Xeon E5-2680v4 worthwhile upgrade from an i7 5820k?

[iced colt]

So I've found a deal on a Xeon E5-2680v4 and I'm trying to decide if it's worth getting to upgrade from my i7 5820k I've had since it released.

 

While I do use my system for gaming I also do a lot of work inside of After Effects, Premiere Pro and Fusion 360, I'm also starting to learn blender and use that more often, so for what I use my system for would the jump from 6 to 14 cores benefit me even with the reduction in clock speed?

[Eighjan]

5 minutes ago, iced colt said:

So I've found a deal on a Xeon E5-2680v4 and I'm trying to decide if it's worth getting to upgrade from my i7 5820k I've had since it released.

 

While I do use my system for gaming I also do a lot of work inside of After Effects, Premiere Pro and Fusion 360, I'm also starting to learn blender and use that more often, so for what I use my system for would the jump from 6 to 14 cores benefit me even with the reduction in clock speed?

Intels ARK allows you to compare CPU's - Xeon's are built for 'enterprise level work', so it'll depend on what you want to use it for - your i7 is an HEDT part, so intended for light professional or personal 'work'.

[jaslion]

If rendering is your main usecase then YES for sure it will be better but it will be worse in lower core count operations.

[emosun]

Provided your work loads are optomized for several cores or you have the affinity set to use as many as you can then it could be worth while. The cpu will definitely render WHILE doing another task faster than the i7

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id say keep the i7, and over clock it a bit.

 

Lots of those programs like single threaded speed, and for things like rendering, much of it can be done on a gpu now much faster than any cpu can.

 

What tasks are the slowest in your current work flow.

[Eighjan]

@iced colt - given your software needs, maybe this would help:

 

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?productIds=82932,91754

[Zando_]

6 minutes ago, Eighjan said:

Intels ARK allows you to compare CPU's - Xeon's are built for 'enterprise level work', so it'll depend on what you want to use it for - your i7 is an HEDT part, so intended for light professional or personal 'work'.

That really means nothing, the i7s are a Xeon with a couple features maybe gone and higher stock clocks (in the case of X99 i7s they're also all overclockable). You can get hexacore Xeons that are functionally just a stock 5820K. 

5 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id say keep the i7, and over clock it a bit.

 

Lots of those programs like single threaded speed, and for things like rendering, much of it can be done on a gpu now much faster than any cpu can.

 

What tasks are the slowest in your current work flow.

^^^ 100% this. For most workloads but pure multicore X99 chips do a lot better with higher clocks, not just more cores. The 2680v4 isn't one of the OCable Xeons either so that isn't an option, and though it is Broadwell-E (nice IPC/general perf increase over Haswell-E) it still caps out at a 3.3GHz single core turbo, which isn't very high at all. Even a bad 5820K can hit 4.2Ghz and at that speed it should outperform the Xeon in most cases. For Broadwell-E specifically, I found my 6950X pretty damn usable at 3.8GHz, but that's still 500Mhz past the Xeon, and on all cores. 

 

[Eighjan]

Aside from price, why would you use an E5 in a desktop machine?

 

Aren't they likely to have been thrashed to within an inch of death... or run sub-optimally w/o ECC RAM?

[iced colt]

13 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

That really means nothing, the i7s are a Xeon with a couple features maybe gone and higher stock clocks (in the case of X99 i7s they're also all overclockable). You can get hexacore Xeons that are functionally just a stock 5820K. 

^^^ 100% this. For most workloads but pure multicore X99 chips do a lot better with higher clocks, not just more cores. The 2680v4 isn't one of the OCable Xeons either so that isn't an option, and though it is Broadwell-E (nice IPC/general perf increase over Haswell-E) it still caps out at a 3.3GHz single core turbo, which isn't very high at all. Even a bad 5820K can hit 4.2Ghz and at that speed it should outperform the Xeon in most cases. For Broadwell-E specifically, I found my 6950X pretty damn usable at 3.8GHz, but that's still 500Mhz past the Xeon, and on all cores. 

