Intel Xeon E5345 4-core LGA 771

The Intel Xeon E5345 is a quad-core Clovertown chip from 2007 that still works fine for legacy server tasks. It's cheap on the used market, runs at 80W, and has a 5/5 rating from buyers who knew what they were getting. But with a gaming score of 37.2 and DDR2 memory support, it's only worth buying if you have an LGA 771 board that needs a replacement CPU. For anything new, look at newer used Xeons or modern budget chips instead.

Let's talk about those PassMark numbers, because they're actually more interesting than you'd expect from a chip this old. The multi-thread score of 19,728 puts it at the 75th percentile in our database, which sounds impressive until you remember that our database includes a lot of very old and very low-end silicon. For context, a modern budget chip will absolutely demolish this thing. But for what it is, four physical cores at 2.33GHz doing real work, it's not embarrassing. The single-thread score of 3,850 lands at the 90th percentile, which says more about how many weak single-core chips exist in the world than it does about this Xeon being fast.

The 80W TDP is actually reasonable for a quad-core from 2007. Intel was still figuring out how to make multi-core chips without melting motherboards, and Clovertown was a stopgap solution. Two dual-core dies on one package meant more heat and more power draw than a native quad-core design, but 80W is manageable. The 1MB of L3 cache is tiny by modern standards, and the 1MB of L2 cache is split across the two dies, which creates some latency when cores on different dies need to share data. In practice, this chip does fine with old server workloads like file serving, basic web hosting, or running legacy database software. It's not going to transcode video or run modern AI workloads, and our AI score of 57th percentile reflects that.

The competitor list here is a strange mix, and that's because our database groups this chip with everything from modern gaming CPUs to other server relics. The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is in there, and comparing this Xeon to that is like comparing a horse-drawn carriage to a Tesla. The Ryzen has modern architecture, massive cache, and single-thread performance that would make this Xeon look like it's standing still. But it also costs many times more and requires a completely different platform. The Dell Xeon E5-2637 V2 is a more interesting comparison. It's a newer Xeon from the Ivy Bridge era, still LGA 2011, and it offers better single-thread performance and much better efficiency. If you're looking for a cheap server chip and you're not locked into LGA 771, the E5-2637 V2 is probably the better buy.

The other competitors in the list, the G.Skill Trident Z Neo, the MICRO CENTER bundle, and the ADVB3 Phenom II X6, are all over the place. The Phenom II X6 is actually a reasonable comparison point since it's from a similar era and offers six cores instead of four, though it's an AMD platform so you'd need a different board. The G.Skill and Micro Center entries are memory and bundle listings, not direct CPU competitors, so they're not really relevant here. The real competition for this Xeon is other LGA 771 chips and the decision to just retire the old hardware entirely.

Pricing on this chip is all over the map depending on where you are and what currency you're spending. The US listing at $150 is the most straightforward reference point, but we're seeing CAD 299 in Canada, JPY 32,528 in Japan, and BRL 1,722 in Brazil. Those numbers aren't directly comparable because of currency differences and regional availability, but the takeaway is that this chip costs real money in some places and pocket change in others. For $150 USD, you're getting a working quad-core Xeon that will drop into any LGA 771 board and just run. That's not a bad deal if you're rescuing an old server.

The value question really comes down to what you're comparing it against. If you're looking at this as a cheap way to get a quad-core server chip, it's fine. But if you're building something new, even a used modern chip will run circles around this for not much more money. The affordability score of 56th percentile tells the story. It's not the cheapest option out there, and it's not the most expensive, but you're paying for compatibility with old hardware more than you're paying for performance.

The Intel Xeon E5345 is a relic from a very specific moment in server history, the Clovertown era when quad-core meant two dual-core dies slapped together on one package. It's a 65nm chip running at 2.33GHz with a 1333MHz front-side bus, and it's the kind of thing you buy today because you have an old LGA 771 board that still works and you refuse to let it die. Or because you found a stack of decommissioned servers in a closet and want to turn one into a home lab experiment. This is not a chip anyone should be buying for a new build in 2025, but that doesn't mean it's without purpose.

Who is this for? Honestly, it's for the tinkerer. The person with a Dell PowerEdge 2950 or an old Supermicro board collecting dust who wants to keep a legacy system alive. Maybe you're running some ancient software that only plays nice with this generation of hardware, or you just enjoy the challenge of squeezing usefulness out of something most people would recycle. At 80W TDP, it's not going to melt your power bill, but it's also not exactly sipping electricity compared to what a modern low-power chip can do.

The interesting thing here is that this chip still shows up in our database with a 5/5 customer rating. That's not because it's fast by today's standards. It's because the people buying it know exactly what they're getting and they're happy it exists at all. There's something almost charming about a 17-year-old server CPU still finding buyers.

We should be upfront though. The gaming score of 37.2 out of 100 tells you everything you need to know about using this for anything modern. This is a productivity and server chip from a time when those words meant something very different than they do now.

If you're building a new system, any new system, skip this chip. The platform limitations are too severe. DDR2 memory is slow and expensive to find in decent capacities. The lack of modern instruction sets means some software won't even install. And the single-thread performance, while decent for its era, is nowhere near what you need for a responsive modern desktop experience. You'd be better off with a used Ryzen or a newer used Xeon from the E5 v2 or v3 generation.

Also skip this if you're hoping to do any kind of media work. Video transcoding, photo editing, even running a modern web browser with lots of tabs open will push this chip to its limits. The 1MB L3 cache is a real bottleneck for anything that needs to move data around quickly. If you need a cheap server and you're not locked into LGA 771, look at used Dell or HP workstations with newer Xeons. They're often available for similar money and offer dramatically better performance.

If you have an LGA 771 board that's still running and you need to keep it alive, this Xeon E5345 is a perfectly fine choice. It's cheap, it's reliable, and it does exactly what it says on the box. The 5/5 customer rating suggests that the people buying these chips are getting working parts and they're happy with them. For a home lab, a legacy file server, or a machine running old software that can't be migrated, this chip will do the job without drama.

But if you're building anything new, even a budget home server, you should look elsewhere. A used modern chip will give you better performance, better efficiency, and access to modern features like faster memory and NVMe storage. The only reason to buy this Xeon is compatibility with existing hardware. If you don't have that constraint, there's no reason to go back to 2007.