@@CraftComputing I know Hardware Haven and Raid Owl were doing a mini competition like scrapyard wars. Maybe you could get those two onboard for a competition.
One thing to watch out for with older Xeon chips pre-Haswell is the lack of FMA3 & AVX2 support. Adobe's Creative Cloud applications and many new games (like Alan Wake 2, for example) are starting to require AVX2, and it's only going to become more commonplace.
i cant find a dependable source for X99 boards at reasonable prices and some of the XEON cpu coming out china are just junk if reasonably priced especially when you consider you can dependably get a ryzen 1500X and A320 for around 80$ together, ounce you look into the cost of a PSU that can handle a decent XEON your price to performance gives older AM4 the win for so many reasons, and then there is the upgrade path of a 275$ build, i mean the old work stations are good value is you dont mind using PCI power adapters to augment a 6 pin connector, but its not going to be attractive or up-gradable just to save 25$ , and of course power draw and heat production on Xeons verses performance is awful
@@hayseedfarmboy I'm not really sure how any of that relates to my comment, but you are right, mainstream CPUs have gained enough cores to compete with and even outcompete old Xeon platforms in most regards. The only remaining reasons to choose an old Xeon platform over a mainstream setup in my view are memory capacity and PCIe connectivity.
@@Anton1699 ...any memory bandwidth. Not much point in having tons of cores without the RAM bandwidth to feed them. Xeons typically have 4 memory channels whereas current mainstream CPUs only have two.
@@Martinit0 Sure, but those older Xeon chips typically use DDR3 memory. Four channels of DDR3-1600 are just as fast as two channels of DDR4-3200, right?
I grabbed an “x99” Xeon RAM combo off Aliexpress for around $100 and was very impressed by it. For simple gaming it does just fine. Minimum frame rates could be better, but I played games at 4K on it with a 2080 I got off eBay and the whole build is really cheap and performs as good or better than a PS5/XSX. I think it was a 2670 v3. I built it for my nephew.
E5 2696v3 18C/36T w/ boost clock of 3.8GHz and using X99 BIOS Mod, can get a blend of 3.4GHz and 3.6GHz across the board with some threads hitting 3.8GHz. E5 2697v3 14C/24T w/ boost clock of 3.6GHz using same X99 BIOS Mod, can run all cores at 3.6GHz. Both CPU's are dirt cheap.
@@kestirix4602 They beat a lot of low end new cpus that are way more expensive. They are beasts. $19 for a e5-2697 gets way better performance in single core and multi core than a 14100f which is 5x the price. Building a budget pc is way cheaper and better performance going with a good v3 xeon.
@Baleed7256 E5 2696v3 has the highest boost clock speeds. It's single core is the best of the v3 v4 CPU's and multi core performance is almost at fast (within a few points) of the 22C 44T highest end v4 LGA2011 Xeon CPU's.
X99 is the platform that will continue to live on. I still use on with a E5 2696v3 and 128GB for my home file/game/streaming server (yes, it does all 3 simultaneously, with NO issue).
It does seem to be the sweet spot of old enough to be cheap, performant enough to be relevant, and lacking in major flaws - other than Windows 11 support which, let's be honest, is a pretend thing. Long live E-5 Xeons!
Bought a Lenovo P520 recently, with 64GB of ECC DDR4 and a Xeon W2235. It's a little power hungry, but it keeps up with my Ryzen 5800X... Threw in a 2nd hand RTX2070 and it's a really capable gaming machine.
And a W2135 would work in the same socket. I've seen those for $25, while the W2235 is more like $115. But the price difference for Skylake vs. Cascade Lake really comes if you try to get more than 6 cores.
@@Jordansklar0698 One reason I stayed with the RTX 2070 was because I couldn't get ReBAR to work on the P520, and that meant leaving performance on the table in newer-gen GPUs.
In Brazil, "xeon kits" are the only thing that allows you to build a computer, at an affordable price, and have decent entry-level performance. Typically in conjunction with an RX 480 2048SP. A computer like this can be assembled for less than R$2000.
@@Wirenfeldt1990 Not actually cheaper if the user ends up with a dead board that needs replacing. Several TH-camrs tested these boards and noticed their extremely high VRM temperatures. I use a X79 system and could get a replacement motherboard for very cheap while still keeping everything else. Last I saw, these kits didn't include RAM yet were almost double the price of the best-selling X99 kits. Anyway, not that it has a point talking about it right now. Brazil's new government set up new tax regulations on imports that basically killed the cost-benefit of Xeon kits from Aliexpress, except for the very very cheap X79 kits.
CraftComputing is a great channel for people of all budgets whether it’s $300 power efficient servers or powerful AMD EPYC powered systems. My personal favorite episodes are covering topics such as enterprise SLC cache cards (SUN F80) and PCIE passthrough on older Nvidia Tesla cards or newer ones like the Tesla P4.
I'm writing this comment on my ancient 2010 Mac Pro 5,1 w/ dual Xeon X5690 CPUs (3.5Ghz, 12 cores, 24 threads total) w/128GB RAM, internal RAID5 storage, PCIE NVME SSD system drive (I added this and the RAID5 drives), with Radeon RX580 GPU, that I bought on ebay about 2 years ago for $275 (including shipping). Yes, I virtually stole it with my winning auction bid - it should have been a few hundred more to be honest. I'm running Garuda Linux (Arch base) and occasionally boot up macOS Monterey. Even 14 years later it's solid as hell. It won't win any speed contests anymore but she never crashes, and needs to reboot only after an occasional kernel upgrade. It does video editing, plays a ton of games (yes, Linux can really game now) brilliantly @ 1440p and has been amazing overall. Highly recommended! EDIT: I will say, it has a 1000w power supply because it's really thirsty for energy. Probably drawing 500-750 at any given moment. There's always a cost for a machine that does so much.
I don't know ... AM4 boards are cheap, used Ryzen is cheap, DDR4 3200 CL16 is cheap... Here in Germany you can get a B450 board and 16GB of said memory for under 100,- Euros new including tax. And for games a Ryzen 5600 or even 3600 will stomp all over those Xeons. Don't get me wrong, I have a 2680 v4 sitting in an ASRock X99 Taichi with 128GB of registered DDR4 and it's great as a homeserver. But I don't see the Xeon route to be viable (specifically) for a gaming system anymore.
Some years ago it made sense to build a xeon, but like you said, nowadays an am4 mobo is affordable and crazy upgradeable. You can make a basic cpu with an athlon 3000g and update it up to a ryzen 9 basically.
@@chedds No. The 3600 is just as fast as my 2680 V4 was in multicore and twice as fast in single core. All that at half the TDP. I also wrote "(specifically) for a gaming system". And since that comment the 5700X3D has been released and pushed the old Xeon option further into irrelevance.
@@noenken the 2680v4 is far from being one of the best Xeons, both in multi and single. If you only care about benchmarks sure the single core score of Xeons like the 2667v4 and 2687w v4 are way lower than the 3600's, but in an actual real world gaming section both Xeons will be either on par or at max 10 fps below the 3600 And the 5700x3d throwing Xeons at irrelevance? Here the 5700x3d is about R$1200 (250-300$) just the CPU while an 2697v3 for example which with TBU and some light memory tweaks can match the 3600 is less than R$100 (around 20$), what is the 5700x3d dethroning here? Maybe some newer gen Intels but not Xeons, the people who buy cheap X99 Xeons are not buying the 5700x3d and people buying the 5700x3d are not buying X99 Xeons
@@chedds If your "actual real world gaming" scenario shows that little of a difference your setup is suffering from a dramatic mismatch between CPU and GPU. X99 is a bad idea for gaming these days and has been when I wrote my initial comment. That doesn't mean that you have to change what you're using, please keep that in mind. I'm not saying that. But I am saying for anyone who does not already have it .. X99 isn't worth it for games. It just isn't.
Big personal fan of Jeff's work over at Craft Computing. Nice to see him featured here. Used/New enterprise gear is pretty fun, and Jeff's channel dives deep into Gaming, Workloads, and self hosted home services. Join us over there for his content AND his reoccurring live show wednesday to see what kind of shenanigans we all find ourselves in. Jeff ALSO regularly reviews gaming handhelds, head mounted displays, monitors, trackball mice... and much more. See ya'll around ^_^
I’ve managed to build a Dell precision t5810 2690v4 16gb ram 1tb m.2ssd 1080ti for 250 dollars. 4K hdr 80fps average on most modern games. The only downside is the loud fans but it works well as a heater in the winter haha. Love your content @craftcomputing.
does your motherboard use the dell 5-pin fan header? I bought some cable converters online so you can run standard 4-pin. though I can't tell whether or not the t5810 uses standard 120mm fans. if you can access the header on the mobo you can just plug the converter in and attach a standard 4-pin fan. my dell t3500 originally came with loud delta fans, the sound was unbearable for me lol
I did a similar t5810 2690v4, 64G ram, 1000w PSU, SSD/m.2 SSD/4tbHD/4k capture card and a 2080Ti (special power cable bought) total cost was around $700. This is my workstation but it can play too. Have fun with yours.
