Is X58 Still The Price/Performance King? Any Alternatives?

[bmichaels556]

It truly does seem that when you look at price to performance ratio, X58 really can't be beat, especially for someone looking for an overall multi-purpose rig for some gaming, a workstation and so on. For example, I'm currently running a Dell T7500 that I upgraded to dual X5675's with 24GB RAM. My total system cost was under $300 for a bangin' 12 core 24 thread workstation that rivals a Ryzen 7 1700/X. An alternative would be to get a single CPU and overclock it like mad, to where it shows very little bottleneck in games, which is possible based on many tests out there.

 

But I have to wonder... What do you guys know about any other bangin' deals that are out there? You'd think that by now, with the length of time that X58 CPU's have been dirt cheap (and continually going down), that following generation Sandy Bridge CPU's would start becoming more affordable. And it's true, they are showing better prices every day. But surely most data centers aren't using them anymore anyway. So why has X5600 series become the "baseline" by which the pricing of the newer gen Xeons have been based, in the sense that despite them being so cheap, one generation to the future is like 3x the price, with only something like 50%+ performance gain.

 

Am I missing something? Even if they can't truly compete in price/performance, what (newer) affordable server-type CPU's are relatively affordable and offer great bang for your buck, especially with cheap workstation boards and the like, or even multi-CPU setups? And would it be limited to Sandy Bridge at most? I'd think so, for the time being. For example, I happened to find a Xeon E3 1275 V3 (basically a 4770K) for dirt cheap, like 30% normal market rate. And yet it isn't that much better than even the X5675. Not even in power consumption either. Gaming and single core performance? For sure. But as an overall workstation, it again follows that trend. Similar or slightly better performance for many times the cost.

 

Well, I'll quit rambling. Hoping to find some of them juicy insider secrets.   

[Ashleyyyy]

just keep that system. i've got dual X5650's and 48GB of ram and it's an absolute beast of a machine. yours is even faster so... just keep it  

 

i'd imagine that the newer chips are still in use in most datacenters because intel has been doing practically nothing the past 8 years for their mainstream and xeon lineup (other than slapping more core's on the chips), which is why X58 holds up so well. so because the newer chips are still used a lot they still cost a lot...

 

i can imagine X58 no longer being used in datacenters because of power consumption... so that's why they're cheap. 

 

i'm just guessing here though.. i could be wrong. 

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

X58, if you don't mind the jank, is still a great option. For something less sketchy, SB - Devil's Canyon i7s or their Xeon brethren (for dat ecc) are good options. Also if you can find a board (Craft Computing has done a few videos on surprisingly functional Chinese ones) X79 Xeons are fairly popular these days. For newer than that, it's hard to beat a Ryzen 5

[bmichaels556]

21 minutes ago, firelighter487 said:

just keep that system. i've got dual X5650's and 48GB of ram and it's an absolute beast of a machine. yours is even faster so... just keep it  

 

i'd imagine that the newer chips are still in use in most datacenters because intel has been doing practically nothing the past 8 years for their mainstream and xeon lineup (other than slapping more core's on the chips), which is why X58 holds up so well. so because the newer chips are still used a lot they still cost a lot...

 

i can imagine X58 no longer being used in datacenters because of power consumption... so that's why they're cheap. 

 

i'm just guessing here though.. i could be wrong. 

Yeah, I do think I'm going to stick with this as my main rig for at least a bit longer. Might very well upgrade to a Ryzen 7 "3700x" or whatever they call it. Depends on what we see I guess, but I'm pretty excited for them.  

 

That's a pretty smokin' rig though. 48GB of ram is epic. I can barely use 8-10GB out of my 24 lmao

[Ashleyyyy]

Just now, bmichaels556 said:

Yeah, I do think I'm going to stick with this as my main rig for at least a bit longer. Might very well upgrade to a Ryzen 7 "3700x" or whatever they call it. Depends on what we see I guess, but I'm pretty excited for them.  

 

That's a pretty smokin' rig though. 48GB of ram is epic. I can barely use 8-10GB out of my 24 lmao

i bought 24GB, and then i bought a motherboard that came with 6gb, and when that broke i bought a ProLiant server that i'm using now and that came with 18gb  

 

it's really nice to have.. i can run VM's all i want and multitask like crazy. if i have 40 tabs and a load of other stuff open i can just go play Overwatch because i have ram for days  

 

it's also just cool to look at, everytime i open it up i'm greeted with 18 full dimm slots  

[bmichaels556]

9 minutes ago, OrbitalBuzzsaw said:

X58, if you don't mind the jank, is still a great option. For something less sketchy, SB - Devil's Canyon i7s or their Xeon brethren (for dat ecc) are good options. Also if you can find a board (Craft Computing has done a few videos on surprisingly functional Chinese ones) X79 Xeons are fairly popular these days. For newer than that, it's hard to beat a Ryzen 5

I agree with all of that.

 

Actually... I do have a "QDBW" engineering sample I happened upon a while ago. It's essentially an E5-2683 V3, 14 core 28 thread badass Haswell Xeon... Biggest issue is finding a board that will actually work with the thing. And that's tough to find, especially with this particular sample which seems to be incredibly rare, as I've found almost zero information on it, let alone what setup could get it to run if at all.

 

Not to mention the sketchiness of these things in the first place..?