Thoughts on first gen E5-2670

So the dual xeon build is complete and the results are in.

The intended purpose of this build was to be a dedicated workstation for Adobe Premiere Pro editing 4k footage.

The 6700k with 32gb DDR4 2400 vs the Dual E5-2670 with 64gb DDR3 1300.

Both systems tested with a GTX 980ti and a single Samsung Evo 850 Pro.

The Skylake build absolutely DESTROYS the dual xeon. Renders and transcodes take more than double the time on the dual xeon. Even disabling ecc and overclocking the mem results in only a marginal increase.

Scrubbing the timeline with native h.264 4k footage is very similar in performance.

Super bummed at the time and money invested in this build.
 
BadSeed said:
So the dual xeon build is complete and the results are in.

The intended purpose of this build was to be a dedicated workstation for Adobe Premiere Pro editing 4k footage.

The 6700k with 32gb DDR4 2400 vs the Dual E5-2670 with 64gb DDR3 1300.

Both systems tested with a GTX 980ti and a single Samsung Evo 850 Pro.

The Skylake build absolutely DESTROYS the dual xeon. Renders and transcodes take more than double the time on the dual xeon. Even disabling ecc and overclocking the mem results in only a marginal increase.

Scrubbing the timeline with native h.264 4k footage is very similar in performance.

Super bummed at the time and money invested in this build.
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What kind of cpu usage is the dual proc setup getting? I guess Adobe pre is not able to use an ass load of threads?
 
I picked up the dual socket board in the link, put it together with 4 sticks of Gskill 1866, sure enough it runs at 1333 like he said it would.
It gives the option for 1600 but it falls back to 1333. So I ordered eight 4gb sticks of DDR3 1333 registered server ram, 40$ for 32gb Samsung

All in all the systems works great and running BOINC it is spitting out work units at a good clip.
I have a hard disk with Win Vista business and also boot from a USB drive with a light Ubuntu distro, depending on what I am running what OS I will use.
The board came quickly, well packaged and looked new. The price was good. I am pleased.
 
BadSeed said:
The Skylake build absolutely DESTROYS the dual xeon. Renders and transcodes take more than double the time on the dual xeon. Even disabling ecc and overclocking the mem results in only a marginal increase.
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Didn't you do any research before building? If it wasn't CPU limited it wasn't going to be any faster. From what little I seen of Premier Pro I was under the impression it was generally GPU limited. In which case they should be equally fast.

However, in order to get the performance gap your describing it must be CPU limited but only launching no more than 8 threads and making very extensive use of AVX2 and FMA3 instructions. Otherwise it can't be two times as fast.

You did use a 6GBps SATA port in the dual E5 v1 system right? What does the task manager show for CPU usage & disk utilization on each system when it's rendering and transcoding?
 
Stereodude said:
Didn't you do any research before building? If it wasn't CPU limited it wasn't going to be any faster. From what little I seen of Premier Pro I was under the impression it was generally GPU limited. In which case they should be equally fast.

However, in order to get the performance gap your describing it must be CPU limited but only launching no more than 8 threads and making very extensive use of AVX2 and FMA3 instructions. Otherwise it can't be two times as fast.

You did use a 6GBps SATA port in the dual E5 v1 system right? What does the task manager show for CPU usage & disk utilization on each system when it's rendering and transcoding?
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you get the feeling we been trolled? lol.....I always thought premier pro was into cuda and or opengl...is it not a lot of stuff 10 times faster using gpu's? Probably varies with the actual task. Badseed should see if theres a way to use the GTX 980ti over the cpu
 
I found the 3930K @4.3GHz vs 2670V1 @ stock to be similar in Intel burn test (the 2670 was a tad slower). The same held true for 3Dmark.

I didn't do any testing in games, but only single threaded games would suffer any due to the lower frequency.

As far as reviewer benchmarks for games? I looked and did not find any. This is all I could find - Intel Xeon Processor E5-2670 Review
 
Due to this amazing price on the processors I've decided to jump on this ride. My main purpose is to use the Adobe Suite and Cinema 4D. And some lite gaming.
I had recently went from a I920 to an X5660 when I found I could upgrade it. It was a nice upgrade but still not enough muscle for me. I do plan to rebuild this into a new secondary system.

So far I've purchased 2 E5-2670 for $125 shipped.
A Super Micro X9DAE for $400. Not my first choice but it was one of the few still available for under $600. And have multiple pciex16 ports and Usb 3. I really hope I've chosen the right mobo for the chips. It was a nightmare searching and always seeing v3 or r3 boards.
Also I like that it will support an upgrade to the v2 processors which will be a nice upgrade once they come down.