I got mine going for about 400 bucks. E5-2695V3 14 core 64GB DDR4 on an Asus motherboard. Paint, filters, and fans were the most expensive parts. I got the motherboard and processor together as a combo for a hundred bucks, it came with a tall 4 headtube heatsink but it hit the cover. I got a Dell workstation heatsink for it with a faster fan. Really it's a gamer board with RGB but I use it like a workstation it doesn't have a glass cover. I have a 750-watt Corsair RGB power supply that glows colors out the bottom. The memory was inexpensive compared to desktop prices it was about 6 bucks per stick. It looks weird having glowing colors on a workstation without a see though cover but I got a good deal on the glowing parts. My office PC glows colors now too.
I got an HP Z440 Workstation for 80 bucks a few months back with a GTX 970 in it. Put a E5-2697V3 (14 cores, 20 bucks) into it and upgraded the RAM to 64GB (50 bucks). It's a nice homeserver-lab but I will probably sell it soon as a workstation/editing rig. Power draw is too high to keep it running constantly.
I did something similar. Grabbed a dell precision for 50 dollars. Put a E5-2680v4 so only 14 cores. 15 bucks though. And then 60 on 64GB of ram. 25 for a SFP+ card and it got deployed as a second node for the homelab. And now I’m debating doing it all over so I can have 3 nodes running.
I have nearly the same build as a NAS and homelab VM Host. An HP Z440 with an E5-2697v3 and 128GB of RAM. I paid a few bucks extra for specifically Samsung branded RDIMMs. And I intentionally got 2400mhz instead of 2133, in case I want to migrate it from Braodwell v3 up to Haswell v4, which would shave a few watts off that draw while still being faster. You can mitigate a lot of that power draw if you feel comfortable BIOS modding, by giving the chip a slight undervolt. And if you only need 14 cores, but not 28 threads, disable the Hyperthreading to shave even more off the top. A mindful GPU choice can save power too. I went with an RX 5700 instead of the 5700XT, just because of lower power draw. And the GPU can be undervolted also. A 4x NVMe adapter works because of PCIe Bifurcation support in that second x16 slot, as it runs straight off the CPU lanes and not the chipset. That means you can avoid SATA drives too.
For people like me, on a tight budget and living in a country with limited access to new technologies, old Xeons are truly a godsend! I'm grateful some TH-camrs are shedding light on this because the level of elitism among many American TH-camrs is unfortunately quite astounding
Dont worry...soon all world become like your situation atm...im in italy...and I looking for build a dual xeon cuz prices grows too much for little more performance. So, understand you very well. Cheers😊
I think the value lies in used workstations like the Lenovo Thinkstation. I picked up my ‘mystery’ p510 for 80 bucks incl. shipping and received quite the bargain system. 850W platinum PSU, 14tb server HDD, 512Gb NVME, 64 GB of RAM, an e5-2690v4 and some random lab card I sold for 150 bucks. So basically a free gaming PC. Boungt an RX 580 and an IBM Model M from the leftover money, hooked the system to two Eizo s2202w I got for free and well… It works pretty well for what it is. Even the monitors are pretty serviceable (they got some very hq monitor stands that weigh a ton lol).
@@ubercorey Essentially German Craigslist. These Workstations get pretty cheap at certain times of a year in certain areas of the world. Since these workstations are often leased to companies they get insanely cheap when a big corporation decides to upgrade their IT and the leasing partner needs to get rid off the old hardware. Also ig I was extremely lucky with this PC. I originally wanted an old MacPro to tinker with but then I stumbled across the Thinkstation with no specs or model number listed, offered 70 bucks incl. shipping and had the system 1 week later. Heavy af tho. Weighs over 28 kgs.
I looked into this a while back, but the cost of motherboards put me off. Didn't know about the chinese boards, this could be a game changer! Great vid
from my experiences 1 in 4 of the Chinese X99 motherboards are bad and allexpress can take months on a refund, not mention the hassle of doing the return
One of my grandson's friends has it pretty hard right now and asked me to help him build his first PC on the uber cheap, managed to grab an Aliexpress special that had a E5 2650V2 with 16GB of RAM, mobo, and a cooler for just $66, slapped another 8GB for $4, a $37 nice looking white case, $40 500w Thermaltake, a 1TB NVME on sale for $37, an RX580 2048 for $50 and a Win10 Pro key and he managed to end up with a sub $260 PC that plays all his eSports titles above 60FPS. So for super duper uber budget builds ya can't go wrong with the Aliexpress Xeon kits.
Depending on how well they perform in Handbrake, I’m in the market. I’m still trying to decide between an old workstation or a Chineseium motherboard combo. With a workstation my buy in is roughly $400 without HDDs. As it stands I don’t like being limited to 4 HDDs. With the Frankenstein motherboard combo my buy in is around $460 when I add in a CPU cooler, PSU, and that’s without HDDs.
the other reason why some people may find old xeon builds attractive is because they run on DDR3 ram, which is really really cheap nowadays. Not saying that DDR4 is expensive, but for people who have a very tight budget, every cent counts. another good budget option is to buy an old office pc and upgrade it. I have a dell precision t3500 which I use almost daily. Takes a standard ATX power supply and the motherboard has 6x4gb ddr3 ram slots for a max 24gb ram. the fan headers on the mobo are propietary but you can buy adapters to run standard 4-pin fans. chucked out the old dual-core W3503 and put in a 6-core 12-thread xeon X5675 (have to update bios first). The unit originally came with a low-spec quadro gpu, took it out and replaced it with a gtx 1060 3gb. So far it's been fairly good for most average-spec 1080p games, I don't play the latest AAA games so it's sufficient for me. if you go for the used office pc route, just watch out for the ones that use proprietary power supply form factors or motherboard pins, make sure you can still buy replacements or pin converters, otherwise you'll have a big problem if your power supply dies.
I used to have a crazy idea of harvesting the CPUs and memory from old workstation PCs (not servers) and salvaging motherboards that aren't proprietary junk. I think the challenge would be sourcing motherboards to replace them. But the scrappy budget PC could live on.
I was an auto tech for 34 years and can't do it anymore because of medical problems so in order to stay busy I got into the PC world as a hobby. I sourced some very cheap parts to do my first build based around inexpensive Asus LGA 1150, 32gb of DDR3 and an old Thermaltake case. I have a Xeon 1270v3 (3.50 - 3.90 GHZ) or a I7-4790 (3.60 - 4.0 GHZ) both under 85W, and a Corsair 750W PSU that I can use with an EVGA GTX 1060. These cheap parts that are hitting the market are right in my ballpark for budget and my expectations. The cost of the parts came out to $125 US. I'm learning alot from so many channels like this one and Craft computing and having alot of fun doing it.
I havea BOINC farm of i5-8500 little SFF boxes. Desktop 65w CPUs from popular auction site over 100 of them. In the years I've had them, only a few fans have failed they really all work. It is fans that wear out that's it.
It’s not so cheap anymore when you pick some of the better quality mainboards like the Huananzhi ones with for example a Xeon V4. The time to do this was 2-3 years ago. Now the ryzen or Intel parts are cheap enough that I would not go with it. The usecase where you need a lot of PCIE lanes is still valid though.
Still have an 2 X99 servers, 1 is a NAS and the other recently retired Proxmox machine. Before it was Proxmox it was my workstation and did fine at that too. They are starting to show their age though, as someone else said some newer features like AVX2 AVX512 are starting to slow down the older chips for some workloads but if you don't need newer instruction sets they still work great on a budget.
Ive got a e5 2680 v2 running 3.594 all cores idling and boosts to 4.294 all cores it took about 2 days tuning in bios and a Asus ws pro board but it still only uses 122 watts at max load in stress tests for 10 cores 20 threads and it doesnt go over 68 degrees in stress tests working on finding an Asus x99 ws board for my next build i have more fun seeing just what i can get a xeon to do than I would with a newer system that just works
Used Xeons are unbeatable for low cost workstation if your main applications are scaling well with cpu count.. But it depends quite a bit on the work load you consider. For 3d rendering, scientific / fluid simulation they are great. Also if you need a stable server with lots of cores and memory for example to run VMs but your budget is limited and you don't need that fastest performance, these are great too. But based on my experience, for mixed use cases, where a blend of single thread and parallel are common, a Ryzen 5600x or 5800x system or similar is much better overall but can get much more expensive if you need a lot of RAM.
i have loved the old xeon paradigm for years , but apart from spefic use cases and and multicore or multi socket systems . its far easier and cheaper to just buy some old ryzens i have made lots of ultra budget pcs recently based around r7 1880 pro cpus and b350 motherboards , and yes they are slower than todays , but on par with most xeons and way more power efficient and more modern platform
A first gen Ryzen is around Broadwell-E/EP performance in most cases. In gaming it's more like in between Ivy Bridge and Haswell. Meanwhile Broadwell-EP goes up to 18c/36t? If you need the extra cores, Intel Xeon still wins. If you do any kind of multitasking or streaming/recording while gaming? Xeon still wins in many cases.
