3900x vs Dual Xeon

[Guest]

2 hours ago, SnooPainting8310 said:

Yeah, of course you are right not cheaping out on the motherboard, what I was trying to say is that with the right xeon you could easily compete with even a 3950x...

 

Speaking of the right xeon, I dug a bit and found my supposedly perfect candidates : e5-2695 v4 and here is a performance idea (see this benchmark)

I would not recommened the E5-2695 v4 at its current eBay price of $400+. I would recommend instead either dual E5-2697 v3 QS (28c/56t) for $400 or dual E5-2697 v4 QS (36c/72t) for $500. The v3 Haswell-EP chips are generally much cheaper than the equivalent Broadwell-EP chips on eBay, at least at the moment, but it is possible to find some good deals. For example.... If you pair two of these together, they will absolutely spank the 3900X in raw multithreading performance.

 

If your goal is absolute multithreading capability and you aren't as concerned with single-thread performance, going with a dual-Xeon setup will be a much better value. However, their single-threaded performance lacks by significantly by comparison. For my purposes, buying a E5-2697 v3 at half of the cost of a 3900X was abolutely the better buy. You may be able to find deals on Threadripper Whitehaven (1st Gen) or Colfax (2nd Gen), but from my experience, the platform and CPU costs are still outrageously high on eBay ($800! for a 2920X, and $320 for a 1920X at the time of writing).

 

Cheers

[SnooPainting8310]

1 hour ago, Radium_Angel said:

Gotcha. I assume there is no stand-alone Benchmark for ZBrush? Because I"m happy to test it on some of my systems as way of comparison 

I never heard about any current Zbrush Benchmark... Apparent there was one coming with an very old version but I'm very unsure.

[SnooPainting8310]

59 minutes ago, Pooky said:

I would not recommened the E5-2695 v4 at its current eBay price of $400+. I would recommend instead either dual E5-2697 v3 QS (28c/56t) for $400 or dual E5-2697 v4 QS (36c/72t) for $500. The v3 Haswell-EP chips are generally much cheaper than the equivalent Broadwell-EP chips on eBay, at least at the moment, but it is possible to find some good deals. For example.... If you pair two of these together, they will absolutely spank the 3900X in raw multithreading performance.

 

If your goal is absolute multithreading capability and you aren't as concerned with single-thread performance, going with a dual-Xeon setup will be a much better value. However, their single-threaded performance lacks by significantly by comparison. For my purposes, buying a E5-2697 v3 at half of the cost of a 3900X was abolutely the better buy. You may be able to find deals on Threadripper Whitehaven (1st Gen) or Colfax (2nd Gen), but from my experience, the platform and CPU costs are still outrageously high on eBay ($800! for a 2920X, and $320 for a 1920X at the time of writing).

 

Cheers

Thanks for your answer.

Before buying the 3900x, I checked for cheap threadrippers, but at this budget the 3900x was the king. Actually no, on ebay you could find nice deal for 1950x and other but the performances of the 1 st gen threadripper are still lower anyway and when it comes to the 2nd gen, it's too expensive... until I stomped into those budget monster that are the e5-2690(+) v3-4... I actually regret my choice a bit... I feel like for the same budget I could have get like 20-30% more multi-thread performance, even easily beating the 3950x... I'll just save 700 euro and buy it all, compare it to my current build then sell the less appropriate build..

 

The opportunities I look was on ali express : https://fr.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=SB_20200929083718&SearchText=e5-2695+v4

 

Also, I am very new to Xeon cpu, so what are Haswell and Broadwell chips ?

I feel like going for a xeon build allow for more upgradability as you can always (1) buy a better cpu, (2) upgrade to a dual socket motherboard and just buying one extra cpu, (3) going for a quad socket and buying 3 more cpu... It seems so easy to upgrade.. And cheap.

 

Like, 4 wisely chosen Xeons could easily beat a 3970x, right ? 2 e5-2690 v4 score around 9100 on cinebench r10... with 4 of those you hit 18000 points for... 800$... Ridiculously incredible.

 

At the end I am really asking myself if third party xeon build wouldn't be always the way to go for multi-thread oriented build/workstation ?

