique Fan Blade Design, Red LEDs, Optimized Bracket Design by Cooler Master
$19.99

There's a $20 rebate on the PSU, so after rebate, tax, shipping, I'm looking at $225 or so. I've got a case that will hold the guts and I think a mouse, KB, and monitor so it didn't feel like I was throwing good money after bad and it should be a machine that will last at least 3 years for light office work.

I understand not wanting to spend much on MB and RAM.
But could have spent more on PSU and SSD-they could be carried forward for future builds,and being for the office should be tax deductable........................
When you take away profit,packaging and transport from that PSU your lucky if there's $5 worth of components(cheap ones) inside.(borderline rubbish)
PSU IS MOST IMPORTANT PART OF ANY BUILD...NEVER SKIMP ON PSU.............
That SSD,best I can tell is-TLC and ramless-In the race to the bottom,it don't get lower than that-a few dollars more would get you MLC,and for not a lot
more a jump to 240/256 would see a huge improvement.
good luck

As utterly rubbish as that SSD is, it's going to be plenty adequate for the 99% read workload of a light-duty office PC. Sadly, this is why those RAMless TLC drives continue to litter the market

At least the race to the bottom for budget SSDs is slowly squeezing cheap mechanical drives off the store shelves at last \o/

HERETIC wrote:

[

I understand not wanting to spend much on MB and RAM.
But could have spent more on PSU and SSD-they could be carried forward for future builds,and being for the office should be tax deductable........................
When you take away profit,packaging and transport from that PSU your lucky if there's $5 worth of components(cheap ones) inside.(borderline rubbish)
PSU IS MOST IMPORTANT PART OF ANY BUILD...NEVER SKIMP ON PSU.............
That SSD,best I can tell is-TLC and ramless-In the race to the bottom,it don't get lower than that-a few dollars more would get you MLC,and for not a lot
more a jump to 240/256 would see a huge improvement.
good luck

I'll be honest and say I didn't spend a ton of time researching every component of this build, but in this application I feel comfortable with the PSU choice and SSD. I could have spent the same on a 1TB HDD, used less than 100GB of space (more like 50GB) and it would feel terrible. Based on my glance at newegg and amazon reviews it doesn't appear to have any major reliability issues. Would I put it in my personal machine? No. Will the person using this notice a difference between this and a Samsung or Crucial drive? Unlikely. The PSU, once again, no major marks against it, from a reliable brand (in my experience) and a $20 rebate? Sold.

Maybe this is a bit of an experiment for me - I usually agonize over every component choice, especially the motherboard. This time I grabbed Chrispy's link from earlier, grabbed the one that was in stock and didn't think more of it. We'll see if this bites me down the road but I'm interested to try it out. I'll run some benchmarks against my 4790K machine with 850pro SSD, 16GB RAM, etc. and see just how much faster/slower it is. I've spent more than $225 on a single component before so it will be interesting to see how it does. Thanks for your help guys and gals.

I will see what I can find out about the drive when I have it installed (it already arrived today from Newegg - I ordered it yesterday and chose the cheapest shipping) but it doesn't appear to be guaranteed to be DRAM-less TLC - it's a so-called variable BOM product
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/dra ... 833-8.html

Given increasing densities of NAND, you don't even get to "maximum" performance until at least 240/256GB anymore because there aren't enough dies for parallelization(word?). You're absolutely right that even the cheapest SSD will be more responsive than a mechanical hdd that has 10x more storage than will ever be used.

So I got everything put together and.... it just works. No fuss, no muss. I installed W10 off a USB drive in about 20 minutes and it seems perfectly happy to do whatever I've asked. Boot times are quick, program launch is what I hope for. I ran ChrystalDiskMark to get some numbers to go with it and I'm pretty pleased for as cheap as this drive was and the overall investment in the project. No bios changes or updates required to work with the Xeon processor like I was afraid of. Overall I feel ok with my decisions and I'm pretty sure it's a faster machine than 90% of folks that just order a cheap machine from dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. get. It's pretty amazing how well things work together with almost no effort on my part.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 x64 (C) 2007-2013 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 494.456 MB/s
Sequential Write : 324.335 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 357.014 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 67.234 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 13.497 MB/s [ 3295.1 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 49.593 MB/s [ 12107.6 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 110.394 MB/s [ 26951.6 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 50.623 MB/s [ 12359.0 IOPS]

Test : 1000 MB [C: 21.5% (23.9/111.2 GB)] (x1)
Date : 2017/04/28 11:51:59
OS : Windows 8 Professional [6.2 Build 9200] (x64)

Still running that chip's i5 brother on an msi z87 board with an msi gtx 970. Nothing obsolete about it as a workstation or if you are gaming 1080p. I am sure that system will be a work horse for many years to come.