intel xeon price trends

C

C_A_S

n00b
Joined
May 8, 2014
Messages
28
Hi

Anyone have any advice about how fast used processor prices move down after they are out of production?

I'm in the market for hex core xeons, which go from fairly cheap for slower clock speeds right up to $1000 for the 3.46ghz x5690. If they are going to stay this high all year or longer, I'll settle for slower but if that price will drop, I'll hold off. This is all new to me
 
I believe when supply ends from the manufacturer the prices on the high end will tend to move up for some time until the demand goes down.
 
Last edited:
For every Xeon Socket, there's usually a refresh for it. In the case of the 1366, the refresh of the original Nehalem was Westmere. The top Westmere chip is worth the most because it's the fastest chip available for the socket, and a prime target for people looking to upgrade older machines. The fastest CPU for the Nehalem chips, the W5590, doesn't command near what the X5690 gets, simply because it's not the best chip for the Socket. This price trend holds true for quite some time after a Socket is deemed obsolete, usually until the next newest generation moves down when the newest one is introduced. But even then, years after, there is still demand for the fastest CPU in an old socket, but this demand slowly wanes over time.

Things have changed quite a bit with the new 2011 chips, as they've introduced varying core counts and clock speeds, so upgrade demand after the fact will probably be split between the various top chips of each core count, without any one chip demanding all the ransom as in the past, so the king's ransom given to the X5690 will likely not be quite so acute for the top Ivy-EP chips, where an E5-2697 V2 or E5-2690 V2 may be more valuable than an E5-2697V2 for a particular person for their higher clock speed.
 
The 5600 series processor servers are just now finishing 3 years of life. Thus lots of leased equipment is now showing up on ebay. I think it will take the server resellers 1 year to slowly trickle down their prices to get rid of what they now have lots of rolling in.

5300 series processor servers are now almost worthless, 5500 series processor servers are getting close to their bottom. And 5600 are just showing up off lease and will probably bottom out in 2 years.
 
olds server CPUs are tricky to shopp on ebay, i am having a hard time researching for a Chess machien build.
1- you need to know how the target CPU performs on the task. I suggest using spec2006 top compare old and new altervatives for desktop and server hardware.

2- you must attention and steer away from engineer samples xeons, that are incompatible with server grade dual socket mobos.

3- ebay prices on server CPUs seems unrelated with actual price vs performance of new hardware. dual socket slow xeons are worst for some aplicattions than a single desktop 3960/4960. If you are building upon a relatevely new chipset like g34 ou LGA 2011, the older chips are hotter, so cooling costs would negate any price advantage of going with old, slow and hot CPUs can leverage.

4- xeons CPUs prices on ebay are too high for the offered performance, but complete server systems sometimes surface for a competitive price. USD 2k for a 2x16core Opteron 6272 or 2x6 core Xeons is not unheard of. And buyer protection is much easier to work when you purchase a complete server, because the vendor can not blame your mobo when he sells you a faulty CPU.

5- shopping for used server CPUs is a niche: you must have a build that needs more performance than a HIgh End desktop build can offer. Today that means being faster than an OC WC Core i7 4960 (K/X). That's 6c/12Ht @ 4.5Ghz. Using Xeons would require at least dual socket 6c/12Ht @ 2.3Ghz, assuming same IPC, which is not true if you would use older generation CPUs. Considering that soon Intel will release a new desktop CPU with unlocked 8c/16Ht, the so called prosumer server, or gueto server is going the way of the dodo: one would spend too much watts to run a server at home capable of running anything faster that an i7 5960x, and probably such server would cost more than a Vega:cool: build.

Companies outside of BOFH realm do not usually drop old hardware unless the new one is faster for less watts and lower TCO. So real economic opportunities for Xeons on ebay are likely very rare. old server kit is, after all, OLD.
 
This is all very interesting information, thanks for the replies.

I'm not doing a build, I'm upgrading a 2009 dual processor Mac Pro, so I'm stuck in the x56XX series, its all a question of clock speed/price. It seems to me the 2.93ghz chip (x5670) has come down in price, but the 5680/90s seem stuck at pretty high price.

In a pinch, I considered going for the 2.93s and waiting a year or so and seeing if the fast chips come down, then rinse and repeat.

These nuances of the server market are new, so thanks for the insights
 
A pair of 5660s looks like it will cost me 200 quid UK. A pair of 5670s looks like it will be 300. That's not too bad a difference, and gets me closer to 3 ghz.

I need the cores for my video work, but some things that I use (ok, i admit it, X-plane flight simulation) don't utilise cores as much as single thread speed, so clock speed makes a difference to performance there.

The price curve seems to pull away from earth north of that point, from the 5675s (about 450 to 500 British pounds a pair) to the 5680s (about 700 a pair) to the 5690s (north of 1100 pounds a pair, about a 1900 US dollars or just under).

Even the 5660s double my stock geek bench score, so its all gravy from there. I think the 5670 is my sweet spot until something changes.
 
C_A_S said:
I need the cores for my video work, but some things that I use (ok, i admit it, X-plane flight simulation) don't utilise cores as much as single thread speed, so clock speed makes a difference to performance there.
Click to expand...

just as i told before, a pair of old xeons is hardly faster than an i7 4960 for floating point tasks:
4960x
X5670

So the best thing you do with your mac pro is to keep it and save for a single socket xeon 16*0 v2 build. Considering video does not need ECC memory, even a modest 4960 or the soon to be released 5960 would be an upgrade.
 
geok1ng said:
just as i told before, a pair of old xeons is hardly faster than an i7 4960 for floating point tasks:
4960x
X5670

So the best thing you do with your mac pro is to keep it and save for a single socket xeon 16*0 v2 build. Considering video does not need ECC memory, even a modest 4960 or the soon to be released 5960 would be an upgrade.
Click to expand...

A lot of that is because of AVX/AVX2, which quadruples the width of the FPU (over the non-AVX 5600's) and gives a massive boost to the newer CPUs in synthetics.
For example, an IB i7 almost matches my dual 4GHz hex-cores in Linpack performance, but the dual hex outruns it in real-world applications.
In general, eBay sellers, who have no clue what they are really selling, price fairly arbitrarily based on availability. The L5640's hit $80 a while back because several large datacenters had dumped them; similarly, the X5650's (cheapest hex-core with a fast IMC for HPC applications) have just dropped below the $100 mark because several supercomputers and datacenters are upgrading. The top-of-the-line of any general usually remains inordinately expensive; stay away from those.
 
The top-of-the-line chips are the ones that most people initially look to when they want to upgrade, hence the fairly rabid demand for them. It's why I downgraded my server to L5520s from X5690s. I was converting it for use strictly as a server and not as the server/workstation hybrid that I was using it for, hence I could get away with slower (and cooler) CPUs for simple server duties. I pocketed the cash from those chips and if I really need to, I'll re-upgrade in a couple of years when their price has dropped.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top