Affordable-dual-xeon-pc

Waqar.UK

http://www.techspot.com/review/1155-affordable-dual-xeon-pc/

Just by using a single CPU - will it be enough for a 1 Gbit connection?

Guest

Don't believe this hype. The CPU'S $2000 each. You can build a killer i7-5820k machine for the cost or of just one of those xeons.

Jailer

Not hype at all

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=Xeon%20E5-2670&ssPageName=GSTL

Guest

@Waqar.UK:

http://www.techspot.com/review/1155-affordable-dual-xeon-pc/

Just by using a single CPU - will it be enough for a 1 Gbit connection?

Yes, but for that price….....
1U appliance 1:

SYS-1018D-FRN8T 16Cores/32Threats
Chelsio-T520-CR full offloading NAT

1U appliance 2:

1U appliance 3:

XG-2758

1U appliance 4:

2U appliance:
Lanner FW-8895

Intel QAT support
Intel DPDK support
AES-NI support

Custom appliance:

Netgate BCC-VE Board
CPIC Adapter 8955 adding Intel QuickAssist
CPIC Adapter 8920/8955 adding Intel QuickAssist & Ports

Tower or miniITX case appliance:

Gigabyte GA-6LISL
Intel Xeon Processor E3-1285v3
CPIC Adapter 8955 or
CPIC Adapter 8920/8955

For 1 GBit/s an Intel Xeon E3-12xxv3 @3,0GHz will be sufficient enough to handle that load for LAN and WAN.

Guest

@Jailer:

Not hype at all

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=Xeon%20E5-2670&ssPageName=GSTL

All those at that price are used and pulled from servers that ran 24/7 for years on end. If they are that cheap they are probably near EOL

Furthermore, my desktop gaming machine used to be a dual xeon. It had an EVGA Classified SR2 motherboard with two Xeon E-2606 Nehalen quad core cpu's. It also had a big brother called the classified SR-x. Both boards used the 5520 and c606 chipset which neither support things like SLI on there own. In fact EVGA incorporate additional proprietary controllers to make that work. They were great boards but lacked raw power for real gaming and I doubt sever grade boards will do great either. I own a X99 machine now with 32Gb of ram and a i7-5820k that default over clocks to 4.55ghz without exceeding 40c in use; which also scores above 100k points in 3d Mark

Guest

All those at that price are used and pulled from servers that ran 24/7 for years on end. If they are that cheap they are probably near EOL

This could be, but on the other side a Supermicro board with a Intel Xeon E5-26, 10 core @3,1GHz would be
really hard to beat for that price range and its powerfull enough to route multiple WAN interfaces with 1 GBit/s
and on top running pfSense as a fully featured UTM. If the Board will be powered by a PSX 350 Watt it would be
enough for 1 CPU, RAM and one SSD. This could be a cool strong and server grade pfSense box but also for cheap.

Guest

I guess I should point out is that Xeon doesn't come with HT where the i7-5820k does and being that it is the lowest cost of the CPU line, it has 6 cores and 6 threads that give you a total of 12 logical processors starting at 3.3ghz. The other benefit of this cpu line is DDR4 which is supported in Dual Quad-Channel.

I wanna point out you guys keep getting stuck on cost. I use the i7-5820k over clocked to 4.55ghz on an Asus X99A motherboard. I bought both the board and cpu for under $500.

2chemlud

…when it comes to Xeons: I look for 2-3 y old Dell Precision T from my dealer...

Jailer

@jbhowlesr:

I guess I should point out is that Xeon doesn't come with HT

That is not true at all.

@jbhowlesr:

I wanna point out you guys keep getting stuck on cost. I use the i7-5820k over clocked to 4.55ghz on an Asus X99A motherboard. I bought both the board and cpu for under $500.

Did you read the article? You're missing the point of the build. It's a 16 core/32 thread (<- via hyperhreading) server build with a core component cost of $700. That's a lot of computing power for $700; MUCH more than an i7-5820k.

dual E5-2670

i7-5820k

Jailer

@Waqar.UK:

http://www.techspot.com/review/1155-affordable-dual-xeon-pc/

Just by using a single CPU - will it be enough for a 1 Gbit connection?

And to answer your question, yes but there are less power hungry options that may be better suited to the task.