I run a reconditioned HP workstation with dual Xeon E5-2680 V4 Cpu's and 128GB Ram Got masses of storage bays and ports up the wazoo, Run a 8GB graphics card for it Think I paid about US$ 400 for it a couple of years ago with 9tb of storage all in mint condition. Never missed a beat. Absolute tank I really love the laser etched system map on the inside of the main cover! Passmark scores of 1,961 SC (Dismal) but 29,039 Multicore (Yesss!)
You have to be a bit careful with the old Xeons. Make sure you get one that has AVX and AVX2 instructions. Some modern programs and games will refuse to launch without them. I think Baulders Gate 3 is one of the games that do not work without AVX instructions. For this reason I would not recommend getting anything older than a LGA-2011 V3 Xeon.
The cheapest and least risky way suggested by channels that deal exclusively with servers for finetuning and inference of LLMs all suggest buying refurbished servers that hit the market maybe around 2014. You often get them with years of warranty left and you can get server GPUs that are not that expensive if you invest the time
In 2013 i bought a i7 4820k a 4 core ivy bridge e on an x79 mobo. I went with that chip and platform for the quad channel memory. In 2019 i upgraded to a xeon e5 1680 v2 an 8 core chip, i kept that for 4 more years. I was able to get 10 years out of a mobo, ram, and AIO. I built a new system in 2023 because i didn't have AVX 2 and the chip didn't support TPM, which is needed for window 11, which will be the only windows OS supported after October 2025.
Gents great video, perhaps I watched too fast the video but didn’t saw any TDP reference, that would be great to grasp the idea for home server running 24/7
PCIE lanes with bifurcation is good for multiple SSDs. Dual x16 slots which drop to x8 when both are populated are useless for quad SSD cards (even if your graphics card doesn't mind) and motherboard-based SSD slots need to be looked at very carefully to see if you're bottlenecking them through the chipset. This basically means dropping back to PCIE gen3 , but that's probably ok if you're prioritising capacity over speed. Going PCIE gen4 seems to get very expensive in the workstation/server arena.
I am running a 4 core 8 thread 3.6ghz xeon that supports 40 pcie gen 3 lanes with 32gb of ddr3 running in quad channel. Old ass setup but still running well. A little over a year ago I upgraded from gtx 680 4gb gpu to an AMD 6600 8gb. I am gaming at 1080p with anywhere from medium to ultra settings based on the game. I can even upgrade my ram as high as 128gb ecc IF I wanted to. Nothing about my rig is amazing but it is still running and getting the job done. One down side is without trickery I won't be able to use an os newer than windows 10.
i have bought a Dell R630 for 600€ including 2 Dell 12 3.5inch Bay PowerVault. My R630 had 128GB RAM with 4 DIMM and a single xeon e5 2603v3, external HBM controller for the PowerVault's, 4 port 10gbit sfp+ and a internal perc h330 mini. i needed a powerful server for my projects. I invested another 600€ for 2 xeon E5 2683v4 and another set of 4 DIMM for the second socket, a cooler for the second socket as well and 8 sata SSD 500gb each with drive caddy's. Now i have enough storage and compute power for a high memory bandwidth and parallelization workload. 128gb is not much for my projects, but i can upgrade fairly cheap if i need to, the limit of my system is 3Tb RAM and if i would buy the same RAM modules i have installed. i would top out at 768Gb and that's is more than enough for the moment. Surprisingly in those PowerVault's were drives as i bought them, all of them are 4Tb SAS 12gbit 10k. The PoweVault's were dropped and got dented significantly. I got them for free on top. I mean why not, both work fine, only a total of 2 drives are nonoperational. i set up my R630 with ubuntu server on a USB3.0 drive internally, the SATA SSDs are in RAID10 for maximum speed and somewhat failure prove because those drives getting stressed a lot Even the data on those drives are volatile. The Powervault's are in Raid 6 each and a copy of its self, because this data is important for me and because i know those drives were dropped, i expect drive failure in the future. For the most part my R630 idles around 84W and doing nothing and acting like a NAS for me, but if i need the power, i loading um the SSDs and run my script and waiting usually Hours for the result. if i would do that on my work and game system this takes days to complete and i got sick of that, therefore the R630 in the end the R730 would be the smarter option. i don't regret it, it's the best thing i ever bought. This thing is crazy fast.
I have a Xeon i5 4rth Gen and 1 ZEON with 2070 SUPER RTX cards SLI'd. I do a lot of video upscaling at 4k and 8k locally on the machines and I have no issues and it's insanely fast.
The power consumption for some Xeon workstations is no joke. I bought one and my apartment electricity bill doubled. Depending on where you live and how much your electricity costs, you can spend enough in one years increased power costs to where you would have been better off just buying a new system.
I've a no brand Chinese X79 motherboard £56, paired with Xeon E5-2690v2 £10, 64GB of DDR3 14900 server ram £12. The mobo supports NVME gen3 x4 and boot times are pretty quick. For older games, virtualization and other homelab stuff, it's great. It's the fastest machine I've had, so far. Sure I'd love something better, but more importantly, to me, it's affordable.
I'm very new in this world of server class parts as I just bought a Dell 5820 Tower. Currently I have a 2155 CPU + P4000 GPU and just wondering my upgrade options even if I have to gut the case. I just love the hard drive bays in the front and the overall form factor. It's a very appealing look, just wondering if there are any upgrades I can make to this system to make it more power efficient or if it's stuck as is
You know what, I have several used Dell dual Xeon workstations and they work acceptably well for virtual machines and Borderlands 1, 2, 3. I like those used Dell Xeons. T7400, T7600, T7910.
picked up a old x5690 Xeon for $33USD and run it my Asus P6T vanilla mobo as a daily desktop driver clocked steady at 4.507GHz in a modded bios. Added an LSI 9271-8i card in RAID5 which has throughput of ~2500MB/s (4 units Samsung 500GB SSDs) Not bad for a motherboard produced in 2009! 15 years old and still churning out with 280mm watercooled AIO CPU cooler.🤣🤔😉😇 Cheers
What are your thoughts on buying used xeon workstations, like hp z workstations or dell precision workstations. I have both and they are very reliable beasts and can be had on the cheap.
Very useful information, though it's interesting how much prices vary in different parts of North America. Where I am in BC, Canada, there is an added tax value of 12% to any purchases made in North America and various countries excluding China. Now imagine what it's like shopping/selling on eBay, where value is further inflated by their 13% cut on sales. Not excluding import fees (again excluding China). For true budget value as you discuss here, in my area it's only achievable by circumstance or by ordering from China where there are generally no shipping fees/12% tax added to an order. Luckily, common brand names for CPU's and motherboards are available for great deals on Aliexpress. Source: I work pretty hard to source deals so I can pass on savings to BC residents.
X99 combo on Aliexpress now around $70 . E5 2680v4 , 16GB DDR4, Mougol x99 Mobo . If that aint a bargain i dont know what is and this supports FMA3 & AVX2 instructions 🙏
Some xeons come in Low Voltage versions (they are just as powerful), but they are a GREAT choice if you're using a PSU on the lower wattage side (such as an HP 800 G1)
great and all but I still dont really have an answer, I can get a cheap broadwell based system right now but its....8 years old.....I mean yeah its cheap but probably for a reason right?
I'm seeing used server/workstation PCs on the market with Xeon Ws that seem to be based on Skylake architecture rather than Broadwell/Haswell architecture, including coming with DDR4 RAM rather than DDR3. I wonder if those are significantly better than the Broadwell and Haswell ones that Jeff is talking about. I've heard that the 6-core ones like the W-2135 are comparable to CPUs like the Ryzen 5 3600, but that's purely hearsay on my part.
Would you recommend either an X99 or an X299 workstation, paired with an RX6600 (a card i already own) for a media server/video editing/light gaming machine?
theres 240hz monitors... theres also 500+hz monitors already. cant say its the same big step like from 60 to 144hz. but still when you experienced 240 for the long time - its a pain to look at 144hz
I got a 10 year old pc. I upgraded the first Gen Intel 7 processor to top tier xeon processor, that fits in the same socket. I bought it via AliExpress. It cost me only 10 dollars /euros.
Actually, i find 2nd hand xeons are better at higher resolution gaming because their clock speeds are not the limiting factor. In low res gaming where the cpu clock becomes a bottleneck, xeons suffer a bit. Also, core- intensive games like Civ or Stellaris can leverage the core count on the xeons.
10 หลายเดือนก่อน
I don't understand why the CPU single core clock speed must be high to service these GPUs in games. Surely there is an instruction queue? Is this also an issue where you are using a Xeon system with modern GPUs, like RTX 3090 TI 24GB, used for Stable Diffusion? Is there still an issue with single core performance of Xeons? What are the best second hand Xeons? You can get lower power 3.9 Ghz (without turbo) Xeons with 8 cores.
Old workstation PCs are GREAT, but the problem is that you can't install Windows 11 on them. I use my PCs for work, never gaming, so getting and older workstation is not going to work for me without being able to upgrade to Windows 11.
