>>43043950
core for core... no
because overclock > cache

8+ core xeon is a different discussion

BOYCOTT

>>43043987
How much does an 8 core Xeon cost compared to a similarly specced i7?

>>43043950
Workstations don't choose Xeons for the looks.

>>43044019
there are no 8 core i7s yet

that is why its a different discussion

that being said, an overclocked 4930k approaches the performance of an 8core xeon

>>43043987
>overclock > cache
what

>>43044032
they choose xeons for the marketing propaganda
workstation grade hardware is a crock of shit invented by marketing people to get you to spend more money.

>>43044060
A higher clock is far more beneficial to performance than a bit more L3 cache. Are you some sort of retard?

>>43044060
core for core, you get more performance from overclocking than the extra cache in a xeon would be able to give you.

>>43043950
As an owner of a Xeon, i can tell you now that for consumer workloads, there is no advantage.

Now, if you needed more than 6 cores, a xeon is where you go, especially if you need to go multi-socket.
Just a heads up though: an 8 core Xeon w/ a decent core clock is going to run one hell of a pretty penny ($2k USD easy). Want even more cores? Its going to cost even more. Want to do a monster quad LGA 2011 box? Dont. Each CPU alone is pushing 4 grand, 8 gigs of ram for each CPU (4x2GB DDR3-1600 ECC Registered) would run another 500-1000 USD, and finally a barebones 4P server to hold it all another 2k.

Want moar coars, especially past the dual socket point? Go AMD. Its a metric fuckton cheaper, to the point where anyone with about $2500 USD can purchase a full AMD quad socket system, complete with ram, CPUs, board, heatsinks, power supplies, and a suitable case.

>>43044267
as an AMD fan, I hardly know about their server Opterons. Are they actually good for server computing on most levels?

>>43044401
Depends on how many threads you need and your budget. AMD chips are naturally weaker than intel chips, so if you are doing something that isnt so heavily threaded, stick with intel. If you are doing something that benefits massively from multiple threads (folding, rendering, etc) go with AMD.

Theres a reason why distributed computing teams almost always use AMD 4P rigs. Not only are they cheap and easy to get, the supermicro boards they are typically run on can be flashed to an unlocked custom BIOS that would allow for overvolting and overclocking. IIRC the cinebench world record is currently held by an overclocked AMD 4P rig, and has remained unbroken for several years.
Word of advice though if you go AMD 4P and overclock: expect a fuckton of power consumption, and make sure the board's VRMs are properly heatsinked.
Fuckton of power consumption: depending on how high you push the system, you'll be looking at a consumption of about 300W per socket. Hyper 212+ heatsinks can handle the load, but make sure the rig itself has adequate airflow or is in a suitably cool place (basements work).
VRMs properly heatsinked: the supermicro boards werent designed for that kind of power load in mind, and thus if the VRMs arent heatsinked they will overheat and catch fire. Friend of mine who had an AMD 4P lost it that way. If they ARE properly heatsinked though, the system will last much longer.

>>43043950
xeons are for servers, and 2011 is for no particular purpose.

>>43044657
I just grabbed a random xeon pic.

>>43044607
what kind of person has a use for a 4p opteron server in his home? and why are you talking about this like a hillbilly talks about trucks and 80's mustangs?
>mah buddy..

>>43044066
Yeah, ECC is just marketing BS and doesn't actually do anything, right?

>>43044883
>what kind of person has a use for a 4p opteron server in his home?
we're talking commercial

>>43044952
I'd have thought so, but a few of the phrases and their context indicate otherwise

>>43044883
A person who does alot of distributed computing. Many distributed computing projects benefit greatly from a fuckton of threads.

>>43044982
Do you have any examples of the sort of distributed computing that would require such hardware yet would be done in a home?

>>43044883
Using x264 with --preset placebo daily makes me dream of having a quad CPU opteron setup. :(

Anyway, right now you can find Sandy Bridge Xeons (8c/16t) at $250 a piece on ebay. So for $500 you could run a dual CPU Xeon rig with 16 cores / 32 threads for HALF the price of what Intel is going to charge for an 8core Haswell-E part.
The only downside is that entry level Xeons are clocked very low (2ghz, 2.2ghz if you're lucky) and support no overclocking whatsoever.

