Comparing Dual Xeon with Quad Opteron cost to performance

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There's been a lot of talk about running a used Dual Xeon E5-2670 build for comparible performance to newer i7 10 core machines at a fraction of the cost (both overall and for the processors). So, for fun, I thought I'd throw AMD in the mix and get an idea of how a Quad Opteron would compare. I do see far more Quad Opteron setups then Quad Xeon, and it seems the price points can be worked out to something similar for certain configurations, so the matchup seems reasonable.

For crude performance measures, let's start with some PassMark scores:

Dual Xeon E5-2670: 18637
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2670+%40+2.60GHz&id=1220&cpuCount=2

Quad Opteron 6276: 15342
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Opteron+6276&id=1880&cpuCount=4

Well, based on that alone, it seems the E5-2670 wins by a good margin in the performance category.

Let's compare costs.
Based simply on what I can easily find right now on Amazon and a few other places, you can get an E5-2670 at $75 each, give or take a bit, or in a pair sometimes at $145ish.

Opteron 6276 I've seen for as low as $45 each, though I haven't seen many anywhere near this price point so supply may be limited and unrealistic. Still, going with that, 4 would be about $180. That's already $35 more.
Boards?

A dual LGA 2011 board can be had for as low as $290 used from what I've seen (but that's pretty hard to come by as far as I can tell).

I did find a single very cheap Dell branded Quad Socket G34 refurbished board for $85. That's pretty low, but looks like other than that one, $600 is likely your best deal.

Memory is something I'm not too sure about, simply because I'm not sure how well each chipset compares in how they utilize the RAM in multi processor configurations. I'm going to assume you will need more dimms for the Quad configuration to utilize full bandwidth, even if trying for the same total memory. That could end up overall more, or less, or the same depending on where you get it all from I guess.

But, if we compare Board and CPU prices, we're looking at:

Dual Xeon - $425 (min)

Quad Opteron - $265 (min).

That puts the Quad Opteron at 62% of the cost for 82% of the performance. Not bad, and you'd end up with more total cores so you could in theory squeeze out more virtual machines if you really needed to. (Though, I know nothing about virtualization on opterons, so...).

That's all based on finding the opteron setup at the lowest possible, rarely seen (by me) price. More typical prices would seem to put the Opteron setup at more expensive, in which case, no point, right? Unless you really need those extra cores.

Thoughts? This was a rough comparison done quickly, so maybe others can offer better information on either of these setups and respective performance, or other key things to consider.

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If you want a quality dual Lga 2011 board its usually $400+ as far as I can find. The price of those boards is unreal, although the reason why those are far more popular than quad opteron systems is a couple factors. The opteron's single core performance is appalling, like would be unusable for gaming with any modern graphics card, and a lot of the enthusiasts that have been buying the dual xeon systems also want to game. The opteron motherboards are also huge, like not small at all. The opteron heat spreader is so wide that it is basically impossible to find a mainstream heatsink that comfortably fits the chips. Server heatsinks can be used but they are loud and scarcely found. The power and heat put off by the opterons is also notably higher, with two of the 2670's totaling a 230 watts, whilst the opterons total 460 watts. That is a ton of power, more than a tricked out full system with an I7 6700k and Gtx 1080.

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Quad Opteron is amazing if your software can make use of that. For most people dual Xeon is the most they will ever need.
If board size is a factor, you have been looking at the wrong cases...

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The dual Xeon 2670's actually have near identical compute power to the opteron's in cases where all of the cores of the opterons are utilized, such as in cinebench r15 where both the opterons and xeons score roughly 2000 points varying slightly depending on the run and the turbo speeds being achieved.

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Found a video that shows exatly the mentioned score for the Opterons:

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Uhm... ;)

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Ha, you're right, I totally was multiplying $35 x 4 in my head for some reason. I'll fix the numbers, that makes a decent difference really.

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Those opterons are fun and I'm sure you can do a lot with them. But when you can have 2670s now for as low as 50-70,- bucks... Even price doesn't help. You have to buy a better PSU, a rack case and two more coolers.

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