Guest

@Jailer:

@jbhowlesr:

I guess I should point out is that Xeon doesn't come with HT

That is not true at all.

@jbhowlesr:

I wanna point out you guys keep getting stuck on cost. I use the i7-5820k over clocked to 4.55ghz on an Asus X99A motherboard. I bought both the board and cpu for under $500.

Did you read the article? You're missing the point of the build. It's a 16 core/32 thread (<- via hyperhreading) server build with a core component cost of $700. That's a lot of computing power for $700; MUCH more than an i7-5820k.

dual E5-2670

i7-5820k

Your missing the point also. The article is about building a desktop/workstation; nothing else. Yes you can build that machine in the article but what's the point of it. 32 threads to do what exactly? It stipulates building for a desktop /workstation but the issue here is usefulness. Windows can address all those threads but at most use 2; same goes for pfsense. Should also say something that if a quad core Atom based board can run 1ghz traffic than this setup is total overkill using 3 generation old tech. Plus, X99 currently reigns at the top of Intel workstation chipset line.

So my question still stands; why build it when despite all those cores, X99 out paces the 5520 chipset and c606 in performance and gives you real performance enhancements including better ram utilization and high ram speds, SLi, m.2, msata, more PCIE lanes, nulti-media extensions, pci-express 3.0, etc

X99 is also the culmination of lessons learned from the previous 2 cpu systems and packing those lessons into a single cpu option that adds in top of the line features from high end gaming systems. What X99 is, is an all in one chipset that can do both high-level computing and play the most graphically challenging games with ease. Plus, if you haven't noticed, Intel has all but killed off dual cpu workstations by not releasing anything new. If you speak with EVGA tech support; which made the classified SR-2 and the Classified SR-X dual xeon gaming boards, They will plainly tell you that Intel has no future plans to extend 2 cpu boards into the future plans of workstations because they are no longer viable.

Speaking from experience here. My current X99 build scores almost 2 times the points in numerous benchmarks above my previous dual xeon rig using a classified SR-2; a gaming purpose made dual xeon motherboard which had 48 gigs of ram vs my current machine which has only 16gb.

Guest

I should also add that I believe the board used in the article, is no longer in production. The prices of these boards brand new on Amazon.com range from $528 to nearly $800. Plus cap it off with a $2000 new cpu cost and the overall cost is staggering.

Another question comes to mind. Why build a used last gen system if a current new gen system is equivalent in cost for new? Why is that affordable?

Oh, the article itself and some of replies to may argument overlook some key facets of computing. Comparatively speaking, Xeon and Haswell-e perform near identically gigahertz to gigahertz. What's not discussed in either is feature set of the either system. If you build the listed system, you get a motherboard with standard features for workstation environments that has a whopping 32 cores and a ton of ram but in the end that's all it is; whereas x99 has enthusiast features. A PC is more than RAM amount or GHz which has been proven time and time again. Great computing falls in the feature set which is there to enhance the overall PC performance. This i'm afraid is where the Xeon Shortfalls badly. Even if put into a pfsense environment, what good is dual CPU's if you have to rely on older sata-III when you can have m.2 which runs at near 2 to 4 times faster data transfer rates. Yes x99 is expensive but what you get is a system that is tuned all the way down to the basic interface level; something that wasn't done by intel with the Xeon. EVGA attempted it and made awesome platforms for Xeon but intel reduced the Xeon and supporting chipset to systems intended for serving and even still, Dell has started incorporating more core series processors into their power edge servers than Xeons. It signals to me that the Xeon's day has passed.

mattlach

Dual Xeons for pfSense seems like rather ridiculous overkill, especially since typical pfSense workloads are not particularly threaded.

I'd go with something that has 2 (or if you are running intensive plugins, 4) highly clocked cores instead.

Now, if you want to build a cheap dual Xeon for other reasons (like visualization) there seem to be cheaper ways.

I picked up a old new stock Supermicro X8DTE board on eBay for less than $250, two Xeon L5640's for $60 each, and 12x 8GB Registered ECC DDR3 modules for $15 a piece.

Not the newest tech, but 12 cores (24 logical) at 2.2Ghz (turbo to 2.8) and 96GB of RAM for a total of $550 (for Mobo, CPU and RAM) was a pretty damned good deal, if you ask me. :p