Intel Xeon W3690 is the fastest?

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Dexmaus

Weaksauce
Joined
Apr 2, 2002
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I'm building a 1-processor workstation and I want everything to be top of the line thats on the market right now.
is this W3690 cpu fastest available now without overclocking? any comments on that CPU before I make the purchase from Provantage?
 
fastest in what? encoding or making burritos?

but yeah, that is most expensive xeon chip and should be the fastest in everything :D
 
Honestly, even if you fear overclocking, picking up a i7 990x and doing 4.0ghz at close to stock voltage should give you the fastest.
 
is this W3690 cpu fastest available now without overclocking?
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Afaict the xeon W3960 and i7-990x are the same in almost every regard. The only difference I can spot is that the w3960 supports ECC ram (though you will need a server board to use it) while the 990x has an unlocked multiplier.

As to whether they are the fastest single socket solution on the market that depends hugely on your workload.

A 2600 (add K if you want to be able to overclock) has less cores but each individual core is faster. Since many desktop tasks (including games) use 4 or less threads this will make the 2600 faster in them.

On the other hand for highly multithreaded tasks like video encoding the 990x is still faster and for tasks requiring large amounts of memory the 50% increase in max practically available* ram will be an advantage.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core-i7-2600k-990x.html

* Some sandy bridge boards claim to support 32GB but to do so they require modules which afaict don't exist yet.
 
Last week Intel® released the E3-1200 series processors (these processors are share the same architecture with the 2nd generation Intel Core™ processors like the Core I7 2600). So unless you are doing some heavy multi-threaded work you may want to look at the Intel Xeon® E3-1275. You can see the differences between the Xeon E3’s and the older Xeon W3690 at http://ark.intel.com/Compare.aspx?ids=52276,52277,52586,. At the same clock speed the Intel Xeon E3’s should be out performing the older generation by 15% to 20% in most applications.

Now the boards that will support these processors can reach 32GB of memory only with the use of 8GB sticks in the 4 slots that are available on this board. While the 8GB stick may not be available at this time they will in the future.
 
IntelEnthusiast said:
Now the boards that will support these processors can reach 32GB of memory only with the use of 8GB sticks in the 4 slots that are available on this board.
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And it seems even with the xeon variant of sandy bridge they have to be unregistered sticks. This means that somewhat ironically that with current modules the LGA1156 xeons can support a higher memory build than the LGA1155 xeons!

they will in the future.
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mmm, the question is how far out is that future.
 
thanks guys i went with the W3690 + 12gb ECC ram. should have everything setup this weekend, i'll post some benchmark later
 
Dexmaus said:
thanks guys i went with the W3690 + 12gb ECC ram. should have everything setup this weekend, i'll post some benchmark later
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Holy Moly!

That is going to be the perfect machine for Second Life.

You can get the latest windows build right here:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Project_Snowstorm

The W3690 is made for it, and in fact, is one of the only processors that can really handle what SL is throwing at it. You should be able to set your distance to at least 300 meters inworld.
 
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