Performance of E5 2620v3 vs i7 5820k

The Lurker

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I cant seem to find any benchmarks of the 2620 to compare against the 5820. Comparing the specifications I see that the 2620 has a lower base clock and lower turbo clock(400 mhz lower). I want to know how that impacts real world performance. The reason I would prefer the 2620 is the lower idle power consumption and heat production. The additional PCIE lanes may prove useful for future expansion because right now the system would have a video card, raid controller and a cable card tuner which almost maxes out the lanes. I really don't want to spend more on the 5830 because that would push my budget.

The PC would be an all in one, HTPC, gaming system, plex server, VM host(1 or 2) and would probably see some duty encoding home videos.

What are your thoughts on one versus the other?
 
A GPU, a RAID card, and a tuner doesn't almost max out your lanes unless you've got some super fancy RAID cards and tuners... In all likelihood the latter only needs an x1 slot and the RAID card might be x4... For the GPU it won't make any difference whether it's run at x8 vs x16.

Even if the GPU slot is run at x16 and the RAID card at x4 off the CPU that leaves you x8 CPU lanes for another GPU and another x4 lanes off the PCH for your tuner, on board peripherals etc (36 total). You can always downclock and downvolt the unlocked 5820K as the situation dictates.
 
Makes sense. Its been about 10 years since I upgraded this system or built a high end machine so I am a bit rusty.
I would prefer not to reboot the system every time I need to change the clocks and voltage, thats why the speed stepping of the xeon is so attractive.
 
I'm not terribly well versed in Xeons but the 5820K should have the standard SpeedStep logic of all Intel CPUs, it'll idle at much lower clocks etc.

These days you can even fiddle with multipliers and voltages from within Windows using Intel's XTU or manufacturer supplied apps, even tho many still choose to go at it via BIOS (still more solid or stable for bleeding edge OC'ing).

Some motherboard's software (or at least ASUS') even let you set OC profiles that'll only raise speeds when certain apps are active, and even if you adjust every everything from the BIOS you can use things like adaptive voltage settings so it's lower at idle (the voltage) but ramps up on Turbo.

A lot has changed!
 
According to Intels site the base frequency of the 5820 is 3.2 and thats as low as it will go. Even the box that denotes speed stepping capability says "No".

But as far as the applications that allow the control of clocks and voltage from within windows, is pretty awesome. I remember that was JUST starting out 10 years ago, hugely unreliable though. Its good to see it has come along. I dont plan to do any overclocking, but having the ability to under clock and under volt based on profiles would be hugely beneficial to keep the noise levels low.

I guess i'll go ahead and pickup a 5820k in a few weeks.
 
I don't know about that. My 5930k goes down to 1200 mhz at .75V, and there isn't that much difference between the 5820k and the 5930k. At idle, there won't be any difference in terms of power consumption between the Xeon and the 5820k.
 
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That's good to know because all I have is data sheets and apparently they aren't clear. Thanks.

Lemme ask you this. Should I wait another two months to upgrade or buy in now? I am not waiting for tech, I am waiting for Fall Out 4. That has been my only reason to upgrade for the last 10 years. I am thinking about the pricing and availability. I have done some searching and it seems that the socket nor cpu is ending production and the next development is broadwell-e in march 2016.
 
Yeah not much is gonna change thru the end of this year, other than Skylake being more widely available... But it seems you were thinking of going with Haswell-E/X99 & a hexa core anyway. CPU/mobo prices are fairly static, at least until something better comes along...

DDR4 has finally dropped to near DDR3 levels, might drop a little more but not substantially IMO. You might see some decent holiday deals on RAM in 2-3 months but we're talking like, saving $10-30 on a ~$600 build.
 
Yeah not much is gonna change thru the end of this year, other than Skylake being more widely available... But it seems you were thinking of going with Haswell-E/X99 & a hexa core anyway. CPU/mobo prices are fairly static, at least until something better comes along...

DDR4 has finally dropped to near DDR3 levels, might drop a little more but not substantially IMO. You might see some decent holiday deals on RAM in 2-3 months but we're talking like, saving $10-30 on a ~$600 build.

Yeah, I am pretty set on going with more cores simply because of all the potential multi thread workload. I could get a 6700K but personally I dont feel the single threaded gains over the 5820k outweigh the multi threaded losses. I also like the upgrade path from haswell e to broadwell e and beyond. I can see myself picking up an 8 core or greater chip down the line since I dont plan to refresh the machine for some time. (though something tells me, like so many things, they dont build motherboards to last like they used)

Plus as gimmicky as it might be, quad channel support. I fully intend to stock up on 32 gigs of ram, as you said, its so cheap(relatively) so why not. Which should help in encoding home videos which I hope to edit on one machine and then offload to the server for processing.
 
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