X99 for gaming

[Askingslushy]

What would be the best x99 Xeon for gaming? I have a hp z440 with a e5 2680 v4 currently and wondering if there’s anything that would be a better option.

[Shimejii]

40 minutes ago, Askingslushy said:

What would be the best x99 Xeon for gaming? I have a hp z440 with a e5 2680 v4 currently and wondering if there’s anything that would be a better option.

For what games exactly? It has been nearly 6 years since x99 Xeons  had any relevance for PC gaming due to the Power draw and lack of performance compared to the cheap ryzen chips. 

 

 

[aisle9]

So the thing about using X99 Xeons for gaming is that once you get into the high end, yeah, they have a ton of cores, but they also have very low clock speeds. Case in point: your E5 2680v4 is running on 14 cores that are, give or take, roughly equal to first-gen Ryzen in terms of IPC. Your system can turbo up to 3.3GHz, but in the limited experience I've had with data center Xeon gaming, they don't stay there for long. You're going to spend most of your time at 2.4GHz, which is anemic even compared to the Ryzen 3 1300X's 3.4GHz base clock/3.7 turbo. And that Xeon is going to chew up 120W to keep itself around 2.4GHz. That's where your inherent limitation is: a Broadwell die from ten years ago isn't going to open too many doors for you.

 

Now that I've gloom and doomed you, I think the right question is "what games are you planning on playing?". If you're looking at stuff like GTA V, Skyrim, Witcher 3, older classics like that, yeah, you're in good shape with what you have. I don't honestly think there's an X99 CPU out there that would make your system noticeably better on modern titles.

 

 

[J0LT]

im running a dual xeon server, and the clock speeds really hold it back. like minecraft servers suffer on there. cannot recommend

 

[jaslion]

2 hours ago, Askingslushy said:

What would be the best x99 Xeon for gaming? I have a hp z440 with a e5 2680 v4 currently and wondering if there’s anything that would be a better option.

What games are the goal? The best x99 stuff hasnt been relevant for gaming for a good while. The consumer i7's you can oc are still ok ish but in new games running at stock can cause below 60fps gaming due to cpu limits at this point.

 

Also you dont have x99 you have lga 2011v3 c602. Most chips are intercompatible but this is a server based chipset so no overclocking.

 

Your current xeon is below first gen ryzen Single core performance and I consider that the minimum baseline for modern 60fps gaming. The xeon especially suffers there when many cores have to run hard.

 

Theres not much to upgrade too and the best stuff that is available is REALLY expensive to the point you may as well just grab a used am4 board + 3600 cpu and swap on over for less than 100usd quite often.

[porina]

3 hours ago, Askingslushy said:

What would be the best x99 Xeon for gaming? I have a hp z440 with a e5 2680 v4 currently and wondering if there’s anything that would be a better option.

Look for 6 or 8 core at highest clocks you can get. Both base and boost, since base is guaranteed and boost is a nice to have.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Xeon_processors_(Haswell-based)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Xeon_processors_(Broadwell-based)

Assuming your system allows you should be able to use v3 or v4. Double check compatibility.

 

Example would be E5-2667V4 with 8 cores at 3.2 GHz base, 3.5 GHz all core, 3.6 GHz one core.

 

1 hour ago, jaslion said:

Your current xeon is below first gen ryzen Single core performance and I consider that the minimum baseline for modern 60fps gaming. The xeon especially suffers there when many cores have to run hard.

 

Theres not much to upgrade too and the best stuff that is available is REALLY expensive to the point you may as well just grab a used am4 board + 3600 cpu and swap on over for less than 100usd quite often.

You're not going to run modern games on single core. I think people forgot how bad 1st gen Ryzen was for running anything that wasn't Cinebench R15. AMD hadn't figured out how to do boost clocks yet so they fell off a cliff if you use more than 1 core. Also, those old Xeons are practically given away now so the cost to try is insignificant. I'd expect the faster Xeon models to exceed 1st gen Ryzen for gaming when more than one core is in use. That's still not great, but usable.

[Zando_]

Broadwell with the highest possible clocks while keeping to 6-8 cores is your best bet. It's significantly faster than Haswell, clock for clock. On my X99 boards, my 6950X did the same single core scores as my 5960X, but at 300MHz lower core (4.2GHz vs 4.5GHz) and 200Mhz lower ringbus (3.2Ghz vs 3.4GHz, or the 5960X might have been at 3.5 actually) clocks. 

 

That said, since you can't overclock, any Zen 2 (3000 series excluding the -G suffix APUs) chip will beat the brakes off it. That platform uses DDR4 as well, and I believe supports unregistered ECC (I don't know that it runs them as ECC, but it can run them as normal DDR4) so depending on the price of a prospective Xeon, a move to an R5 3600 or 3700X and B450/550 motherboard off the used market might be the better choice, assuming you don't have registered ECC DIMMs. 5000 series might actually be cheap enough to be a competing option now actually. 

[X-System]

Buy an used Xeon E5-2689 v4, you will have 3.7-3.8 GHz on games. Never less than 3.7 GHz. And you will have enough good FPS on games (my GPU is RTX 3080 Ti and this screenshot is Cyberpunk 2077 setting 1440p ultra with path tracing ultra - EDIT - I forgot a detail to add : with DLSS quality)