Picked up the PIII-S of LGA2011 today: a Xeon E5-1680 v2. Got it from a guy who was selling a bunch of his old Mac gear because the latest OS wouldn't run on it. What is it, Venturi? Ventura? Nine out of ten pet detectives recommend it?
Anyway, really nice (and knowledgeable!) fellow. I even learned that the 1680v2 was an Apple exclusive part (for the Trashcan computer). But what really makes this 8c/16t CPU special is the unlocked multiplier. Guess Intel thought that Mac owners would never sell their old processors to PC users eager to overclock the snot out of them.
So I strapped the CPU into my Asus X79 motherboard's socket, fired it up without even updating the BIOS, and was a little surprised to see the motherboard correctly identify it! The board POSTed and even kept most of the settings I had been using with my previous i7-4930K CPU. The only thing that needed to be adjusted, understandably, was the multiplier. Wingo!
This CPU appears to be made of grade A silicon. Using the 125MHz base strap, it hit a stable 4.25GHz at just 1.1 volts. 4.375GHz was doable @ 1.14v, and it eagerly sailed on up to 4.5GHz at a nice and cool 1.19v. 4.625GHz required a significantly warmer 1.27v, so I just left it at 4.5GHz/1.19v. The memory controller had no problem training my recently acquired DDR3-2666 kit, though my old 4930K was also fine at that memory speed.
16 threads of 4.5GHz Ivy Bridge-EP power backed by a mammoth 25MB cache and quad-channel memory subsystem still feels nice and nimble in most apps. In fact, until I fired up RPCS3 and MS Flight Simulator, I had a difficult time telling it apart from my Ryzen 5900X! Will try out a few more modern games later.
"A little sign-in here, a touch of WiFi there..."