So as most of us know, the xeon 1230v3 is a great way to get a high performing i7 chip for cheap.
But now intel has forced us to use the standard i7 chips with skylake. Unforunately the i7 6700K is prohibitvely expensive. It is nearly 400 bucks. The cheapest i7 you can get is 330 bucks.
But even then, the i7 6700 is pretty bland. You only get 16 PCIe lanes, and no overclocking. For 330 bucks, its basically a cheap i5 with hyper threading and nothing more.
For the same price as the 6700K, you could get the i7 5820K which has 2 more cores, and has 28 PCIe lanes instead of 20.
But the problem is that the x99 motherboards cost 100 bucks more. So again it is cost prohibitive.
Well the xeon E5 1620 is a 4 core 8 thread processor with the full 40 pcie lanes. Now with the motherboard cost difference, it is about the same as a i7 6700K system, but you get a lot more for your money. You can easily run an SLI setup with M.2 NVME support with full bandwidth and you have quad channel memory support.
I have even seen people overclock the baseclock on this xeon chip as well and they were able to get it a little over 4ghz.
So you get great performance on a much better platform for less money.
Factoring in the cost of the motherboard you still end up saving a bit going skylake
Also the 6700 has a stock cooler, so you'd have to spend more again with the 1260, basically makes it overall pointless unless you really need to get on X99 on the cheap.
@Kat It has hyperthreading, so it's basically just a standard i7.
Probably because the E5-1620V3 is a far cry of what the 1620 / 1620V2 were. Locked multi and low core count compared to other offerings on the platform.
all of the X99 chips have hyper threading, it's nothing new. if you want to look at it from a realistic perspective, this xeon is a i7 4790 with 40 PCi-E lanes.
Guys I get that it is a 4 core, but you only need 4 cores for gaming. And yes the multiplier is locked, but I have seen people overclock using the baseclock.
The other big issue here is that the most PCIe lanes you can get on the skylake side is 20 lanes.
As we move on, more and more things will require PCIe lanes. Obviously M.2 is already out and about. Sooner or later we will have xpoint.
And yes, the i7 6700 would be less expensive, but you would literally be buying a i5 6600 with hyper threading and a speed bump for 133 bucks more
yeah but the clockspeeds are low. I think from a performance standpoint it would perform a tiny bit above the 8350 in that regard. (The six core with the low clockspeeds I'm referring to)
Honestly 20 pcie lanes isn't a problem for 95% of people. Even if you have 2 graphics cards, you have lanes to spare for a M.2 or Pcie ssd. Nice X99 boards are going to cost more then equivalent Z170 boards. Quad channel DDR4 is not going to be realistically useful with this generation. By the time quad channel matters, X99 is going to be far out of date.
AS for this one, the problem with the xeon you posted is the fact it's a quad core. for the general consumer this would be amazing, for a "Enthusiast" I think the xeon you posted would be (to some degree a waste of money)
That is true up to a point, and I do not think that point will last for very long.
The max bandwidth of a x4 gen 3 pcie lane is like 4GB/s
Right now the Samsung 950 pro is hitting above 2GB/s. If Intels xpoint really is as fast as they claim, we could start to hit that bandwidth limitation of x4 and we might go to x8.
As we progress further and further with storage, I think we will be far more dependent on PCIe lanes than we could have possibly imagined.
Everything it does can be done better for cheaper. There are other quad-cores in the Xeon lineup even on Z97 and are faster. The only thing the 1620 holds over other chips is the 15MB cache, which is not a big deal.
It has a locked multi. This is a limitation the previous revisions did not have, and honestly they are faster because of it. An Ivy-Bridge EP 1620V2 will eat this chip for breakfast.
Baseclock on X99 is touchy. Very few people can push BCLK on X99 past 105MHz and maintain stability. Some boards outright fail if you enable certain XMP profiles that require a higher BCLK.