I was looking to extend the life of my gaming rig (see sig) and thought I'd entertain the idea of a Xeon CPU upgrade. Price, TDP, base multiplier for OC, etc. has led me to the X5675. So two questions:
 
1) This seems like a good bang-for-the buck Xeon option for the X58 SLI, agree?
 
2) I see them listed with "SLBYL" as a prefix and sometimes with a "Z5" suffix. Can someone help me ID what those mean, how they may or may not work with my plans, and what benefits/drawbacks there are to other versions of the X5675?
 
Thanks!

Thanks. I don't remember all I was reading. But the basic gist was that the 5675 has the best clock and runs at a lower TDP. The implications are that overclocking should come out similarly as the 5690 at 60% of the price. That's why I was asking what I was asking.  Maybe I'm being cheap, but the 5675 may run cooler and OC at least as well. Or am I missing something?

Those are things itching the back of my brain, true. I'm going to keep doing some homework on it before I decide. Thanks!

I vote for doing it. I've done the westmere mod on my E762 and it works perfectly with a X5650 & X5670.
Just FYI, the only difference between the X5650-X5690 is the multiplier, TDP and all that stuff doesn't matter at all, so get the X5650 instead since it's the cheapest.
 
As for oc'ing with 12GB+ of ram, it depends on what IC's your ram has, your motherboard and what the IMC can do, I've run my 24GB's (6x4GB) @ 2100MHz 9-10-10-27 1T 1.6v without problems. Albeit the ram I have is known to do 2600MHz+.
 
Also, the X5690 is not equivalent to the 990X they have completely different architectures. On the other hand the W3690 is the direct Xeon equivalent of the 990X except it has an ECC memory controller, it also shares the unlocked multiplier (on most motherboards).  
 

Sweet! Yea and OC'd 5660 can match up against a 3930k 
THis guy did a pretty good review about it....excellent info..
 
http://www.overclock-and-...eviews/28-x5660-review

I think I'm going to beef up my other X58 system to do what the gaming one does passably well and then send the gaming rig's MB in for the Westmere mod. At this point, staring at a move to an add-in SATA3 card, 1TB SSD, and move to Win10 it makes sense to go the Xeon route to get 2 more hardware cores. I've been sitting on a Corsair H70 for a VERY long time and may as well install that at the same time. It will be the first of my monolithic air-coolers to fall!
 
It's Ashes of the Singularity that has my mind nearly made up.
 
Thanks everyone!