>>43045103
I used to have a xeon setup but I sold it because it was overkill and my energy bill was really high

now I use an i3 lol

>>43045129
Huh? Xeons aren't particularly power hungry and electricity is dirt cheap here in murrica. I'm sure you spent more money on a new cpu and mobo than the extra power cost on your xeon rig over its lifetime

>>43045155
Electricity is dirt cheap but can still come out to $80-$100 per year just from the chip alone.

Yes. I'm not buying anything but Xeons and workstation/server grade motherboards and ECC RAM from now, they'r better, and they're not even much more expensive.

>>43044657
Xeons are not just for servers.

>>43045129
Xeons use less power than Core series though.

>>43044996
Well, Folding@home scales very well with more threads, be they real, fake, weak or strong. Id have to go look around for a bit, but a properly configured AMD 4P rig could easily push the half million points per day mark. Its getting the hardware properly set up and running that is the issue. Once that is done and the box has a link to the net, its a fairly simple matter of getting the folding@home client configured and running.

Im not so sure about other distributed computing projects, but i think einstein@home also does well with plenty of threads. I'd have to start up my desktop (which, by luck and a fair bit of generosity, has a E5-2690 Xeon in it, basically the highest SB-E Xeon possible) and look thorugh the BOINC client to see what of the 3 projects i am running does well with multiple threads.

>>43045103
Those cheap xeons are crap, and most of them are of a stepping that is not guaranteed to work properly. And 2P LGA 2011 boards arent cheap. If he wants to go 2P Intel, he'd be much better off getting a pair of 1366 hex core Xeons, which can be cheaply had, and an SR-2 if he can find one.

>>43045175
poorfag

>>43044267
>consumer
Please don't use that word in the context of computing.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Consumer

muh ecc

>>43044911
The need for ECC is vastly overstated. Running less than 1TB RAM and the odds are nearly 0 that you'll experience any errors in a year. But go ahead and believe what you want. The only reason for ECC in my opinion is because memory is available in higher density.

This thread makes me physically ill.
>cache is useless
>ecc is useless
>vt-d not even mentioned
It literally reeks of
>muh games

>>43045180
>Xeons are not just for servers.
sorry servers and rendering, which is a bit more of a GPU thing.

>>43045247
A very large-scale study based on Google's very large number of servers was presented at the SIGMETRICS/Performance’09 conference.[4] The actual error rate found was several orders of magnitude higher than previous small-scale or laboratory studies, with 25,000 to 70,000 errors per billion device hours per megabit (about 2.5–7 × 10?11 error/bit·h) (i.e. about 5 single bit errors in 8 Gigabytes of RAM per hour using the top-end error rate), and more than 8% of DIMM memory modules affected by errors per year.

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf

>>43045267
I'll play devil's advocate. How much of a difference does the cache make?

>>43045267
You forget about people with two processors in there system, which require Xeons rather than the core series.

By the way, Xeons are often cheaper for performance/features than similar i7's.

>>43045280
You're still wrong.

Xeons are for whoever the fuck needs or wants them, period.

>>43045334
maybe if you like wasting money

>>43043950
> Do Xeon processors offer advantages over i7s?

Have you ever run into something you know would work better with a Xeon? Are you running a high end workstation or server? Do you need moar cores? If the answer is no then there's no advantage for you.

An i7 is great for most users and for the purpose of gaming actually works better than a Xeon.

>>43045334
Or you could go full retard and spend money for two processors or more cores for the hell of it.

>>43045341
Read the first part of my comment perhaps?

>>43043950
Stupid amounts of registered ECC RAM, think 100s of GBs (when used on a C60x board) multi-socket support and more then 8 coars.

You'd easily blow 5k+++ taking advantage of those though, it really isn't relevant to the average /g/ shitposter unless you're picking them up on ebay.

>>43045302
A lot if you optimize your application for it.
CryptoNight mining demands a lot of cache for instance, a bit more than 2 MB per core.
The algorithm totally tanks if you don't have that much cache.

Image and video processing would be another example. You want that image to fit inside the L2 cache

>>43045155
>>43045175
not him but my energy bill was in the hundreds every month. Switched a few lightbulbs and got rid of the ol' Xeon home server, replacing it with a low-voltage i3 (fanless). Saved myself over a grand per year.
>hurr muh poorfag dur
ok

>>43045358
Why would the average person need 2 CPUs?

