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A friend is parting out his X79 rig and building Threadripper, so a quad channel kit of G.Skill Ripjaws 2400MHz DDR3 is being offered to me for $160. Should I bite?

I'm currently on an i7-3820 with a paltry 8GB of RAM, but I can grab an E5-2690 real cheap (hospital I consult for recently upgraded servers). That plus the 32GB of fast RAM should be good for quite a while. IIRC Sandy Bridge IPC isn't that far behind Ryzen so this could be a sub $300 upgrade to 8C/16T and a decent amount of RAM.

What you guys think?

If the RAM hasn't been abused, that's a very good price these days (as I'm sure you're aware).

Are you sure your motherboard is compatible with the Xeon? Just because it is the same socket type does not mean it has BIOS support. I also see that the base clock on the Xeon is much lower (though turbo clocks are the same). Unless you run a lot of highly threaded stuff that takes advantage of the extra cores, the CPU may be a wash.

In your shoes, I'd at least do the RAM. Maybe on the CPU.

Even though I'm running on DDR3 both of my personal machines, I would hesitate to throw money at older IPC processors unless you are genuinely bottlenecked in your current workload by a shortage of threads and RAM. Software x264/265 encode is just about the only thing I can imagine for a consumer workload that would benefit from an old 8C/16T chip like the E5-2690. And for everything single-threaded something like a $75 Pentium 5500 is going to be 75-100% faster at one-third the power consumption. i3-8100 is a 3.6GHz Coffee-lake quad core at $117.

Sure, 32GB of RAM at half the cost of DDR4 is a decent deal, but it's very situational based on whether you actually need it or not. The two extremes are gaming and software encoding. For gaming, you should buy DDR4 and a modern CPU - no doubt about it these days. For software encode it really does depend on just how much of your daily use really is CPU and RAM bottlenecked, and whether you care about power consumption too.

It does occasionally get to flex its multicore muscles. It's used as a PLEX server and sometimes has to transcode HEVC to H264 for some older client devices. There's also the occasional VM when I work on projects from home. The idea of getting more RAM and cores is attractive especially for those VMs. It would be nice to be able to run two at a time and give them a core and 2-4GB each without the host OS slowing to a crawl and/or thrashing the swap file.

Admittedly I've neglected upgrading the machine because 1) it doesn't yet feel slow and 2) I have another PC with an i7-7700 and 16GB of DDR4, but the X79 is housing my media collection and I'm not keen on migrating two 5-drive arrays.

Well, with the media encoding and VMs, your proposed upgrade sounds like a reasonable way to get some extra resources for that without having to shell out for a new platform and DDR4. 8GB is really tight to be running VMs, and getting enough DDR4 for a new build is gonna cost a LOT.

You’ll enjoy the memory capacity more than the inchworm pace of IPC increases. Sandy/Ivy perfectly relevant to upgrade. I would do it.