Prices are way off or changed now. Now you can get e5-2697 v3 for $20. Motherboard cpu and ram combo is $80. And thats for a xeon that has a clock in the 3ghz range and higher l3 cache. Compare that $80 of older stuff to newer stuff same performance youre looking at $300-$350. $80 for a mobo cpu and ram is good. Just need cooler, psu, m.2 ssd and a case. Can get all that for another $190. All in like $270 for a mid tier gaming pc that would cost around $600-$800 for all new gen stuff with same performance.
Used market: DDR3 is about 1/2 the price of DDR4. Server DDR4 is more than desktop DDR4. Server DDR3 is less than desktop DDR3. Make SURE you get one that works with your system...most must have 1 or the other...few can handle either.
I can remember when somebody like this said that CPUs would never exceed 3 GHz clock speed. Interesting that used server grade memory is cheaper than newer memory.
You can put a 4th Gen I7 in the same LGA2011 socket with the same X99 chipset as those Xeons. Have a couple of 4th Gen I7-4690Xs (?) octacores that I got for approx. £40 each and are easy to overclock (all cores) to 4.6Ghz - one being totally stable to over 4.8GHz (but not quite as high as 4.9 ;-D)
Can a Xeon cpu even function without ecc memory? Will it boot? My Asus X99 Prime A-ll with Xeon E5-2690v4 will not boot unless I use ecc ddr4 memory. When I substitute the Xeon with my i7 6900x it will only boot with regular ddr4 (Corsair Vengeance) ram.
Ive build 4 systems on some xeons from asian data centers. 2 dies after over 1Y. Some ordered cpu's didnt work at all. It depends from where for how much you can order your parts. I dont do such systems anymore. I think that it is much more futureproof and reliable to buy newer parts.
I've been running x79 for a long time with a heavily overclocked 1680v2 (8c16t) and 2666mhz ddr3 in quad channel. With my previous 1070 it was more than enough to max out the graphics card in almost any game. Almost! Except those which need any of the newer instructions. In those games, I suddenly felt the age of the system. Now I have a 3090 with the same build... Don't even bother. In literally any game at literally any settings I'm heavily cpu bottle necked. Not to mention all the other issues which come with such an old platform (usb3+, pcie 3+, old mobos, power consumption, etc etc). I love my rig. I love overclocking and you can't do that anymore at all. But still, I am buying new stuff today :(
Get an i5-8500 or i7-8700 Coffeelake SFF HP Prodesk or Elitedesk (just a bigger box, 1 more PCI x x16 slot) or Optiplex SFF for less than $200. Usually i5-8500 is 120 bucks or less, 6 core 3.8GHZ all core. Get a PCI Express ribbon cable and another PSU, bridge the orange wire to ground to turn it on to power the GPU! Upgrade RAM to 16 or 32GB cheaply DDR4 2666. You're done!
I'm piecing together a custom 4k gaming PC with a Lenovo p520 motherboard at the heart. A w2155 makes a decent combo when paired with an amd 6750xt. 900 dollars with a full ATX case, 1050 if you include a Blu ray drive for ripping movies😈
The newest Xeon that's obsolete enough to be cheap is skylake. That's a lot faster than xeons older than it. And you'll get 4 channel DDR4 memory cheap, that brings the memory bandwidth up to equal to much more expensive current gen DDR5 at 2 channel. Why is it cheap? Well you're only getting PCIe 3 and with clock speeds up to 4 ghz, you're gonna get about half the peak single thread performance of the fastest current cpus. And you might not get NVMe support And don't expect resizable bar. But I just put together a super cheap Dell Precision 5820 tower. They're so well built. My 6 core W-2135 processor cost $25. But if I want NVMe drives instead of SATA, I have to get a replacement backplane which is cheap but the hot swap caddies for NVMe drives are expensive. Or I could get some PCIe NVMe card. Dell makes one with bios support for 4 drives (and that's not a given on other motherboards). Note, the motherboard in mine also supports Cascade Lake which is NOT cheap. And this points to another reason Skylake is cheap. Cascade Lake has built in Spectre and Meltdown mitigations and Skylake doesn't. Also Cascade Lake has some new AI instructions.
Today now consumer CPU's have 6c/12t and high single thread performance (at low power use) server parts only have PCIE lains left as a selling point, today it's a hard sale when a 3600 or 3800 is so cheep used.
At this point, upgrading to anything better than my 4790k for an affordable price would be a godsend. I live in Japan and pc parts are stupidly expensive, even for low end stuff. Moreso when you get paid in yen.
The biggest issue that I didn't hear mentioned here is Windows 11 support. We only have 1 year of support left for Windows 10. That is a major negative for me.
Here's where modern cost analysis fails when comparing one system to another. I take a CPU, figure out my gaming time/mo. and look at the difference in power consumption for the SYSTEM (not the CPU) when using one system vs. the other. That's it right? No, it's not. If you run AC in your home you have to consider what the extra heat being pumped into the room causes. How much more does your AC run to keep the room at the temp. you set it for. This ends up being bigger than what people think. And yet I'll watch TH-camrs do cost analysis based on the CPU alone, but that's not how it works. Server hardware tends to be a bad value for home PC use cases. They're made for a much different use case and because of it they have transistors powered that will for the most part never be used. I don't have to do a cost analysis to know the 5800X3D and 7800X3D are outstanding game parts and regardless of the fact the CPUs cost a little more, over the long run total cost will be less. There's a lot of difference in a CPU that's gaming around 45W and one that's gaming around 125W, once again taking into account how much heat it put into a room and what that does to the AC costs. I mean in Data centers, their cost analysis is mostly centered on air conditioning.
I got 2697v2 system 12 core best cpu from ivy bridge xeon is amazing value i buy cpu for 30 usd from AliExpress and 32 gb ram rx 580 whole build with case and everything cost me 300 usd. Is not something groundbreaking but i try build system cheapest possible which is capable of gaming and was very nice bet I love it. Pretty much can play any modern game on 60+ fps without few latest games like alan wake 2, avatar and starfield where you need much more powerful pc anyway but for those can do 30 stable fps
And if you are in the business And you have cpus and ecc memory, then your entire platform (cpu+memory+mobo) is just buying a mobo for your computer. My pc is a xeon Gold 6150, based system and has 96gb ecc 2933mts My kid's pc is an e5-2667-v3 with turboboost unlock applied, and 96gb ecc 2133mts Bothe are paired with 1660super, and both were upgraded from x58 xeon systems All i had to do was buy mobo's.... Sometimes, the reason is just not wanting to waist good and working HW
I'm older and wear glasses. I straight can't tell the diff beyond 45 fps and 1440p. It's why I'm horrible at fps and RTS games. My eyes can't keep up. So for me a middling gaming computer running 1440p at 40 fps for 95% of games is good enough. I really can't see spending 3k+ to get that 100 fps 4kp cyberpunk experience.
Lol I thought they were going to get talking about old server cpus . . . . I came to find out what they thought I should be doing with my x58 motherboard modded to use an x5670
I think, Ryzen 1600/2600/3600 + Mobo, used..will cost just as little as one of those Ali combos. And a Ryzen combo will be better than a china motherboard.
Hey, i know that guy!
As always, he is Jeff
Just Jeff.
Never heard of him. Does he review stuff drunk or something? 🤔
Was the beer good?
lol . Good video
I would love to see a "Scrapyard Wars" type series between PC World and some of the channels they have been collaborating with recently!
I'd be down 🤘
@@CraftComputing I know Hardware Haven and Raid Owl were doing a mini competition like scrapyard wars. Maybe you could get those two onboard for a competition.
One thing to watch out for with older Xeon chips pre-Haswell is the lack of FMA3 & AVX2 support. Adobe's Creative Cloud applications and many new games (like Alan Wake 2, for example) are starting to require AVX2, and it's only going to become more commonplace.
Most of the activities around the old Xeons are on the Haswell generation which do have AVX2 and FMA3.
i cant find a dependable source for X99 boards at reasonable prices and some of the XEON cpu coming out china are just junk if reasonably priced especially when you consider you can dependably get a ryzen 1500X and A320 for around 80$ together, ounce you look into the cost of a PSU that can handle a decent XEON your price to performance gives older AM4 the win for so many reasons, and then there is the upgrade path of a 275$ build, i mean the old work stations are good value is you dont mind using PCI power adapters to augment a 6 pin connector, but its not going to be attractive or up-gradable just to save 25$ , and of course power draw and heat production on Xeons verses performance is awful
@@hayseedfarmboy I'm not really sure how any of that relates to my comment, but you are right, mainstream CPUs have gained enough cores to compete with and even outcompete old Xeon platforms in most regards.
The only remaining reasons to choose an old Xeon platform over a mainstream setup in my view are memory capacity and PCIe connectivity.
@@Anton1699 ...any memory bandwidth. Not much point in having tons of cores without the RAM bandwidth to feed them. Xeons typically have 4 memory channels whereas current mainstream CPUs only have two.
@@Martinit0 Sure, but those older Xeon chips typically use DDR3 memory. Four channels of DDR3-1600 are just as fast as two channels of DDR4-3200, right?