>>43045379
loger epeen

>>43045379
The average person needs a Core i3 and no dedicated GPU.

>>43045357
>An i7 is great for most users and for the purpose of gaming actually works better than a Xeon.

I highly doubt the most high-end i7 available will outperform the most high-end Xeon available in any game.

>>43045379
Who the fuck gives a shit about the average person? We're not talking about the average person.

>>43045287
#REKT

>>43045410
>gaymen
>processors

>>43045103
>Anyway, right now you can find Sandy Bridge Xeons (8c/16t) at $250 a piece on ebay.

You're talking about ES ones right? they don't run on my mobo, that sucks.

>>43045410
I'm going to take a wild guess and say OP is an average person given he needs to ask the question

>>43045410
An i7 Extreme will outperform a Xeon E5 in many consumer applications. The Xeon is more designed for handling extreme virtualization loads.

>>43045410
>>43045423
I was asking out of interest, because I have seen people talk about the differences in i7's and Xeons, and I do not know very much about how different cpu architecture functions.

>>43045302
Depends on a large number of factors. In some applications having a fuckton of L3 cache is greatly useful. In others it serves little purpose other than allow for on die communication between cores. L1 and L2 cache are far more critical though, as they are much faster and lower latency, and thus closer to the CPU cores in the memory hierarchy. Toms hardware did a review with an Athlon II quad core and a Phenom II quad core, set both CPUs to the same settings (clocks, voltages, ram speeds etc) and pit them against each other. In some cases the Phenom II pulled ahead, sometimes by a significant amount, othertimes it was neck and neck.

>>43045287
Cosmic rays and flaws in manufacturing can be a right bitch. Especially cosmic rays. If the ray itself doesnt do the damage, the subatomic shrapnel of it smacking into the atmosphere at relativistic velocities definitely will. Most cosmic rays move with a velocity > .95c, and the fastest one detected to date was a single proton that hit with the kinetic energy equivalent to a baseball moving at 60mph.

>>43045451
>consumer
Stop using that word immediately.
See
>>43045219

>>43045466
> The terms “producer” and “consumer” come from economics and its treatment of material products. Thus, using them leads people to mistakenly apply to copiable digital data all that they know about the economics of uncopiable material products. Of course, this error is exactly the one proprietary software developers want people to make.
Were not talking about digital data though
were talking about physical items
autist

>>43045485
The users don't passively consume their CPUs.
They're using them to create and if it's just Facebook posts.

>>43045464
>Cosmic rays and flaws in manufacturing can be a right bitch. Especially cosmic rays. If the ray itself doesnt do the damage, the subatomic shrapnel of it smacking into the atmosphere at relativistic velocities definitely will. Most cosmic rays move with a velocity > .95c, and the fastest one detected to date was a single proton that hit with the kinetic energy equivalent to a baseball moving at 60mph.
this is either the world's best shitpost or a brief introduction to an extremely interesting topic

please, tell us more

>>43045410
You can run an i7 at higher clock speeds, which is more important for games than the cache.

>>43045451
>An i7 Extreme will outperform a Xeon E5 in many consumer applications.

No it won't.

>The Xeon is more designed for handling extreme virtualization loads.

There is nothing stopping it from handling desktop/workstation loads absolutely great, which it does.

>>43045460
Get a Xeon and a workstation motherboard, a lot of them are cheaper for the performance (in games and everything) and features than i7's.

>>43045515
Overclocking does not make that big of a difference. Even with whatever i7 you want overclocked however high you want, it's not out-performing the highest-end Xeons available.

>>43045532
>implying you understand what youre talking about

>>43045582
Implying I don't. This is not workstation vs gaming GPUs.

There's nothing stopping a Xeon from performing better than a core series processor with any type of task, Intel doesn't gimp them for one thing or the other like nvidia/amd do with workstation/gaming GPUs, they only add benefits to the Xeons.

>>43045582
>>43045610
You're right, they don't actually understand this.

>>43045503
It's actually a real thing he's talking about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory#Problem_background

>>43045503
Ok then. On cosmic rays:
They are a variety of subatomic objects, ranging from single protons to entire atomic nuclei to even antimatter. What they all have in common is that they are moving at very very high speeds, typically fast enough that relativity and all the weird shit that happens to matter moving that fast occurs.
Now, most of the time these subatomic particles and shit are flying around without a care in the universe. The bulk will miss our solar system entirely. Some will hit the sun's magnetic field and be deflected back into space. The faster ones will penetrate the field but miss our planet. The extremely (un)lucky ones will manage a successful strike against our planet's atmosphere.

