Dual Xeon E5 2670 for a gaming rig?

[BLoCkZ420]

So I've seen Wendells '16-Core 64GB RAM Gaming PC' video and it made me wonder - would this be a suitable base for a gaming system?
Now in case you haven't seen it - Wendell from TekSyndicate basically bought a pair of Xeon E5 2670s for cheap on eBay, along with a dual socket ASUS board and 64GBs of RAM. He was planning to use it as a (Linux)Workstation along with other partitions being loaded with Windows and even MacOS. According to him games ran just fine and this got me wondering - would this really be a viable alternative to upgrade to, say, a Skylake based system? Surely in terms of ports and newer features you wouldn't be getting anything with server hardware, not even mentioning stuff like SLI/Crossfire support (as far as I know at least). But in terms of cost it seems pretty much unbeatable right? I mean you could get two 8-cores, a mainboard and some RAM (32GB) for around 600€ (Oh yeah right, I'm in Germany here so prices might vary a bit). My usecase would mainly be gaming, but I am really interested in trying out Ubuntu as my main OS and run games that aren't Linux-compatible in a VM maybe? I'm still reading into all this stuff but I'd appreciate your guys' opinion.
What would you say? Is this something you'd do/be interested in?

[david cassar]

Would it be badass? hell yeah. Would it be viable compared to say a skylake based system for gaming? Not really no.

[RedWulf]

Games will only use 1 cpu

So if you have a good cpu and gpu on it, then sure game on, but unless you're running a server or workstation on it as well, its a waste. 

As you said, for the cost, you can get nicer features on a normal or gamer board than on a server board

[GirlFromYonder]

2 minutes ago, BLoCkZ420 said:

So I've seen Wendells '16-Core 64GB RAM Gaming PC' video and it made me wonder - would this be a suitable base for a gaming system?
Now in case you haven't seen it - Wendell from TekSyndicate basically bought a pair of Xeon E5 2670s for cheap on eBay, along with a dual socket ASUS board and 64GBs of RAM. He was planning to use it as a (Linux)Workstation along with other partitions being loaded with Windows and even MacOS. According to him games ran just fine and this got me wondering - would this really be a viable alternative to upgrade to, say, a Skylake based system? Surely in terms of ports and newer features you wouldn't be getting anything with server hardware, not even mentioning stuff like SLI/Crossfire support (as far as I know at least). But in terms of cost it seems pretty much unbeatable right? I mean you could get two 8-cores, a mainboard and some RAM (32GB) for around 600€ (Oh yeah right, I'm in Germany here so prices might vary a bit). My usecase would mainly be gaming, but I am really interested in trying out Ubuntu as my main OS and run games that aren't Linux-compatible in a VM maybe? I'm still reading into all this stuff but I'd appreciate your guys' opinion.
What would you say? Is this something you'd do/be interested in?

Follow this chart/set of rules or whatever:

2x Cores without HT(hyper threading): HELL NO FOR GAMING as modern AAA dont run on dual cores

2x Cores with HT: ONLY IF UR BUDGET DICTATES IT. Modern AAAs will run but will stutter on higher settings.

4x Cores without HT: Sweet spot for bang for the buck

4x Cores with HT: Will see a performance boost in cpu bond games: GTA 5 Arma Minecraft

6x Core with HT: Good future proofing

8x cores with HT: Overkill

Anything higher: WAAAY OVERKILL

 

AMD cpus: WAIT FOR ZEN the older ones are shit nowadays(like really old)

[Nena Trinity]

This may help?

[BLoCkZ420]

14 minutes ago, Nena360 said:

This may help?

Yeah watched those a few times already over the last couple days  Idk, I mean my current setup is fine but it would be more badass than practical to go with old server parts... I guess I'm not doing it unless I find a really 'dirt cheap' (huehue) scrapped server from a local IT-firm or something ^^

[SLAYR]

I have a single e5 2670 and I have seen games only use up to 65% of the chip, if this is purely for gaming the xeon will be crushed by something like an i5 6400. I would recommend this type of setup for programs that can use the threads, the multithreaded performance of two of the xeons is on par with a 5960x, but the singlethreaded performance is about that of an i5 2400.

[Riley-NZL]

It will work fine for gaming, however it's a lot of wasted money if you are going to only use it for gaming. If you are photo/video editing it would make some sense, but otherwise you would be better getting an Fast i7 quad core and putting the extra money into a good graphics card.

 

Also on the note of missing on modern I/O, asus does make some more enthusiast based dual socket boards that have most modern I/O such as M2 and SATA express, although I don't believe they have USB 3.1.

[Riley-NZL]

16 hours ago, RedWulf said:

Games will only use 1 cpu

So if you have a good cpu and gpu on it, then sure game on, but unless you're running a server or workstation on it as well, its a waste. 

As you said, for the cost, you can get nicer features on a normal or gamer board than on a server board

Games will happily use both CPU's, infact all the game will see is a bunch of CPU cores without any care what physical CPU the cores are from. 

[SLAYR]

11 minutes ago, Riley-NZL said:

 

Also on the note of missing on modern I/O, asus does make some more enthusiast based dual socket boards that have most modern I/O such as M2 and SATA express, although I don't believe they have USB 3.1.

You are thinking of 2011-3, these are 2011-0 there is no board with an m.2 slot, any many of these boards don't have pcie 3.0, or usb 3.0.

[Riley-NZL]

Geez didn't look at the generation. That changes things significantly, unless you can get both processors and an dual socket mainboard for dirt cheap, it makes zero sense even for video/photo editing etc. A modern high core count processor like an 6900k will probably give the dual 2670's a run for there money in anything highly parallel, and be miles ahead in gaming due to much higher clock speeds.

 

The main problem with the dual socket boards, is even getting a nice modern 2011v3, only the low clock speed, high core count processors are in the "Affordable range". the Low core count, high clock speed Xeons are incredibly expensive, which makes making a dual purpose gaming/editing rig very hard. 

 

I went through the same process, deciding between a very high end i7 vs 2x cheap xeons and and dual socket board for a dual purpose gaming/editing rig. The only Xeons that fall in the same sort of price range half roughly 1/2 the clock speed, meaning even if you are doubling the core count, you are only getting about the same overall performance, and only if your programs scale perfectly across multiple threads. Anything that doesn't could be getting less then 50% the performance of a high end i7.

 

Although games will work fine on and dual socket and will use both processors fine, it makes very little economic sense when you can get much more performance for your money else where.

 

Also for reference, the only dual socket Xeons that I can find that would really work in a gaming/editing rig (ie not sacrificing clock speed) are the E5-2643 and E5-2667 with RRP's of $1500 and $2050 respectively (+~$600 for mainboard). Personally I'd rather take an 6900K-6950X and a couple Titan XP's  

[SLAYR]

@Riley-NZL

 

With the older lga 2011 you are probabbly looking at new prices, you can get two e5 2670s for $120USD, a board for $350USD, and 32gb ddr3 ecc for $80, so for pretty much half of the price of a 6900k/5960x for the cpu/ram/ and board you can get the same level of multithreaded performance as them.