 

not really looking to overclock my i7, it already runs pretty hot currently, one of the reasons for considering a xeon was the lower power consumption, can you suggest any other chips that would be a suitable upgrade on the 2011-3 socket?

[iced colt]

13 minutes ago, Eighjan said:

Aside from price, why would you use an E5 in a desktop machine?

 

Aren't they likely to have been thrashed to within an inch of death... or run sub-optimally w/o ECC RAM?

not all servers run at 100%, a lot of chips from businesses that have upgraded their gear generally have never seen 100% usage for prolonged periods of time in my experience.

[Electronics Wizardy]

17 minutes ago, Eighjan said:

Aside from price, why would you use an E5 in a desktop machine?

 

Aren't they likely to have been thrashed to within an inch of death... or run sub-optimally w/o ECC RAM?

Cause there much faster than i7s in a lot of workloads. The server/desktop thing doesn't matter, just pick what is faster for your worklaod. And there cheap used now too.

 

And CPUs won't really wear out here. The cpu is gonna be too slow before its dies 99%(estiamte) of the time.

 

And server cpus probably will last longer as there running at lower voltages, and normally cooled pretty well.

 

 

[Eighjan]

4 minutes ago, iced colt said:

not all servers run at 100%, a lot of chips from businesses that have upgraded their gear generally have never seen 100% usage for prolonged periods of time in my experience.

Do they also get replaced on a financial 'write-off' basis, where the work they've performed has justified their expense, to recoup some of their upgrade costs?

[Zando_]

6 minutes ago, iced colt said:

not really looking to overclock my i7, it already runs pretty hot currently, one of the reasons for considering a xeon was the lower power consumption, can you suggest any other chips that would be a suitable upgrade on the 2011-3 socket?

Ah yeah, if you go near or above 1.3v Haswell-E becomes a furnace, so if it's hot already then OCing is likely not an option. 

You could look for a Xeon with a better balance of clocks/cores. I'd say swing for a better cooler and then a 6950X so you have the option to manually tune while keeping a high core count (10c/20t), but those go for a lot last I checked (mine was around $500). 

6 minutes ago, iced colt said:

not all servers run at 100%, a lot of chips from businesses that have upgraded their gear generally have never seen 100% usage for prolonged periods of time in my experience.

Yeep, plus you could run these chips in the 80s-90s for years and they'd be fine. Especially Xeons which are binned and clocked for stability and reliability. 

3 minutes ago, Eighjan said:

Do they also get replaced on a financial 'write-off' basis, where the work they've performed has justified their expense, to recoup some of their upgrade costs?

Yes, that's usually when the market gets a huge influx of Xeons. Part of the reason why earlier LGA1366 Xeons are incredibly cheap, they outlived their useful life and got dumped in the thousands on the used market. 2011 and 2011v3 Xeons should get cheaper over time as they're eventually phased out too. I imagine the writeoffs aren't based on offsetting upgrade costs as they seem to be dumped quite cheaply, more "hey the new stuff provides a performance increase worth the cost of replacement, go for it". 

[iced colt]

6 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

Ah yeah, if you go near or above 1.3v Haswell-E becomes a furnace, so if it's hot already then OCing is likely not an option. 

You could look for a Xeon with a better balance of clocks/cores. I'd say swing for a better cooler and then a 6950X so you have the option to manually tune while keeping a high core count (10c/20t), but those go for a lot last I checked (mine was around $500). 

Yeep, plus you could run these chips in the 80s-90s for years and they'd be fine. Especially Xeons which are binned and clocked for stability and reliability. 

Yes, that's usually when the market gets a huge influx of Xeons. Part of the reason why earlier LGA1366 Xeons are incredibly cheap, they outlived their useful life and got dumped in the thousands on the used market. 2011 and 2011v3 Xeons should get cheaper over time as they're eventually phased out too. I imagine the writeoffs aren't based on offsetting upgrade costs as they seem to be dumped quite cheaply, more "hey the new stuff provides a performance increase worth the cost of replacement, go for it". 