Now, you have to keep in mind, these particles are hitting a fairly dense layer of matter at energies that would make the LHC weep with envy. When they hit, they and whatever unfortunate molecule that got struck basically get torn into their constituent components and fired deeper into the atmosphere towards the surface, still moving at high velocity. These fragments continue to "shotgun" deeper into the atmosphere, shredding atoms as they go. Many will stop before they reach the surface. Some though will make it.
Cont next post
A link for reading material in the meantime:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_rays

>>43045532
Of course it handles loads great. It's a great processor. But the i7 Extreme is great too, and it's great in slightly different ways.

Maybe you don't realize what I'm talking about. I don't mean this:
>i7-4790, LGA 1150, $340
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117369&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-na-_-na-_-na&cm_sp=&AID=10446076&PID=3938566&SID=

I mean this:
>i7-4960X, LGA 2011, $1050
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116938&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-na-_-na-_-na&cm_sp=&AID=10446076&PID=3938566&SID=

The i7-Extreme is what happens when Intel gets out the A list and makes a desktop processor out of it.

i got a i7 920

when would it be time to upgrade

>>43045836
If you're paying that much, why would you want a "desktop" processor?

>>43045733
Cont:
And heres where the problem lies. Each one of those fragments will still pack one hell of a punch for their size when they end their journey. To a human or other organism living on the surface, we can take a hit from such an event and basically shrug it off.
To a computer though, such a shower of subatomic debris can be hell. See, transistors nowadays have very very fine tolerances when it comes to their construction, with some of the layers involved being only a couple atoms thick at best.
Lets throw in the wrench that is the aforementioned shower of subatomic debris moving at a significant fraction of c. Suddenly said transistors are getting the shit whacked out of them by debris passing through, knocking atoms from the crystal lattices and generally causing chaos. Most of the time the transistor can continue to function after a hit. Sometimes though the impact is enough to cause the transistor to switch its state, which can lead to silent corruption and data loss.
That server running in the stock exchange doing high speed trading just had a shitfit from that single memory error, causing millions in losses while the system restarts. Or that rendering project you were running just had a parameter changed that shouldnt have been, corrupting the whole thing.
Basically, cosmic rays can fuck up a computer, and the problem is getting worse as transistor sizes continue to fall.

Oh, and a bit on that super particle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle

>>43045844
You're doing just fine.

>>43045857
Where do you think you are?

>>43045302
from what I understand cache is good for programs/applications that the processor needs to keep recalling. It is faster to do so from cache than ram.

Would a Xeon be worth it for heavy audio/music production and video and stuff along side it?

>>43046819
You dont' need a Xeon unless you're running a server that's going to be serving thousands of clients at once.

>>43046879
>not needing to run hundreds of virtual machines at once

>>43044042
What about an 8 threaded Xeon processor ?

Those go for around $190-$230 socket 1155 tho

also does anyone know whats faster amd 8320 vs Xeon 1230?

are there even water blocks for xeons?

I kind of want to swap out my noisy 2U fans for a simple water cooling setup. Dual Xeons, no overclocking of course.

How are Xeon processors for gaming?

for like budget builds and what not

>>43047751
>budget
Just get an i5/3.

>>43047766
But for the same price of a 4 core i5 I can get an 8 threaded Xeon which in theory sounds like a better deal


just no on talks about Xeons for gaming....

>>43046879
This is bullshit.

>>43045375
House with a family? Had a three bedroom apartment with 2 of us using gaming rigs left on 24/7. We broke a $200 on the electric bill once in July.

I got my E3-1245v3 for less than a i7-4770 and it benchmarks better than the latter.

>>43048935
I have a 1230v2, it costs $85 less and performs almost as good as a 4770, yet has features like ECC support, VT-d, dual-processor support, and a bunch of other Xeon stuff.

If you got the 1230v3 it's performance is about the same, has all those features, and is still more than $50 cheaper.

The Xeons are a better bang for your buck.

>>43049267
Yeah how come it's always intel i5 vs amd 8350?

Why can't Xeon processors get some love?