I grabbed an “x99” Xeon RAM combo off Aliexpress for around $100 and was very impressed by it. For simple gaming it does just fine. Minimum frame rates could be better, but I played games at 4K on it with a 2080 I got off eBay and the whole build is really cheap and performs as good or better than a PS5/XSX. I think it was a 2670 v3. I built it for my nephew.
E5 2696v3 18C/36T w/ boost clock of 3.8GHz and using X99 BIOS Mod, can get a blend of 3.4GHz and 3.6GHz across the board with some threads hitting 3.8GHz.
E5 2697v3 14C/24T w/ boost clock of 3.6GHz using same X99 BIOS Mod, can run all cores at 3.6GHz.
Both CPU's are dirt cheap.
Scrap wars
if games were good-optimized in terms of multipe core usage, those cpus would be beasts
@@kestirix4602 They beat a lot of low end new cpus that are way more expensive. They are beasts. $19 for a e5-2697 gets way better performance in single core and multi core than a 14100f which is 5x the price. Building a budget pc is way cheaper and better performance going with a good v3 xeon.
Quick question-I'm new to this. With your knowledge, which processor should I use for a game server where single-core performance is necessary?
@Baleed7256 E5 2696v3 has the highest boost clock speeds. It's single core is the best of the v3 v4 CPU's and multi core performance is almost at fast (within a few points) of the 22C 44T highest end v4 LGA2011 Xeon CPU's.
X99 is the platform that will continue to live on. I still use on with a E5 2696v3 and 128GB for my home file/game/streaming server (yes, it does all 3 simultaneously, with NO issue).
It does seem to be the sweet spot of old enough to be cheap, performant enough to be relevant, and lacking in major flaws - other than Windows 11 support which, let's be honest, is a pretend thing. Long live E-5 Xeons!
@@albertsquest I used a, uh...freeware* version of Server 2019. 🤫. It works great!
Got the same cpu, only running 32gb but I’m not multitasking.
Still using a 4114. I bought it 2nd hand but it was still glistening it was so new.
a pentium 4 would do all of that simultaneously without issues, let alone a Xeon or your model.
Bought a Lenovo P520 recently, with 64GB of ECC DDR4 and a Xeon W2235. It's a little power hungry, but it keeps up with my Ryzen 5800X... Threw in a 2nd hand RTX2070 and it's a really capable gaming machine.
And a W2135 would work in the same socket. I've seen those for $25, while the W2235 is more like $115. But the price difference for Skylake vs. Cascade Lake really comes if you try to get more than 6 cores.
I was considering that for my niuldbut a rx 7600
@@Jordansklar0698 One reason I stayed with the RTX 2070 was because I couldn't get ReBAR to work on the P520, and that meant leaving performance on the table in newer-gen GPUs.
In Brazil, "xeon kits" are the only thing that allows you to build a computer, at an affordable price, and have decent entry-level performance. Typically in conjunction with an RX 480 2048SP. A computer like this can be assembled for less than R$2000.
I’m curious if Mobile CPUs on motherboards are cheaper?
@@Wirenfeldt1990 Not actually cheaper if the user ends up with a dead board that needs replacing. Several TH-camrs tested these boards and noticed their extremely high VRM temperatures. I use a X79 system and could get a replacement motherboard for very cheap while still keeping everything else. Last I saw, these kits didn't include RAM yet were almost double the price of the best-selling X99 kits.
Anyway, not that it has a point talking about it right now. Brazil's new government set up new tax regulations on imports that basically killed the cost-benefit of Xeon kits from Aliexpress, except for the very very cheap X79 kits.
Yeah but whats the power pulls on these. Ik some of them use 1200w psu. Is it woRth it to draw so much power?
R$2000 for a RX 570 system is completely crazy
CraftComputing is a great channel for people of all budgets whether it’s $300 power efficient servers or powerful AMD EPYC powered systems.
My personal favorite episodes are covering topics such as enterprise SLC cache cards (SUN F80) and PCIE passthrough on older Nvidia Tesla cards or newer ones like the Tesla P4.
I'm writing this comment on my ancient 2010 Mac Pro 5,1 w/ dual Xeon X5690 CPUs (3.5Ghz, 12 cores, 24 threads total) w/128GB RAM, internal RAID5 storage, PCIE NVME SSD system drive (I added this and the RAID5 drives), with Radeon RX580 GPU, that I bought on ebay about 2 years ago for $275 (including shipping). Yes, I virtually stole it with my winning auction bid - it should have been a few hundred more to be honest. I'm running Garuda Linux (Arch base) and occasionally boot up macOS Monterey. Even 14 years later it's solid as hell. It won't win any speed contests anymore but she never crashes, and needs to reboot only after an occasional kernel upgrade. It does video editing, plays a ton of games (yes, Linux can really game now) brilliantly @ 1440p and has been amazing overall. Highly recommended! EDIT: I will say, it has a 1000w power supply because it's really thirsty for energy. Probably drawing 500-750 at any given moment. There's always a cost for a machine that does so much.
X99 is the ultimate budget platform at the right price
I don't know ... AM4 boards are cheap, used Ryzen is cheap, DDR4 3200 CL16 is cheap... Here in Germany you can get a B450 board and 16GB of said memory for under 100,- Euros new including tax. And for games a Ryzen 5600 or even 3600 will stomp all over those Xeons. Don't get me wrong, I have a 2680 v4 sitting in an ASRock X99 Taichi with 128GB of registered DDR4 and it's great as a homeserver. But I don't see the Xeon route to be viable (specifically) for a gaming system anymore.
Some years ago it made sense to build a xeon, but like you said, nowadays an am4 mobo is affordable and crazy upgradeable. You can make a basic cpu with an athlon 3000g and update it up to a ryzen 9 basically.
There are plenty of Xeons with Ryzen 5 3600 performance, you need to get above that to beat X99 in raw performance
@@chedds No. The 3600 is just as fast as my 2680 V4 was in multicore and twice as fast in single core. All that at half the TDP. I also wrote "(specifically) for a gaming system". And since that comment the 5700X3D has been released and pushed the old Xeon option further into irrelevance.
@@noenken the 2680v4 is far from being one of the best Xeons, both in multi and single.
If you only care about benchmarks sure the single core score of Xeons like the 2667v4 and 2687w v4 are way lower than the 3600's, but in an actual real world gaming section both Xeons will be either on par or at max 10 fps below the 3600
And the 5700x3d throwing Xeons at irrelevance? Here the 5700x3d is about R$1200 (250-300$) just the CPU while an 2697v3 for example which with TBU and some light memory tweaks can match the 3600 is less than R$100 (around 20$), what is the 5700x3d dethroning here? Maybe some newer gen Intels but not Xeons, the people who buy cheap X99 Xeons are not buying the 5700x3d and people buying the 5700x3d are not buying X99 Xeons
@@chedds If your "actual real world gaming" scenario shows that little of a difference your setup is suffering from a dramatic mismatch between CPU and GPU. X99 is a bad idea for gaming these days and has been when I wrote my initial comment. That doesn't mean that you have to change what you're using, please keep that in mind. I'm not saying that. But I am saying for anyone who does not already have it .. X99 isn't worth it for games. It just isn't.
Big personal fan of Jeff's work over at Craft Computing. Nice to see him featured here. Used/New enterprise gear is pretty fun, and Jeff's channel dives deep into Gaming, Workloads, and self hosted home services. Join us over there for his content AND his reoccurring live show wednesday to see what kind of shenanigans we all find ourselves in. Jeff ALSO regularly reviews gaming handhelds, head mounted displays, monitors, trackball mice... and much more. See ya'll around ^_^
I love my Xeons and my RX580!
I’ve managed to build a Dell precision t5810
2690v4
16gb ram
1tb m.2ssd
1080ti for 250 dollars.
4K hdr 80fps average on most modern games. The only downside is the loud fans but it works well as a heater in the winter haha. Love your content @craftcomputing.
does your motherboard use the dell 5-pin fan header? I bought some cable converters online so you can run standard 4-pin. though I can't tell whether or not the t5810 uses standard 120mm fans. if you can access the header on the mobo you can just plug the converter in and attach a standard 4-pin fan. my dell t3500 originally came with loud delta fans, the sound was unbearable for me lol
I did a similar t5810 2690v4, 64G ram, 1000w PSU, SSD/m.2 SSD/4tbHD/4k capture card and a 2080Ti (special power cable bought) total cost was around $700. This is my workstation but it can play too. Have fun with yours.
Cheapest route: get a HP Z440 ;P
I got mine going for about 400 bucks. E5-2695V3 14 core 64GB DDR4 on an Asus motherboard. Paint, filters, and fans were the most expensive parts. I got the motherboard and processor together as a combo for a hundred bucks, it came with a tall 4 headtube heatsink but it hit the cover. I got a Dell workstation heatsink for it with a faster fan. Really it's a gamer board with RGB but I use it like a workstation it doesn't have a glass cover. I have a 750-watt Corsair RGB power supply that glows colors out the bottom. The memory was inexpensive compared to desktop prices it was about 6 bucks per stick. It looks weird having glowing colors on a workstation without a see though cover but I got a good deal on the glowing parts. My office PC glows colors now too.