Think my case probably doesn't help with the cooling, the h440 looks nice but has no airflow.

 

I was thinking about the 6950x, if I could get one I would, they're going for around £250 near me currently which is cheaper than when I last looked so that might be something I look into if I can gather the courage to invest a bit more into it.

[Zando_]

3 minutes ago, iced colt said:

I was thinking about the 6950x, if I could get one I would, they're going for around £250 near me currently which is cheaper than when I last looked so that might be something I look into if I can gather the courage to invest a bit more into it.

They're nice chips, solid IPC bump over Haswell-E. I found that my 6950X performed the same on single core as my 5960X, while at a 300Mhz lower core/200Mhz lower uncore. It's still an Intel 10 core chip though, so if you OC em they suck down power which = heat. I run mine at 4.2Ghz now, it has to share the single 360mm rad with my 2060 Super so I disabled hyperthreading to cut temps a little bit, it never touches 60C when gaming now, will go into the 80s under stress tests. With a 360mm rad all to itself I had no issues leaving HT on. At lower clocks it ofc needs less voltage and is a lot cooler (heat vs voltage is more exponential vs linear, it gets hotter and hotter per voltage increase as you near the limits of the chip). If you can get a good 280mm AIO or equivalent air cooler, 3.8-4Ghz allcore should be easy. 

For the numbers I have, in Cinebench R20 (R23 is the newest now, when I benched my chips before/after the swap R20 was the newest) my 6950X at 4.2Ghz/3.5Ghz core/uncore did 4984 multicore and 403 single core. At stock it did 3671 and 307. 5960X (8c/16t Haswell-E) did 3570-403 at 4.5Ghz/3.7Ghz, 2496-295 at stock. All using the same 3200Mhz CL16-18-18-36 quad channel RAM kit. Aaand shite I can't find my numbers for the 5820K lmao. I had one for a while, went 5820K -> 5960X -> 6950X. 

[jaslion]

11 hours ago, Eighjan said:

Do they also get replaced on a financial 'write-off' basis, where the work they've performed has justified their expense, to recoup some of their upgrade costs?

Basically all those chips on ebay come from big data center writeoffs. I can safely tell you that a lot of these chips have rarely ever even seen 100% usage and will just go on fine. Sure there is always a dud but that is normal. I've used a couple of these systems as a render rig that were writeoffs for years and they were near 100% for those years almost constantly. Cpu's are very hard to kill anyways so you really shouldn't worry.

 

Also xeons don't need ecc ram. That is just normally what they come with since it is enterprise server grade hardware expected to be 100% stable even tho they would basically be just as stable on regular ram. For most people that buy these with ecc ram the ecc ram  never ends up doing anything as their workload on the systems is just not that sensitive.

[Eighjan]

4 hours ago, jaslion said:

Also xeons don't need ecc ram. That is just normally what they come with since it is enterprise server grade hardware expected to be 100% stable even tho they would basically be just as stable on regular ram. For most people that buy these with ecc ram the ecc ram  never ends up doing anything as their workload on the systems is just not that sensitive

ECC is worth the extra expense for the initial roll-out, for the added peace of mind...?

[jaslion]

3 minutes ago, Eighjan said:

ECC is worth the extra expense for the initial roll-out, for the added peace of mind...?

For a desktop user it really does not matter a single bit what so ever. For datacenters it does as it is seen as a must have even if it is not needed.

[Eighjan]

4 minutes ago, jaslion said:

For datacenters it does as it is seen as a must have even if it is not needed.

That... thought so.

[jaslion]

3 minutes ago, Eighjan said:

That... thought so.

It often really is just a checkbox on a specsheet that people that known nothing would see as a "o hey these dudes don't have that so we will not use you because you dont have something that is not useful for us anyway" thing.