Xeon Upgrade Advice/Help

[TheZinex]

Hey guys,

First time posting here in a long while and i literally just wrote a bloody essay here and then failed to post and i lost everything.. will remember to copy ti all before i post next time  I would first off like to say sorry for a long post incoming and sorry if i miss out any information due to writing this for a second time, may think i wrote it but haven't haha.

 

I am an experienced PC builder, i have been making computers and servers for all types of applications for a few years now but have reached a upgrade path choice that i cannot decide on for my main build.. My build is as follows:

 

CPU: i7 5820K overclocked to 4.3Ghz (6C,12T)

GPU: GTX titan X Pascal Overclocked to 2GHz. (12GB 5.3Ghz Mem)

RAM: 32GB DDR4 2133Mhz (4x 8GB corsair vengeance) 

MB: Gigabyte GA-X99M-Gaming-5

PSU: 850w EVGA supernova modular 

Case: NZXT H440 Red

Cooler: Corsair H100i 

Storage: 2x Samsung evo 850 (500GB) + 2x WD green 3TB

Monitors: 3x 1440P 80Hz asus zeroframe + 50" 4K TV.   i only play games on a single monitor or the TV at any one time.but all 4 are connected at all times.

 

I play games a hell of a lot however over the years i have slowly more and more got into making games aswell as movie CGI etc... ever wanting to improve my setup and performance in these areas as it is becoming my job soon also... i began to look at Xeons. many of the current Xeons out of my preferable price point, i came across engineering samples. now I do not want to get into how Intel doesn't like these to be sold etc.. i understand all of that and understand that an engineering sample may not have the same spec or lifespan of a official released chip, but 8/10 of the videos, forum posts and articles i have read, have been positive saying that they have had a good time with ES chips. so for me at my current knowledge, i do not mind the risk.

 

The two chips i have in mind so far, are the E5 2695 V3 (Marked as 2.2GHz, 14C, 28T) which i will refer to as chip 1, and the E5 2658 V3 (Marked as 2GHz, 12C, 24T) as chip 2. both of these chips are on all the supported chips and motherboard lists for my setup so I am pretty confident it is compatible with my motherboard.

 

however i am not too sure on how much better these chips will be in my current workflow due to slower speeds even though many more cores.. programs used mostly[but are not limited to] are; Blender(i use GPU to render, CPU does handle baking and can be used for rendering some things that GPU cant), Premier Pro/Sony Vegas, After Affects, Photoshop. the latter programs i know will benefit more form the CPU then GPU acceleration. i also do a fair amount of virtualization work and a lot of multi-threaded programming.

 

An issue i have is that i am worried if these xeons may tank my performance in games??.. the stock speeds of these chips being half of what i am used to worries me. the official release of chip 1 has a turbo clock of 3.3Ghz witch worries me less and has been known to hold a solid overclock at 2.8GHz+ (i know my mileage may vary due to ES chips). chip 2 only having a turbo speed of 2.9Ghz and lesser overclocking capabilities. the only reason I am considering chip 2 over chip 1 is the cost, being 35% cheaper. 

 

my monitors can only display 80FPS anyways and my current system outputs way more then that can handle in most if not all cases. so as long as it wouldn't tank it so much it falls below 80FPS, i know wouldn't really feel the difference.

 

i have always been told fewer faster cores is better for gaming, but a few posts are saying recent/future games are being make to utilize many slower cores instead (after some research i found this relating more to the PS4/XboxOne but pc was included) not knowing how reliable this source is its not making me want to jump to as many cores as possible for gaming.

 

Anyways, Rambling aside, as you can probably tell I am very confused about what step i should take or if i should take a step at all and would be very grateful of a second, or many opinions

 

i have a few options in mind.. 

Option 1: get one of the two xeons and put it in my main build

Option 2: Build a separate computer for the xeon and use that for my CPU intensive needs and/or use it to compute things over network (network renders etc) however this is an annoyance as not all programs will be able to use this and only one build will have the titan in as well as having to buy more RAM etc... along with the inconvenience of constantly switching computers for different needs. This choice being more expensive of course which isn't preferable, plus if i was to do this i would probably go all out and get a dual socket E-ATX board and run two of the chips as well, but that still means two separate computers and only one titan etc..

Option 3: After wiring option 2 i thought maybe i could get a dual socket board and run two of the chips in my main build and sell my old motherboard and cpu or use it for something else meaning i have a single computer, dual socket xeons and the titan.. but once again this choice being more costly, new case etc but could do option 1 then move to option 3 at a later date i guess

 

still wondering weather the price different between chip 1 and 2 is worth it, as well as weather the xeons will be okay with gaming in the first place.. 

 

anyways, just hoping to hear some opinions to try and help my solve this as i cant decide on my own.. sorry for the long post and rambling on and if i missed any info just ask  

 

thankyou in advance and thankyou for actually putting up with reading this  

Zinex 

 

Posted in the workbench>new build and planning also, wasn't sure what section i should be talking about this in... I'm sorry in advance for double post :C 

 

[GDRRiley]

I would just look at grabbing 2 old quad core xeons and make a rendering PC, you could get something like a gtx 1060 for cuda. 

 

[TheZinex]

10 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

I would just look at grabbing 2 old quad core xeons and make a rendering PC, you could get something like a gtx 1060 for cuda. 

 

good video and good option, but not so much in my situation i don't think, my current PC can render much faster then what two quad cores could so would not benefit me apart from being able to game and render at the same time... maybe for that little price i could build a full render farm (multiple pcs with 2x quad core xeons) and then network compute with them... but then again to get the 28 threads it would be nearing the same price anyways  but the fact not all applications will benefit from network computing to my knowledge 

[GDRRiley]

all adobe programs can use network computing. I would the only get 2-3 of the pc and then have a small render farm. it would only be like 400$ a pc. 

[TheZinex]

If I was to make a render farm, would I be able to use the gpu and CPU of my main PC simultaneously with the render farm? So if the program wanted to use the gpu of my main PC while using the CPUs in the farm it could? Or is that not possible/non beneficial 

 

saying that, I guess I could get the E5-2695, try it and see what the gaming performance is like, if not good enough for 80hz, put in in anouther motherboard and add it to the render farm...  

 

I guess if no one really knows how much of a performance drop in gaming a Xeon will make, I'll have to just try it out and let ya'll know  hahaha