I got an HP Z440 Workstation for 80 bucks a few months back with a GTX 970 in it. Put a E5-2697V3 (14 cores, 20 bucks) into it and upgraded the RAM to 64GB (50 bucks). It's a nice homeserver-lab but I will probably sell it soon as a workstation/editing rig. Power draw is too high to keep it running constantly.
I did something similar. Grabbed a dell precision for 50 dollars. Put a E5-2680v4 so only 14 cores. 15 bucks though. And then 60 on 64GB of ram. 25 for a SFP+ card and it got deployed as a second node for the homelab. And now I’m debating doing it all over so I can have 3 nodes running.
I have nearly the same build as a NAS and homelab VM Host. An HP Z440 with an E5-2697v3 and 128GB of RAM.
I paid a few bucks extra for specifically Samsung branded RDIMMs. And I intentionally got 2400mhz instead of 2133, in case I want to migrate it from Braodwell v3 up to Haswell v4, which would shave a few watts off that draw while still being faster.
You can mitigate a lot of that power draw if you feel comfortable BIOS modding, by giving the chip a slight undervolt. And if you only need 14 cores, but not 28 threads, disable the Hyperthreading to shave even more off the top.
A mindful GPU choice can save power too. I went with an RX 5700 instead of the 5700XT, just because of lower power draw. And the GPU can be undervolted also.
A 4x NVMe adapter works because of PCIe Bifurcation support in that second x16 slot, as it runs straight off the CPU lanes and not the chipset. That means you can avoid SATA drives too.
For people like me, on a tight budget and living in a country with limited access to new technologies, old Xeons are truly a godsend! I'm grateful some TH-camrs are shedding light on this because the level of elitism among many American TH-camrs is unfortunately quite astounding
Dont worry...soon all world become like your situation atm...im in italy...and I looking for build a dual xeon cuz prices grows too much for little more performance. So, understand you very well. Cheers😊
I think the value lies in used workstations like the Lenovo Thinkstation. I picked up my ‘mystery’ p510 for 80 bucks incl. shipping and received quite the bargain system. 850W platinum PSU, 14tb server HDD, 512Gb NVME, 64 GB of RAM, an e5-2690v4 and some random lab card I sold for 150 bucks. So basically a free gaming PC. Boungt an RX 580 and an IBM Model M from the leftover money, hooked the system to two Eizo s2202w I got for free and well… It works pretty well for what it is. Even the monitors are pretty serviceable (they got some very hq monitor stands that weigh a ton lol).
Good Lord, where did you score that?
@@ubercorey Essentially German Craigslist. These Workstations get pretty cheap at certain times of a year in certain areas of the world. Since these workstations are often leased to companies they get insanely cheap when a big corporation decides to upgrade their IT and the leasing partner needs to get rid off the old hardware.
Also ig I was extremely lucky with this PC. I originally wanted an old MacPro to tinker with but then I stumbled across the Thinkstation with no specs or model number listed, offered 70 bucks incl. shipping and had the system 1 week later. Heavy af tho. Weighs over 28 kgs.
I looked into this a while back, but the cost of motherboards put me off. Didn't know about the chinese boards, this could be a game changer! Great vid
from my experiences 1 in 4 of the Chinese X99 motherboards are bad and allexpress can take months on a refund, not mention the hassle of doing the return
One of my grandson's friends has it pretty hard right now and asked me to help him build his first PC on the uber cheap, managed to grab an Aliexpress special that had a E5 2650V2 with 16GB of RAM, mobo, and a cooler for just $66, slapped another 8GB for $4, a $37 nice looking white case, $40 500w Thermaltake, a 1TB NVME on sale for $37, an RX580 2048 for $50 and a Win10 Pro key and he managed to end up with a sub $260 PC that plays all his eSports titles above 60FPS.
So for super duper uber budget builds ya can't go wrong with the Aliexpress Xeon kits.
Depending on how well they perform in Handbrake, I’m in the market. I’m still trying to decide between an old workstation or a Chineseium motherboard combo.
With a workstation my buy in is roughly $400 without HDDs. As it stands I don’t like being limited to 4 HDDs.
With the Frankenstein motherboard combo my buy in is around $460 when I add in a CPU cooler, PSU, and that’s without HDDs.
the other reason why some people may find old xeon builds attractive is because they run on DDR3 ram, which is really really cheap nowadays. Not saying that DDR4 is expensive, but for people who have a very tight budget, every cent counts.
another good budget option is to buy an old office pc and upgrade it. I have a dell precision t3500 which I use almost daily. Takes a standard ATX power supply and the motherboard has 6x4gb ddr3 ram slots for a max 24gb ram. the fan headers on the mobo are propietary but you can buy adapters to run standard 4-pin fans. chucked out the old dual-core W3503 and put in a 6-core 12-thread xeon X5675 (have to update bios first). The unit originally came with a low-spec quadro gpu, took it out and replaced it with a gtx 1060 3gb. So far it's been fairly good for most average-spec 1080p games, I don't play the latest AAA games so it's sufficient for me.
if you go for the used office pc route, just watch out for the ones that use proprietary power supply form factors or motherboard pins, make sure you can still buy replacements or pin converters, otherwise you'll have a big problem if your power supply dies.
I used to have a crazy idea of harvesting the CPUs and memory from old workstation PCs (not servers) and salvaging motherboards that aren't proprietary junk. I think the challenge would be sourcing motherboards to replace them. But the scrappy budget PC could live on.
I was an auto tech for 34 years and can't do it anymore because of medical problems so in order to stay busy I got into the PC world as a hobby. I sourced some very cheap parts to do my first build based around inexpensive Asus LGA 1150, 32gb of DDR3 and an old Thermaltake case. I have a Xeon 1270v3 (3.50 - 3.90 GHZ) or a I7-4790 (3.60 - 4.0 GHZ) both under 85W, and a Corsair 750W PSU that I can use with an EVGA GTX 1060. These cheap parts that are hitting the market are right in my ballpark for budget and my expectations. The cost of the parts came out to $125 US. I'm learning alot from so many channels like this one and Craft computing and having alot of fun doing it.
I havea BOINC farm of i5-8500 little SFF boxes. Desktop 65w CPUs from popular auction site over 100 of them. In the years I've had them, only a few fans have failed they really all work. It is fans that wear out that's it.
It’s not so cheap anymore when you pick some of the better quality mainboards like the Huananzhi ones with for example a Xeon V4. The time to do this was 2-3 years ago. Now the ryzen or Intel parts are cheap enough that I would not go with it. The usecase where you need a lot of PCIE lanes is still valid though.
Still have an 2 X99 servers, 1 is a NAS and the other recently retired Proxmox machine. Before it was Proxmox it was my workstation and did fine at that too. They are starting to show their age though, as someone else said some newer features like AVX2 AVX512 are starting to slow down the older chips for some workloads but if you don't need newer instruction sets they still work great on a budget.
Ive got a e5 2680 v2 running 3.594 all cores idling and boosts to 4.294 all cores it took about 2 days tuning in bios and a Asus ws pro board but it still only uses 122 watts at max load in stress tests for 10 cores 20 threads and it doesnt go over 68 degrees in stress tests working on finding an Asus x99 ws board for my next build i have more fun seeing just what i can get a xeon to do than I would with a newer system that just works
Used Xeons are unbeatable for low cost workstation if your main applications are scaling well with cpu count.. But it depends quite a bit on the work load you consider. For 3d rendering, scientific / fluid simulation they are great. Also if you need a stable server with lots of cores and memory for example to run VMs but your budget is limited and you don't need that fastest performance, these are great too. But based on my experience, for mixed use cases, where a blend of single thread and parallel are common, a Ryzen 5600x or 5800x system or similar is much better overall but can get much more expensive if you need a lot of RAM.
i have loved the old xeon paradigm for years , but apart from spefic use cases and and multicore or multi socket systems . its far easier and cheaper to just buy some old ryzens i have made lots of ultra budget pcs recently based around r7 1880 pro cpus and b350 motherboards , and yes they are slower than todays , but on par with most xeons and way more power efficient and more modern platform
A first gen Ryzen is around Broadwell-E/EP performance in most cases. In gaming it's more like in between Ivy Bridge and Haswell. Meanwhile Broadwell-EP goes up to 18c/36t? If you need the extra cores, Intel Xeon still wins. If you do any kind of multitasking or streaming/recording while gaming? Xeon still wins in many cases.
First gen Ryzen is far from beating X99 in gaming perf
I run a reconditioned HP workstation with dual Xeon E5-2680 V4 Cpu's and 128GB Ram Got masses of storage bays and ports up the wazoo, Run a 8GB graphics card for it Think I paid about US$ 400 for it a couple of years ago with 9tb of storage all in mint condition. Never missed a beat. Absolute tank I really love the laser etched system map on the inside of the main cover! Passmark scores of 1,961 SC (Dismal) but 29,039 Multicore (Yesss!)
No mention of idle power draw?
PC World is still around! This just made my day!
