Intel E5-2690 V2 10-core LGA 2011

Ten cores for around 30 bucks. Great for homelab and server builds, terrible for gaming. If you have an LGA 2011 board, this is an easy yes.

The multi-thread score of 13295 in PassMark lands it in the middle of the pack overall, which sounds unimpressive until you remember this chip costs less than a pizza delivery for two. Ten physical cores at 3.0GHz will chew through VMs, Plex transcodes, and file server duties without breaking a sweat. Single-thread performance is where it shows its age. 1853 is fine for basic tasks but feels sluggish in anything latency-sensitive. The 130W TDP means you'll want decent cooling and a power supply that isn't from 2008.

Against the Dell Xeon E5-2637 V2, the 2690 V2 gives you more cores but lower clocks, so it's a trade-off between parallel throughput and per-core speed. The AMD Ryzen 5 5500 absolutely destroys this chip in single-thread and gaming, but it costs several times more and needs a newer platform. The be quiet! and Thermal Grizzly entries in the competitor list are coolers, not CPUs, so they're not really in the same conversation. For pure budget server work, the 2690 V2 holds its own against anything near its price.

At 30 USD, this is one of the best price-to-core ratios you'll find anywhere. The affordability score sits in the 95th percentile, which tracks. You're getting ten cores for the price of a cheap keyboard. The catch is the platform cost. LGA 2011 motherboards and registered ECC DDR3 aren't free, and if you don't already have them, the total build cost creeps up. But if you do have the board and RAM, this is a no-brainer.

The Intel E5-2690 V2 is a decade-old server chip that still shows up in budget homelab builds for a reason. Ten cores, 25MB of L3 cache, and a 3.0GHz base clock on the LGA 2011 socket. It's a used refurb at this point, but at around 30 bucks, it's basically an impulse buy for anyone with a compatible board lying around.

This is not a gaming CPU. Not even close. But if you need cheap multi-threaded grunt for a NAS, a home server, or a virtualization box, this thing punches way above its price tag.

Skip this if you're building a gaming rig or a daily driver desktop. The single-thread performance will frustrate you in everyday apps, and the gaming score is near the bottom of the barrel. Also skip it if you don't already have an LGA 2011 board, since hunting down a compatible motherboard and ECC DDR3 adds cost and hassle that might push you toward a newer budget platform instead.

Buy this if you're building a homelab, a NAS, or a cheap virtualization server and you already have or can find an LGA 2011 board. It's a workhorse for parallel tasks and the price is almost impossible to beat. Just don't expect it to feel snappy in single-threaded desktop apps or games.