Any thoughts on what a good value for money upgrade on an existing i3-2100 cpu out there ?  I was toying with replacing the Mobo but I might try a cpu upgrade first.  Just want to plug and play and not worry too much about extra cooling if possible

Xeon E3-1220s are pretty cheap on eBay (~$100), use the same socket, only 4 more watts TDP than your i3-2100 (so no cooling upgrade), and are nearly twice the performance of your i3 (6500 passmarks vs. 3600 passmarks for your i3).

 

There's a number of LGA1155 Xeons out there that might work - from the E3-1220 to the E3-1290.

 

The difficult part seems to be motherboard support. Asus' website only lists the E3-1230, but says "some features may not work, see our website for detail." Useful when you're already on their site! You might have to do a little confirmation to make sure the processor you choose is supported, but a Xeon upgrade might be a great way to get some extra oomph from your setup for not too much money or difficulty.

I find when buying anything that is a little "out-of-date" that you can sometimes pay a premium.

 

If you get a new (but older model) CPU that fits your old mobo, then later decide you want a new (but older model) mobo to fit your "new" CPU, you may wind up paying a lot more than if you just bought newer models of both together.

Agreed, just pick up a DDR3 Socket 1151 board and a Skylake CPU.  The i3-6100 is a brilliant CPU, and pretty cheap.  Even the Pentium I'm using runs very well, is really cool running even with the tiny retail box cooler.  The board was cheap as chips too (though it's DDR4).

What are you trying to do with the machine?  Are you finding that it is CPU constrained for anything now?  You can pop a new or eBay CPU on there but it's hard to know if it will meet your needs without a little more information.

Your motherboard is a desktop board that doesn't support all of the features of a Xeon, so if you want to upgrade, I'd go with an i7 instead of a Xeon.    I'd go with an i7-3770, which scores 9328 on PassMark ... more than 2.5 times the 3644 your current CPU scores.  These can be found for ~ $200 on e-bay.

 

Note that if you want to do this, you should be sure you upgrade your BIOS to v803 (or later) BEFORE you remove your old CPU.  Your current CPU only required v203 to be supported, but the i7 requires at least v803.  So be sure you do the BIOS upgrade (if needed) while you're running a supported CPU !!  [The current version is v907, so you may as well just upgrade to that.]

 

Whether it's worth doing this depends on what the reason is for the upgrade => if you simply need more CPU "horsepower" it's a reasonable upgrade.  It supports both vt-x and vt-d, so it'll be fine for VM's and Dockers; and has enough "horsepower" that you can easily support those.    The only feature you're really "missing" is support for ECC RAM ... but whether or not that's worth doing a complete CPU/motherboard/memory upgrade is debateable.    I'd certainly suggest buying a server-class board with ECC support if you were starting from scratch; but given that you already have a complete system, if all you need is more "horsepower" then a CPU swap is a reasonable approach.

 

In addition, you should verify whether you need the chosen CPU to include video hardware.  The E3-1220 does not, whereas the E3-1225 and the i7-3770 both do.  You would need to check which processor versions your motherboard will support in this regard.

Now getting all confused again.  As usual start looking at a cheapish upgrade and now I'm looking at mini server boards with 12 data ports.....

 

The main reason is I moved my server from the Lilian q25 to a fractal node 804.  Fantastic case and dropped disk drive temps by 10c.  When moving the board across I saw that the cooler fins were filled with black junk which had built up over the years so a new one was the easiest way.

 

Now I might just remove it, clean it and revisit th server again when the family are next overseas.

Clearly on-chip video is required, per the motherboard specs.  It's unlikely he'd want a dedicated video card in an ITX system (although the board does have a single expansion slot).

 

Note, by the way, that the only Xeon listed in the CPU support chart is the E3-1230, which does NOT have onboard graphics, so it would require a dedicated graphics card.  As I've already noted, I think a Core i7 is a far better choice for a CPU upgrade in this instance.

 

 

 

 

If you're happy with your performance and are only looking to do this to clean out the heatsink, you can either remove it and clean it or simply pop in a new heatsink ... there are several good choices for under $20.  e.g.  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6J32UC8382

 

Yeah, thanks Gary.  That might be what I end up doing though there's a good chance I'll get a new cpu and maybe board unless I buy the cooler online.

 

I'm just a fiddler with an itch.  I started in IT doing chip level repair work on old Cpm systems and now when the family are away on holidays I get the server our and start playing around

Just for anyone following... I was running an i3-3225 in my main server and a Pentium G2120 in my backup server.  I was also looking at upgrade options, wanting a bit more processing power and the possibility of playing with virtualisation.  But since that was "playing" rather than a definite need, and since I was already well invested in socket 1155 boards and DDR3 RAM, I went for a used Xeon E3-1245 (first generation) for around US$120.  The E3-1245 benchmarks at 8070 compared to the i3 at 4326.  It was a straight swap and allowed me to upgrade the backup server at the same time with the i3.  All working so far.  Now I need to get my head around Docker and everything else that I can now play with.  A nice problem to have...