You have to be a bit careful with the old Xeons. Make sure you get one that has AVX and AVX2 instructions. Some modern programs and games will refuse to launch without them. I think Baulders Gate 3 is one of the games that do not work without AVX instructions. For this reason I would not recommend getting anything older than a LGA-2011 V3 Xeon.
Thank you fortheheadsup im thinki gof gettinga lenovo p520
The cheapest and least risky way suggested by channels that deal exclusively with servers for finetuning and inference of LLMs all suggest buying refurbished servers that hit the market maybe around 2014. You often get them with years of warranty left and you can get server GPUs that are not that expensive if you invest the time
In 2013 i bought a i7 4820k a 4 core ivy bridge e on an x79 mobo. I went with that chip and platform for the quad channel memory. In 2019 i upgraded to a xeon e5 1680 v2 an 8 core chip, i kept that for 4 more years. I was able to get 10 years out of a mobo, ram, and AIO. I built a new system in 2023 because i didn't have AVX 2 and the chip didn't support TPM, which is needed for window 11, which will be the only windows OS supported after October 2025.
Gents great video, perhaps I watched too fast the video but didn’t saw any TDP reference, that would be great to grasp the idea for home server running 24/7
PCIE lanes with bifurcation is good for multiple SSDs. Dual x16 slots which drop to x8 when both are populated are useless for quad SSD cards (even if your graphics card doesn't mind) and motherboard-based SSD slots need to be looked at very carefully to see if you're bottlenecking them through the chipset. This basically means dropping back to PCIE gen3 , but that's probably ok if you're prioritising capacity over speed. Going PCIE gen4 seems to get very expensive in the workstation/server arena.
I am running a 4 core 8 thread 3.6ghz xeon that supports 40 pcie gen 3 lanes with 32gb of ddr3 running in quad channel. Old ass setup but still running well. A little over a year ago I upgraded from gtx 680 4gb gpu to an AMD 6600 8gb. I am gaming at 1080p with anywhere from medium to ultra settings based on the game. I can even upgrade my ram as high as 128gb ecc IF I wanted to. Nothing about my rig is amazing but it is still running and getting the job done. One down side is without trickery I won't be able to use an os newer than windows 10.
nobody is paying $25 for an 8gb stick of anything in 2024 jeff
i have bought a Dell R630 for 600€ including 2 Dell 12 3.5inch Bay PowerVault. My R630 had 128GB RAM with 4 DIMM and a single xeon e5 2603v3, external HBM controller for the PowerVault's, 4 port 10gbit sfp+ and a internal perc h330 mini. i needed a powerful server for my projects. I invested another 600€ for 2 xeon E5 2683v4 and another set of 4 DIMM for the second socket, a cooler for the second socket as well and 8 sata SSD 500gb each with drive caddy's. Now i have enough storage and compute power for a high memory bandwidth and parallelization workload.
128gb is not much for my projects, but i can upgrade fairly cheap if i need to, the limit of my system is 3Tb RAM and if i would buy the same RAM modules i have installed. i would top out at 768Gb and that's is more than enough for the moment. Surprisingly in those PowerVault's were drives as i bought them, all of them are 4Tb SAS 12gbit 10k. The PoweVault's were dropped and got dented significantly. I got them for free on top. I mean why not, both work fine, only a total of 2 drives are nonoperational.
i set up my R630 with ubuntu server on a USB3.0 drive internally, the SATA SSDs are in RAID10 for maximum speed and somewhat failure prove because those drives getting stressed a lot Even the data on those drives are volatile. The Powervault's are in Raid 6 each and a copy of its self, because this data is important for me and because i know those drives were dropped, i expect drive failure in the future.
For the most part my R630 idles around 84W and doing nothing and acting like a NAS for me, but if i need the power, i loading um the SSDs and run my script and waiting usually Hours for the result. if i would do that on my work and game system this takes days to complete and i got sick of that, therefore the R630 in the end the R730 would be the smarter option.
i don't regret it, it's the best thing i ever bought. This thing is crazy fast.
I have a Xeon i5 4rth Gen and 1 ZEON with 2070 SUPER RTX cards SLI'd. I do a lot of video upscaling at 4k and 8k locally on the machines and I have no issues and it's insanely fast.
The power consumption for some Xeon workstations is no joke. I bought one and my apartment electricity bill doubled. Depending on where you live and how much your electricity costs, you can spend enough in one years increased power costs to where you would have been better off just buying a new system.
I've a no brand Chinese X79 motherboard £56, paired with Xeon E5-2690v2 £10, 64GB of DDR3 14900 server ram £12. The mobo supports NVME gen3 x4 and boot times are pretty quick. For older games, virtualization and other homelab stuff, it's great. It's the fastest machine I've had, so far. Sure I'd love something better, but more importantly, to me, it's affordable.
I'm very new in this world of server class parts as I just bought a Dell 5820 Tower. Currently I have a 2155 CPU + P4000 GPU and just wondering my upgrade options even if I have to gut the case. I just love the hard drive bays in the front and the overall form factor. It's a very appealing look, just wondering if there are any upgrades I can make to this system to make it more power efficient or if it's stuck as is
Can there be such a thing as a do it all station? it could do gaming do rendering? Is that even possible?
yes goddamnit. i got a xeon w 2155 for $150. 10 cores, 3.3ghz, lots of IO
You know what, I have several used Dell dual Xeon workstations and they work acceptably well for virtual machines and Borderlands 1, 2, 3.
I like those used Dell Xeons. T7400, T7600, T7910.
picked up a old x5690 Xeon for $33USD and run it my Asus P6T vanilla mobo as a daily desktop driver clocked steady at 4.507GHz in a modded bios. Added an LSI 9271-8i card in RAID5 which has throughput of ~2500MB/s (4 units Samsung 500GB SSDs) Not bad for a motherboard produced in 2009! 15 years old and still churning out with 280mm watercooled AIO CPU cooler.🤣🤔😉😇 Cheers
What are your thoughts on buying used xeon workstations, like hp z workstations or dell precision workstations. I have both and they are very reliable beasts and can be had on the cheap.
Older threadripper CPU's would be much better in my honest opinion
The problem is SP3 motherboards are still $300+. Value goes out the window pretty fast outside the super high end chips.
First gen TR is pretty bad for gaming. The newer parts tend to be pretty $$ still.
With all the NUMA headaches involved? Nah, not really...
Very useful information, though it's interesting how much prices vary in different parts of North America. Where I am in BC, Canada, there is an added tax value of 12% to any purchases made in North America and various countries excluding China. Now imagine what it's like shopping/selling on eBay, where value is further inflated by their 13% cut on sales. Not excluding import fees (again excluding China). For true budget value as you discuss here, in my area it's only achievable by circumstance or by ordering from China where there are generally no shipping fees/12% tax added to an order. Luckily, common brand names for CPU's and motherboards are available for great deals on Aliexpress. Source: I work pretty hard to source deals so I can pass on savings to BC residents.
X99 combo on Aliexpress now around $70 . E5 2680v4 , 16GB DDR4, Mougol x99 Mobo . If that aint a bargain i dont know what is and this supports FMA3 & AVX2 instructions 🙏
I'm a simple man, I see Jeff, I like.
2673v2 in a dual socket configuration on x79 has been amazing for homelab stuff for me.
Some xeons come in Low Voltage versions (they are just as powerful), but they are a GREAT choice if you're using a PSU on the lower wattage side (such as an HP 800 G1)
great and all but I still dont really have an answer, I can get a cheap broadwell based system right now but its....8 years old.....I mean yeah its cheap but probably for a reason right?
We're getting down in the price range where you can get into W and Scalable at really good price to power ratio.
I'm seeing used server/workstation PCs on the market with Xeon Ws that seem to be based on Skylake architecture rather than Broadwell/Haswell architecture, including coming with DDR4 RAM rather than DDR3. I wonder if those are significantly better than the Broadwell and Haswell ones that Jeff is talking about. I've heard that the 6-core ones like the W-2135 are comparable to CPUs like the Ryzen 5 3600, but that's purely hearsay on my part.
Would you recommend either an X99 or an X299 workstation, paired with an RX6600 (a card i already own) for a media server/video editing/light gaming machine?
Sincere question here. Other than bragging rights, why would anyone need 250 fps?
theres 240hz monitors... theres also 500+hz monitors already. cant say its the same big step like from 60 to 144hz. but still when you experienced 240 for the long time - its a pain to look at 144hz
@@sxdattxb I can’t say that I really notice a difference above 60fps one way or the other but I guess that’s just me.
@@jimk8520 you dont notice difference between 60 and 120 fps on 120hz monitor with 120hz mode actually turned on?
@@sxdattxb Not really. Certainly not anything worth writing home about.
I got a 10 year old pc. I upgraded the first Gen Intel 7 processor to top tier xeon processor, that fits in the same socket. I bought it via AliExpress. It cost me only 10 dollars /euros.
What about xeon gold 6138?
