So turns out there are a bunch of old Xeons being sold for dirt cheap.
I’m thinking about buying a E5-2680v2 which is a 10 core and, if I were to believe cpubenchmark.net, beats Ryzen 1800x in multithreaded benchmarks, but it’s hard to find anything about its ipc. It’s running @2.8 GHz with single core boost to 3.6 GHz so I’m not sure how well it will do in games.
I currently have an FX-8320 and I was waiting for ryzen to upgrade, but it seems like I can build a Xeon system including the motherboard and 16 GB DDR3 1333 MHz RAM for the price of one Ryzen 1800x.
It is Ivy Bridge, so the IPC will be slightly lower than Ryzen. The slower DDR3 RAM will also make it even slower in most tasks.
As far as gaming goes, it won’t be bad at all.
How dirt cheap is dirt cheap? Even if the chips are going for $50, a working motherboard might not be easy to find. If you went this route for multi-core performance, it might be worth looking at a dual socket motherboard.
You might be better off with a Ryzen 5 1600 (6 core/12 thread) and 3000MHz RAM, or the Ryzen 7 1700. You don’t need to spend the extra on the 1800X, it is money wasted (literally).
you could build a capable g4600 system for the price of that x79 board (lga2011), as low as $300 US . it could be upgraded to an i7/m.2/moar ram later.
and it will have all the modern features; usb3.1 , m.2 nvme slot(s), etc.
I am still gaming on an Ivy Bridge CPU, I don’t even have it OC’d (boost to 3.8 GHz).
If you can do 20 cores(dual socket) with that Xeon for a good price, it should easily outperform an 8 core Ryzen if the software can use all those cores.
If you are talking about a single 10-core Xeon, I would look at a R7 1700 ($300) + $125 X370 motherboard + 16GB of good RAM ($200).
It would probably be better to go with the newer platform because I don’t think the 2 extra cores on the Xeon with 1333MHz DDR3 will be faster by much when using all the cores… it will be close and the Xeon might even slower. There will be a guaranteed 7%-10% better per core performance on the Ryzen and the much faster DDR4 RAM.
I’ve watched RAM benchmarks on LinusTechTips and it seems like RAM frequency doesn’t matter too much, even the difference between DDR4 and DDR3 is negligeble. Maybe Ryzen somehow relies more on RAM frequency than Intel CPUs?
The Infinity Fabric for the inter-CCX communication runs at the speed of the RAM so yes, it has a large effect on Ryzen. That said, 3200MHz seems to be the sweet spot with vastly diminishing returns above that. Really the goal is to run at 2667MHz or a bit above, as those speeds see a large increase over 2133/2400MHz.
Even on the Intel platform, RAM performance will affect CPU performance when there is CPU overhead (even in games).
Most of the time, in games, the GPU is the sole contributing factor to a high frame rate when the CPU is sufficient. When the CPU is a limiting factor in any particular game, RAM speed can dramatically affect the minimum frame rate. This relates to the FPS dips we sometime experience in games. Instead of dipping down to 40 FPS, you might see an increase to like 45 FPS (sometimes more) in those instances. RAM can affect frame rate stability and give the user a smoother overall gaming experience. If the price is similar, always grab the better RAM.
…and yes, Ryzen does inherently gain meaningful performance from faster RAM; much more than Intel.
A Youtube channel named DigitalFoundry has tested for these results regarding RAM speed in games. I got a lot of the information from a member (hobbyist overclocker) name MageTank over at LTT. IDK if he is still there, but you can try asking him if it interests you. He will give you an in depth answer based on real world testing and have you scurrying to google to find definitions of the terms he uses =P
Man what’s the pc build i know nothing about xeons i always thought i had to go with an i7 or better for any sensible performance beyond a top grade laptop.
He could go hog wild and install 96 gb of ram to a server grade mb, allowing you to make comfortable ram disks for utility use, which I what I do when I make VMs: make ramdisk that can hold both the initial ISO and the installation, run the VM install entirely in ram, shut down VM and copy the result to a SSD or HDD.
Thats one advantage of that paricular platform compared to ryzen which has expensive ram not to mention can’t handle as much ram anyway.
Cinebench r15 single score of an e5 2670v1 were about 110 points.
I assume that ivy 2670v2 should do about 120, and the 2680v2 should be close to the 130.
So pretty ok ish for gaming and just slightly below Ryzen.
Trust me when I say that just playing games you could have a 16 core 2ghz xeon and not notice the difference to that 10 core. For just games you really aren’t pushing a processor that much. Evens AI based ones if you’re going up to server spec. Compared to ryzen? If you need 10 cores cheap, sure. Especially if you can get the ram for it and a board that’ll accept the CPU’s and the ram in combo with each other. But honestly? Just do a ryzen build.
UNLESS you need to run Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 bare metal. Running Ryzen on Windows 7 bare metal requires so many band-aid solutions that mean it doesn’t run all that great.
Meh? I guess when you’re not a normal linux user that seems daunting. I don’t even know what the work is for you to do that anymore lol. I started in linux when the huge desktop push started in 07/08.