Next Ive found 64GB DDR3 1600mhz on ebay for about $130. I haven't ordered yet but will soon.

Ive heard that with super micro mobos that you will have to drill new mounting holes if you don't use one of their cases. I don't find this to be a problem.

I expect my current psu a 750 watt PC Power and cooling will be sufficient. I'm not sure on the 2 cpu power plugs but I can get an adapter it appears. Thoughts?
Im running a GTX970 along with 4 hdds and a couple dvd drives etc.
 
Zahu said:
Due to this amazing price on the processors I've decided to jump on this ride. My main purpose is to use the Adobe Suite and Cinema 4D. And some lite gaming.
I had recently went from a I920 to an X5660 when I found I could upgrade it. It was a nice upgrade but still not enough muscle for me. I do plan to rebuild this into a new secondary system.

So far I've purchased 2 E5-2670 for $125 shipped.
A Super Micro X9DAE for $400. Not my first choice but it was one of the few still available for under $600. And have multiple pciex16 ports and Usb 3. I really hope I've chosen the right mobo for the chips. It was a nightmare searching and always seeing v3 or r3 boards.
Also I like that it will support an upgrade to the v2 processors which will be a nice upgrade once they come down.

Next Ive found 64GB DDR3 1600mhz on ebay for about $130. I haven't ordered yet but will soon.

Ive heard that with super micro mobos that you will have to drill new mounting holes if you don't use one of their cases. I don't find this to be a problem.

I expect my current psu a 750 watt PC Power and cooling will be sufficient. I'm not sure on the 2 cpu power plugs but I can get an adapter it appears. Thoughts?
Im running a GTX970 along with 4 hdds and a couple dvd drives etc.
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IDK about drilling into a motherboard, i personally would NOT under any circumstance do that. I would also get a new power supply designed for for dual socket boards.(thats just me) SO DONT go drilling holes and look into a new supply is my suggestion:)
 
primetime said:
IDK about drilling into a motherboard, i personally would NOT under any circumstance do that. I would also get a new power supply designed for for dual socket boards.(thats just me) SO DONT go drilling holes and look into a new supply is my suggestion:)
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Thanks for looking out for me. But I didnt intend to drill into the motherboard but into the case to make new mounting holes as suggested by other users.
 
Zahu said:
Thanks for looking out for me. But I didnt intend to drill into the motherboard but into the case to make new mounting holes as suggested by other users.
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doh lol ok thats better....we all see it before:)
 
If one is planning a home build with this cheap CPU, which Dual socket mobo can be recommended? the one feature i do understand that is desirable is E5-26xx v2 support, for future upgrade paths, but there is a plethora of LGA-2011 mobos on supermicro site, with features i do not understand. which features are desirable for a prosumer at home? it will be used for a CPU intensive task- chess, and gaming with a GTX 970, maybe SLI 970 later. It will not run programs that benefit from more than 64GB of RAM, but sound and at least 4 storage drives will likely be installed. Should o forget serevr oriented mobos from supermicro and look instead towards dual socket solutions from other vendors?
 
geok1ng said:
If one is planning a home build with this cheap CPU, which Dual socket mobo can be recommended? the one feature i do understand that is desirable is E5-26xx v2 support, for future upgrade paths, but there is a plethora of LGA-2011 mobos on supermicro site, with features i do not understand. which features are desirable for a prosumer at home? it will be used for a CPU intensive task- chess, and gaming with a GTX 970, maybe SLI 970 later. It will not run programs that benefit from more than 64GB of RAM, but sound and at least 4 storage drives will likely be installed. Should o forget serevr oriented mobos from supermicro and look instead towards dual socket solutions from other vendors?
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Be very careful. The dual CPU boards generally don't support SLI or Crossfire. They're also server oriented so they don't have onboard audio, USB 3.0, or a pile of USB ports. Why do you want a dual CPU board over a single CPU board?
 
Stereodude said:
Be very careful. The dual CPU boards generally don't support SLI or Crossfire. They're also server oriented so they don't have onboard audio, USB 3.0, or a pile of USB ports. Why do you want a dual CPU board over a single CPU board?
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I would agree with this for overclocking if nothing else....that extra GHZ of cpu speed will really pay off in my mind
 
Stereodude said:
Be very careful. The dual CPU boards generally don't support SLI or Crossfire. They're also server oriented so they don't have onboard audio, USB 3.0, or a pile of USB ports. Why do you want a dual CPU board over a single CPU board?
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I'm not OP, but I am interested in the answer to the question. I'm looking for the cheapest dual socket board that "gets the job done" - I just want dat thread count, yo.
 