Actually, i find 2nd hand xeons are better at higher resolution gaming because their clock speeds are not the limiting factor. In low res gaming where the cpu clock becomes a bottleneck, xeons suffer a bit. Also, core- intensive games like Civ or Stellaris can leverage the core count on the xeons.
I don't understand why the CPU single core clock speed must be high to service these GPUs in games. Surely there is an instruction queue? Is this also an issue where you are using a Xeon system with modern GPUs, like RTX 3090 TI 24GB, used for Stable Diffusion? Is there still an issue with single core performance of Xeons? What are the best second hand Xeons? You can get lower power 3.9 Ghz (without turbo) Xeons with 8 cores.
There are fairly priced Xeon cpu's that hit around 4 to 4.5ghz
Old workstation PCs are GREAT, but the problem is that you can't install Windows 11 on them. I use my PCs for work, never gaming, so getting and older workstation is not going to work for me without being able to upgrade to Windows 11.
Which Xeon platforms support sleep/suspend? (My "gaming" applicances spend most of their life not doing anything.)
Prices are way off or changed now. Now you can get e5-2697 v3 for $20. Motherboard cpu and ram combo is $80. And thats for a xeon that has a clock in the 3ghz range and higher l3 cache. Compare that $80 of older stuff to newer stuff same performance youre looking at $300-$350. $80 for a mobo cpu and ram is good. Just need cooler, psu, m.2 ssd and a case. Can get all that for another $190. All in like $270 for a mid tier gaming pc that would cost around $600-$800 for all new gen stuff with same performance.
Used market: DDR3 is about 1/2 the price of DDR4. Server DDR4 is more than desktop DDR4. Server DDR3 is less than desktop DDR3. Make SURE you get one that works with your system...most must have 1 or the other...few can handle either.
I can remember when somebody like this said that CPUs would never exceed 3 GHz clock speed.
Interesting that used server grade memory is cheaper than newer memory.
You can put a 4th Gen I7 in the same LGA2011 socket with the same X99 chipset as those Xeons.
Have a couple of 4th Gen I7-4690Xs (?) octacores that I got for approx. £40 each and are easy to overclock (all cores) to 4.6Ghz - one being totally stable to over 4.8GHz (but not quite as high as 4.9 ;-D)
Can a Xeon cpu even function without ecc memory? Will it boot? My Asus X99 Prime A-ll with Xeon E5-2690v4 will not boot unless I use ecc ddr4 memory. When I substitute the Xeon with my i7 6900x it will only boot with regular ddr4 (Corsair Vengeance) ram.
What's the differencee between base clock and all-core boost? Is the base clock only for power viruses?
All core boost is temporary, base clock is 24/7.
I would really love to buy a used lga 3647 motherboard to use an $100 xeon platinum.
Ive build 4 systems on some xeons from asian data centers. 2 dies after over 1Y. Some ordered cpu's didnt work at all. It depends from where for how much you can order your parts. I dont do such systems anymore. I think that it is much more futureproof and reliable to buy newer parts.
Great content, thanks
I've been running x79 for a long time with a heavily overclocked 1680v2 (8c16t) and 2666mhz ddr3 in quad channel. With my previous 1070 it was more than enough to max out the graphics card in almost any game. Almost! Except those which need any of the newer instructions. In those games, I suddenly felt the age of the system. Now I have a 3090 with the same build... Don't even bother. In literally any game at literally any settings I'm heavily cpu bottle necked. Not to mention all the other issues which come with such an old platform (usb3+, pcie 3+, old mobos, power consumption, etc etc). I love my rig. I love overclocking and you can't do that anymore at all. But still, I am buying new stuff today :(
Get an i5-8500 or i7-8700 Coffeelake SFF HP Prodesk or Elitedesk (just a bigger box, 1 more PCI x x16 slot) or Optiplex SFF for less than $200. Usually i5-8500 is 120 bucks or less, 6 core 3.8GHZ all core. Get a PCI Express ribbon cable and another PSU, bridge the orange wire to ground to turn it on to power the GPU! Upgrade RAM to 16 or 32GB cheaply DDR4 2666. You're done!
On Ebay..
In Brazil? Its basically you get a Lga 1155 or lga 2001/-3 motherboards and that it. Ryzen and normal Intel CPUs cost a lot.
I like using odd hardware for NAS or servers, but my main workstations I'm looking for newer (previous gen) stuff imo.
I'm piecing together a custom 4k gaming PC with a Lenovo p520 motherboard at the heart. A w2155 makes a decent combo when paired with an amd 6750xt. 900 dollars with a full ATX case, 1050 if you include a Blu ray drive for ripping movies😈
The newest Xeon that's obsolete enough to be cheap is skylake. That's a lot faster than xeons older than it. And you'll get 4 channel DDR4 memory cheap, that brings the memory bandwidth up to equal to much more expensive current gen DDR5 at 2 channel. Why is it cheap? Well you're only getting PCIe 3 and with clock speeds up to 4 ghz, you're gonna get about half the peak single thread performance of the fastest current cpus. And you might not get NVMe support And don't expect resizable bar. But I just put together a super cheap Dell Precision 5820 tower. They're so well built. My 6 core W-2135 processor cost $25. But if I want NVMe drives instead of SATA, I have to get a replacement backplane which is cheap but the hot swap caddies for NVMe drives are expensive. Or I could get some PCIe NVMe card. Dell makes one with bios support for 4 drives (and that's not a given on other motherboards). Note, the motherboard in mine also supports Cascade Lake which is NOT cheap. And this points to another reason Skylake is cheap. Cascade Lake has built in Spectre and Meltdown mitigations and Skylake doesn't. Also Cascade Lake has some new AI instructions.
I just got 2 e5-2660s for free, is it worth it to build a PC around them? I have server ram, GPU, and storage. Is it worth buying the motherboard?
for homelab theyre totally fine
@@Tgspartnership anything else that I could do? Maybe home media or backup server?
Today now consumer CPU's have 6c/12t and high single thread performance (at low power use) server parts only have PCIE lains left as a selling point, today it's a hard sale when a 3600 or 3800 is so cheep used.
At this point, upgrading to anything better than my 4790k for an affordable price would be a godsend. I live in Japan and pc parts are stupidly expensive, even for low end stuff. Moreso when you get paid in yen.
The biggest issue that I didn't hear mentioned here is Windows 11 support. We only have 1 year of support left for Windows 10. That is a major negative for me.
It seems wrong to see Jeff in a video which doesn't end with "what am I drinking today?"
Here's where modern cost analysis fails when comparing one system to another.
I take a CPU, figure out my gaming time/mo. and look at the difference in power consumption for the SYSTEM (not the CPU) when using one system vs. the other.
That's it right? No, it's not.
If you run AC in your home you have to consider what the extra heat being pumped into the room causes. How much more does your AC run to keep the room at the temp. you set it for. This ends up being bigger than what people think.
And yet I'll watch TH-camrs do cost analysis based on the CPU alone, but that's not how it works.
Server hardware tends to be a bad value for home PC use cases. They're made for a much different use case and because of it they have transistors powered that will for the most part never be used.
I don't have to do a cost analysis to know the 5800X3D and 7800X3D are outstanding game parts and regardless of the fact the CPUs cost a little more, over the long run total cost will be less. There's a lot of difference in a CPU that's gaming around 45W and one that's gaming around 125W, once again taking into account how much heat it put into a room and what that does to the AC costs. I mean in Data centers, their cost analysis is mostly centered on air conditioning.
I would never game with them, but I have exploited the low prices to build my own servers.
I got 2697v2 system 12 core best cpu from ivy bridge xeon is amazing value i buy cpu for 30 usd from AliExpress and 32 gb ram rx 580 whole build with case and everything cost me 300 usd. Is not something groundbreaking but i try build system cheapest possible which is capable of gaming and was very nice bet I love it. Pretty much can play any modern game on 60+ fps without few latest games like alan wake 2, avatar and starfield where you need much more powerful pc anyway but for those can do 30 stable fps
Use them for network attached storage!
And if you are in the business
And you have cpus and ecc memory, then your entire platform (cpu+memory+mobo) is just buying a mobo for your computer.
My pc is a xeon Gold 6150, based system and has 96gb ecc 2933mts
My kid's pc is an e5-2667-v3 with turboboost unlock applied, and 96gb ecc 2133mts
Bothe are paired with 1660super, and both were upgraded from x58 xeon systems
All i had to do was buy mobo's....
Sometimes, the reason is just not wanting to waist good and working HW
That's *Doppelganger Computing*
I'm older and wear glasses. I straight can't tell the diff beyond 45 fps and 1440p. It's why I'm horrible at fps and RTS games. My eyes can't keep up. So for me a middling gaming computer running 1440p at 40 fps for 95% of games is good enough. I really can't see spending 3k+ to get that 100 fps 4kp cyberpunk experience.
Lol I thought they were going to get talking about old server cpus . . . . I came to find out what they thought I should be doing with my x58 motherboard modded to use an x5670
Jeff, are you the long lost brother of Ian from forgotten weapons??
I think, Ryzen 1600/2600/3600 + Mobo, used..will cost just as little as one of those Ali combos. And a Ryzen combo will be better than a china motherboard.