[Guest]

1 hour ago, SnooPainting8310 said:

The opportunities I look was on ali express : https://fr.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=SB_20200929083718&SearchText=e5-2695+v4

When you are looking at these cheaper listings, make sure you are looking at QS (quality sample) chips and not ES (engineering sample) chips. The former are very very close and often identical to the final tray stepping, whereas the latter are often less stable and do not clock as high. You can use resources like CPU-World to verify the steppings of the chips. For example, one of the first listings for ~$250 is a E5-2690 v4 QHV4, but CPU-World says that the closer-to-retail stepping is QKE3.

https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Xeon/Intel-Xeon E5-2695 v4.html

 

In general, for v3 chips, you want something later than QExx, and QKxx for v4. The steppings are in alphabetical order, so QGN3 is a later and better stepping than QGEF for example. If you want more info about how to read core steppings, feel free to inquire.

 

1 hour ago, SnooPainting8310 said:

Also, I am very new to Xeon cpu, so what are Haswell and Broadwell chips ?

Haswell-EP is the v3 mid-grade server/workstation class of CPUs based on the 22nm Haswell architecture (similar to 4th gen Core processors), and Broadwell-EP is the next generation up from that, v4, based on the 14nm Broadwell architecture (similar to 5th gen Core processors). Xeon E5 v3 and v4 both fit into the LGA2011-v3 socket and use the X99/C612 chipset. Although the E5 v4 CPUs came out about a year and a half hafter v3, they are not that much faster in terms of clock speeds or IPC, but because they are the newest available CPUs for the socket, they are notably more expensive than the v3 with very little performance gains. The biggest difference between Haswell-EP and Broadwell-EP is that the latter has a higher max core count at 22c/44t on the E5-2699 v4, vs 'only' 18c/36t on E5-2699 v3. Because of this, the E5 v3 CPUs tend to be a much better value second-hand even if they run slightly warmer.

1 hour ago, SnooPainting8310 said:

Like, 4 wisely chosen Xeons could easily beat a 3970x, right ? 2 e5-2690 v4 score around 9100 on cinebench r10... with 4 of those you hit 18000 points for... 800$... Ridiculously incredible.

The E5-26xx CPUs do not scale up to 4 sockets. For that you will need the E5-46xx CPUs. Hint: the first number in the names represents the number of CPUs it scales with. So the E5-16xx is single socket, E5-26xx supports dual, and E5-46xx supports quad. The more scalability a CPU supports, the lower its clock speeds will be, and quad-socket motherboards are prohibitively expensive so I wouldn't recommend getting one anyway. At that point I would just get a single Threadripper 3970X. It would be better in the long run with more upgradeability, newer platform features, and much better single-core performance--likely double.

Dual-socket workstations though? Yes, I think they are still a very good value for people that needs the cores.

1 hour ago, SnooPainting8310 said:

At the end I am really asking myself if third party xeon build wouldn't be always the way to go for multi-thread oriented build/workstation ?

I think they're really interesting and can be an extremely good buy for someone that needs more cores than Zen offers for the same money. A dual E5-2697 v3 setup would be very competitive in rendering, but not as much with modelling and animation. The lower IPC and clock speeds might be noticeable on zBrush, but since I do not use that software I could not tell you. Keep in mind that a dual E5-2697 v3 workstation only nets ~43% more performance in C15 than a 3900X, despite having over twice as many cores. This is because Zen excels in tile-based rendering where data is not bottlenecked by the Infinity Fabric.

 

Since you already have a 3900X and you are doing tile-based rendering and real-time modelling, I would recommend to you to skip the headache of learning another platform and sticking with your current CPU. It is very good, but if you feel like you need more power, then upgrade to a 3950X or wait for Zen3. A 28c/44t Xeon system could be a lot faster in multicore workloads that share data frequently between cores, or just needs lots of cores for many virtual machines, but tile-based rendering is not one of those tasks. If you see the value of 43% faster rendering time over slightly laggier modelling, it could be a good option, but I would reiterate that since you are already on a good platform it makes more logistical sense to stick with it.

 

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PS: If you are comfortable doing a BIOS microcode patch on an X99 motherboard, you can set the all-core turbo to be equal to the single-core turbo of the CPU and increase performance significantly. Normally, E5-2697 v3 will run at 3.1GHz all-core, but you can increase this to 3.6GHz for even faster multicore performance.

3900X vs 2x E5-2697 v3: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/3963170?baseline=3912842

3900X vs 2x E5-2697 v3 OC: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/3963170?baseline=3701802

 

You can see that the OC improves multicore performance by about 21% and goes from 47% faster than the 3900X to 79% faster. If you feel comfortable doing such a modification (check out a guide here or here) then this may help to sway your decision. If it seems over your head, which is perfectly okay, then you can ignore this last bit and only focus on stock performance numbers.

 

Cheers