I'm running a server with 2 socket E5 2670. I only benchmarked Cinebench R15 and got 1900 score. Pretty impressive given the price I paid for two CPUs (around 60 bucks each on eBay at the moment).
 
I'm looking to build a dual E5-2670 system and am trying to decide between 1333MHz (PC3L-10600R) and 1600MHz (PC3-12800R) ram. Anyone have a sense of what kind of speed difference I would see by going with the faster DIMMs?
 
On my dual e5-2670 I could run 1333 max, even with 1866 ram.
On my single Sabertooth with an e5-2670 I am running ram near 2000 and with BOINC primegrid the work units take the same amount of time.
So, I would go with what I can find cheaper.
 
other than gaming i see no benefit from the faster ram, running 2670 @ 2400mhz ram on my desktop pc, but like bill1024 said, you might be limited on ram speed if you gonna use multiple cpus
 
Usual case is: RAM amount > RAM speed. For gaming, faster RAM makes almost no difference unless you're using an iGPU which depends on RAM speed.
 
KingRaptor said:
Usual case is: RAM amount > RAM speed. For gaming, faster RAM makes almost no difference unless you're using an iGPU which depends on RAM speed.
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Just for the record, that is not true with Rise of the Tomb Raider. Dual channel RAM @1333 to 2400MHz sees a minimum framerate boost of 12FPS for DDR3 boards that didn't support quad channel RAM. I tested out quad channel 800 through 2400MHz on my now backup rig, and the sweet spot is 2133MHz which nets a minimum framerate gain of 4FPS over 1600MHz (and a LOT more over 800, ha!).

EDIT: And we're going to see more of this as more Xbone/PS4 only titles get ported over as they make good use of their unified (and fast) memory.
 
a lot of games might not benefit in fps from faster ram but the huge games like battlefield, fallout, witcher, farcry, etc will probably run smoooother
 
Go for cheapest RAM, just try to buy a factory quad channel setup, u can avoid some troubles. 1366 or 1600 is insesisable.
 
KingRaptor said:
Usual case is: RAM amount > RAM speed. For gaming, faster RAM makes almost no difference unless you're using an iGPU which depends on RAM speed.
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If the game is cpu bound the higher ram frequency will increase minimum fps ,with igpus increase fps because the limited bandwidth
 
GothamsReckoning said:
You will find the price of a dual-socket LGA2011 motherboard to more if not equal to what you can get a enthusiast X79 motherboard for. Since you will only be using it for gaming and CPU intensive tasks a single-socket X79 motherboard should be still be sufficient enough. If you check my link above in the video you will see that the E5 2670 (SB-EP) is almost 90% of 5960X performance at a tiny cost. The E5 2670 V2 are coming down in price but they probably won't be SB-EP prices for a while now (maybe a few years).
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Agreed. The single socket boards are enough for most people and combined with a cheap E5-1650/1660, will make for a cheap and powerful system that'll still be relevant for a long time to come. To use an E5-2670 is kinda pointless, given how lacking they are in single threaded performance (with no way to alleviate this with overclocking). The E5-1650/1660, when overclocked to over 4.0 GHz, will equal the E5-2670 in multi-threaded performance and destroy it in single threaded performance.
 
so the E5-1650/1660 are unlocked? are they bus unlocked, multiplier unlocked or both?
the E5-1650 is x2 the 2670 price, will you get double the performance or even close by overclocking it? i think not,
and the 1660 is x4 the price so this really makes no sense at this time
 
The e5-1650 can be had for 145$ They are multiplier unlocked. My e5-1650 should be here Monday. I will run it in an Asus Sabertooth I paid 160$ for
I think depending on what you do with your computer... For gaming you may want to go with the e5-1650
If you are running BOINC where the more threads the better you may want to go with an e5-2670, or even a dual socket 2011 with 2 e5-2670
I paid 175$ foe an Intel dual socket 2011 and 65$ each for the CPUs, They work so good I built 2 of them.
 
E5-1650 are unlocked, all the way to v3. It all comes down to motherboard avilability. LGA1333 xeons are cheap, but only the EVGA SR2 can overclock 2 of them. Good luck finding one for sale. X58 board are common, but X58 mobos are ancient compared to X79, which can overclock Xeons E5-16xx. What make the e5-2670 so atractive is that mobos are easy to find, and you can get a combo of CPU, mobo and RAM for less than $400 for 32 threads.

