Higher Base Clock Worth It? Xeon E5-2697v4 vs Xeon E5-2697Av4

[mr cheese]

Just bought a Precision T7810 to build out as a budget hypervisor. I'm deciding between the E5-2679v4 and the E5-2679Av4, the difference being that the former has a base clock of 2.3GHz while offering 2 more cores than the A models' 2.6GHz 16core specifications. I don't necessarily need the extra cores, but figured if both can boost to 3.6GHz it wouldn't be an issue and I could just snag the extra two cores for an extra $8 per CPU. However, I'm second guessing if the lower base clock of the 2697v4 will hurt me in the long run if other vms are forced to dip below 2.6GHz while others are pushing higher boost with their allotted cores, like when running single core heavy processes in another vm.

 

Am I overthinking it or is it, on paper, genuinely worth the trade off of two cores for the 300MHz higher base clock? Especially if I may never hit the full core allotment with my vms? Will the non-A model drop consistently to the base clock?

 

 

Thanks a bunch! Also, bonus points if you can tell me if there's that much of a benefit between 2400MHz DIMMs over 2133MHz DIMMs that makes it worth an extra $5 per stick!

[LIGISTX]

10 minutes ago, mr cheese said:

Just bought a Precision T7810 to build out as a budget hypervisor. I'm deciding between the E5-2679v4 and the E5-2679Av4, the difference being that the former has a base clock of 2.3GHz while offering 2 more cores than the A models' 2.6GHz 16core specifications. I don't necessarily need the extra cores, but figured if both can boost to 3.6GHz it wouldn't be an issue and I could just snag the extra two cores for an extra $8 per CPU. However, I'm second guessing if the lower base clock of the 2697v4 will hurt me in the long run if other vms are forced to dip below 2.6GHz while others are pushing higher boost with their allotted cores, like when running single core heavy processes in another vm.

 

Am I overthinking it or is it, on paper, genuinely worth the trade off of two cores for the 300MHz higher base clock? Especially if I may never hit the full core allotment with my vms? Will the non-A model drop consistently to the base clock?

 

 

Thanks a bunch! Also, bonus points if you can tell me if there's that much of a benefit between 2400MHz DIMMs over 2133MHz DIMMs that makes it worth an extra $5 per stick!

What are you intending to actually do on the machine..? What will the VM's be doing?

[mr cheese]

3 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

What are you intending to actually do on the machine..? What will the VM's be doing?

Nothing crazy: game host, pfsense, zfs filestore/freenas, nginx webhost, general purpose linux host(s), and from there likely just whatever I can think of as the need arises. Game host is where I expect most of the horsepower to kick in, and while i'm planning 10G (or at least 2.5G) for pfsense you can do that with a laptop cpu so i don't imagine it having a hard time 

[LIGISTX]

21 minutes ago, mr cheese said:

Nothing crazy: game host, pfsense, zfs filestore/freenas, nginx webhost, general purpose linux host(s), and from there likely just whatever I can think of as the need arises. Game host is where I expect most of the horsepower to kick in, and while i'm planning 10G (or at least 2.5G) for pfsense you can do that with a laptop cpu so i don't imagine it having a hard time 

I know game servers typically like a lot of GHz, but it also really depends on the game.

 

FWIW, I run a e5 2660 v4 and it idles at about 2% usage... I have VM''s consisting of:

pfsense

truenas

multiple ubuntu server

home assistant

windows

over a dozen docker contaienrs

unfi controller

probably a few things I am missing, and even when doing some plex transcoding I never see it over 10%. I actually recently turned some of the cores off in a likely vein attmept to save a few watts of power and heat, but I just don't need all these threads... I only went Xeon on socket 2011 for the RAM and PCIe, that was the main reason I upgraded from my i3 6100 I previously had for my homelab. 

 

I can't speak to the game servers though, those may hit the server harder, but I still don't imagine you need all of that power for a home server.

[mr cheese]

10 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

probably a few things I am missing, and even when doing some plex transcoding I never see it over 10%

Thanks so much! Yeah these processors in tandem are costing me about $90 but if it's too overkill i may just resell and swap em back out for something lower power. But since you don't really see a high hit i'm assuming the cpus won't have a hard time consistently boosting to max so I won't worry about it too much, tysm for the info!