Read more.A no-nonsense board for the 2P Xeon workstation market.
Read more.A no-nonsense board for the 2P Xeon workstation market.
Yes, but will in run Crysis?
On a more serious note, how well to server platforms like this cope with gaming? tremendous over kill or surprisingly meh compared to products aimed at gaming? I'm simply curious, I've never really looked at this side of the market in any detail at all.
Also I do appreciate that this type of rig is aimed at completely different audiences and workloads..
Surprisingly meh actually, I mean for gaming you need about 4 cores and a lot of clockspeed, more cores doesn't give you a benefit usually and xeons tend to be lower speed to keep all the cores within power budget. With dual sockets performance can even be worse than with a single CPU as a task gets juggled between the CPUs. The motherboards generally aren't sli capable or if they are it's only between quadro cards which aren't good for gaming so get used to one GPU.
That said I was looking at the cost of a new skylake system recently and thought "hold on a minute, 260 or 290 GBP for an i7 quad core depending on whether I want to overclock, plus 100 pounds for the board... stuff this".
Went on ebay, bought a pair of used e5-2670s for 280 pounds, 2.6-3.3GHz, 8 sandybridge cores each (16 physical total) plus hyperthreading and PCIE 3.0. Combine that with 64GB of RAM for 120 pounds, a used workstation motherboard for 150 and bam. It's not cheap but it's way better value in my opinion and at that clock speed will probably still hold up during games, probably more so than benchmarks show because benchmarks are run on clean installs but a regular user has backups, steam, skype, chrome running in the background. Those tasks can get a whole other CPU in this system.
Yup. You're much better off putting that money in to your graphics cards, rather than looking at a dual Xeon setup. Even an i7 doesn't offer much of an advantage, with games, compared with an i5.
When it comes to where you're money should go, it's GPU grunt over CPU grunt every time.
IF you are into gaming (any) i5 quad core at +3.0 GHZ is enough, 16GB RAM DDR4/DDR3 @ 1866MHZ is enough, a 512GB SSD Hard drive (Samsung 850) is enough.......what is not enough is the LED screen coz you seriously need 4K capable O-LED screen something like 42 inches (two of them), what is also not enough is the graphics card coz you need something like a GTX 980 Ti in SLI!! OR even TRIPLE SLI.
lol. "The audio could be improved". Not really that important for a server or indeed a high-end workstation, where you would surely use a dedicated sound card?
i love this mobo
Pity about the gaming as 3 PCI-e slots able to run at a full x16 sounds great for 3X GPU'S.
And 1.024TB of ram - easily fit any complete game or 2 or 3 onto ramdisk and still have plenty to spare.
However, "whatif" they ever got something like this to work for gaming, it would definitely cost a bundle to set up, especially with 2x top end processors, so much ram and top end graphics, oh and can't forget the sound card :-)
We can all dream - whatif.
Interestingly I am running a video editing company, when it started I was just using a gaming PC, since then my upgrades have been more business than gaming but of course the 2 go hand in hand in many respects.
I plan a new build towards the end of this year to which it will be business first and gaming second (which will still kick ass for gaming) to which this kind of setup may be the way to go.
With that My plan to wait until the end of the year is based on waiting for zen, last upgrade the AMD processors where there with the i7s for my video editing but the gaming performance just wasn't there, if zen works out it may be the perfect fit for my needs.
Now that I think of it there's one area where these xeons are a definite improvement and that's number of PCIE lanes. Case in point my dual e5-2670 setup gets me 80 lanes of PCIE. What you're going to use that for without built in sli support I don't know, but storage and networking would be good. 40gbit infiniband tends to need 8 lanes and an SSD is either 4 or 8. When a desktop CPU tops out at 16 lanes and additionally has to run dual GPUs it's a bit restrictive.
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