If single thread speed matters, i would build a X79 e5-1650 today. If core count matters, i would go dual socket e5-2670. If i need both, i would set an alert on EVGA SR-2 mobos. The e5-1650 has no upgrade path, as the 1660 v2 has the same core count. The e5-2670 has great upgrade paths on 12 core e5-26xx v2 chips. The EVGA-SR2 has no upgrade path, at least until Intel launches a 12 core i7 to replace the SR2 as the leading clock+threads low cost platform.
 
I did not get the preference for the E5-1660 over the E5-1650, as both are 6c12t unlocked Xeons. The 1660 has more cache and a higher base clock, not worth much when both overclock. Going E5-1660v2 changes nothing.
The SR-X has mediocre overclocking potential. Unless one uses E5-26xx v2 high end chips, i doubt it can beat a SR2 after overclocking in all but the most multi threaded tasks. The SR2 delivers 12c24t at 4.3+Ghz, which is a quite a lot, even for prosumers.
 
Quick update: went with the slower (1333MHz) ram. I do not plan to use this system for gaming, so the slower ram seemed the obvious choice given feedback in the thread here. Thanks for everyone's input.
 
Did a quick test on 2 x E5-2670 with 64GB Quad channel DDR3 ECC Reg 1333MHz, look at the memory bandwidth.
 

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Hello Everyone,

My sig machine has recently died due to my i7 920 gone bad I believe, so I'm hopping on this train also. Its clearly the mostest for the leastest at this time and my case and PSU do not need to change.

I was inspired by this recent article some of you may have seen:

Building a 32-Thread Xeon Monster PC for Less Than the Price of a Haswell-E Core i7

I found Newegg has the EP2C602 board for $280 new, and I got the CPUs and 64gb ECC 1600 ram from Natex.us for $254, which I found through this thread. $534 for 16 core/32 thread/64gb goodness and a future upgrade path with faster E5 v2 CPUs, you simply cannot do better for the money. I'm trying out some Thermalright coolers as they are much cheaper than the Noctua in the article and very effective, I'll let you know what fits.

I game on Windows and also run Funtoo Linux for development, a source based distribution, I can't wait to see how fast this machine can compile. I intend to use VT-d to assign my video card to a Win 10 KVM virtual
machine for near native performance when gaming as described here:

GPU Passthrough - Or How To Play Any Game At Near Native Performance In A Virtual Machine (xpost /r/pcmasterrace) • /r/linux_gaming

Parts showing up over the next couple of days, I'll let you guys know how it goes.

Joseph
 
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workshop35 said:
Newegg show 449 for the asrock now....damn
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Sorry, I ordered the board on Tuesday. Just posted about it today. The one I got is the 8 DIMM one from the article in my post, not the 16 DIMM one. I might have rather had the 16 DIMM version, but really this build is about frugality for me so I went with what is cheapest.

I guess I could have gone with the Intel s2600p board from Natex then, but I wanted at least 2 real x16 PCIe double width slots on the same CPU for training neural networks.

Hey lucky for you! I just checked the other place I was looking at EP2C602 and they have them:

EP2C602 ASRock Rack Dual LGA2011/ Intel C602/ DDR3/ SATA3/ V&2GbE/ SSI EEB Server Motherboard - Xeon Server Motherboard - SuperBiiz.com

I was also looking at some of the Tyan boards there under $400, but when I saw the sub $300 EP2C602 I just went for it. So maybe I'll regret only having 64gb ram one day.

Best of luck!

Joseph
 
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I found an open box one for 319, but i just got an intel s5500bc and am going to put a couple x5670's in it instead.
 
josephnunn said:
Sorry, I ordered the board on Tuesday. Just posted about it today. The one I got is the 8 DIMM one from the article in my post, not the 16 DIMM one. I might have rather had the 16 DIMM version, but really this build is about frugality for me so I went with what is cheapest.

I guess I could have gone with the Intel s2600p board from Natex then, but I wanted at least 2 real x16 PCIe double width slots on the same CPU for training neural networks.

Hey lucky for you! I just checked the other place I was looking at EP2C602 and they have them:

EP2C602 ASRock Rack Dual LGA2011/ Intel C602/ DDR3/ SATA3/ V&2GbE/ SSI EEB Server Motherboard - Xeon Server Motherboard - SuperBiiz.com

I was also looking at some of the Tyan boards there under $400, but when I saw the sub $300 EP2C602 I just went for it. So maybe I'll regret only having 64gb ram one day.

Best of luck!

Joseph
Click to expand...

Ugh, I'm reconsidering switching to the ASRock... but so lazy to swap out the S2600CP -_-
 
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