Anyone here use Dual Xeon for Personal Workstation, Personal Server + Gaming?

[corinthos]

Hi All,
Does anyone here use Dual Xeon as personal workstation w/ some VM & personal server duties + gaming?

Would a pair of Xeon E5-2630v3 (8 cores each x 2, running at 2.4Ghz) with 32GB of DDR4 be overkill? Or would the multitasking, multiple VMs, and video/photo editing and encoding/transcoding be significantly better to make the extra expense worth it over say an i7-5820K or i7-5960x?

 

[RU482]

compar

That I7-5820K looks like a bargain compared to the other two

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2630+v3+%40+2.40GHz&id=2386&cpuCount=2

 

[zir_blazer]

The main issue that you have with Dual Xeons is that unless you have a ton of money to burn, more Cores drastically kills the Frequency, and overclocking isn't an option with them. In anything that uses 4 Threads or less, a Core i7 4790K would be substantially faster (Assuming that a 2.4 GHz Haswell isn't enough to max it, which should do well enough anyways but not what you expect of a 2000 U$D system). Going parallel requires TOO MUCH MONEY. And you're drastically oversizing Core amount yet want a conservative 32 GB RAM.

 

[MongGrel]

There are a few around here use a few older ones and OC em...

Not something I would do personally, wish I had almost grabbed an SR2 long ago, but nah.

That was even a generation older I guess.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Well, personal workstations and personal gaming general goes well together. (Get a high end i7 and call it a week, yah?)

A personal server, IMO, should be in a separate box that's built for power efficiency, since you don't get to turn it off anymore. (And most server tasks aren't exactly OMG CPU INTENSIVE anyway.)

 

[Ketchup]

For multiple VMs, I think the two separate chips would have their advantage. For general mutlitasking, a 4 core chip and plenty of RAM would be plenty. And honestly, if you are running on an SSD anyway, who's to say even the VMs would behave any differently?

But as dave_the_nerd pointed out, at some point one has to asks themselves if they are trying too hard to shove two computers into one.

 

[mfenn]

For multiple VMs, I think the two separate chips would have their advantage. For general mutlitasking, a 4 core chip and plenty of RAM would be plenty. And honestly, if you are running on an SSD anyway, who's to say even the VMs would behave any differently?

That's the crux of it. For the vast majority of VM workloads, you're not going to be able to drive 16 cores to any reasonable utilization with only 32GB of memory. You'd almost always rather have a single 8 core and 64 GB of memory.

Also, most games are not dual-socket optimized in any way, shape, or form, and see lower performance on dual-socket rigs. So you end up having to set affinity so that they only use one CPU anyway.

 

[Viper GTS]

I will third the sentiment that you should not try this in one machine.

Having to gracefully shutdown your entire server environment every time your desktop OS needs updating really, really sucks.

You'll regret it forever if you try this, build them separately.

Viper GTS

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I will third the sentiment that you should not try this in one machine.

Having to gracefully shutdown your entire server environment every time your desktop OS needs updating really, really sucks.

You'll regret it forever if you try this, build them separately.

Viper GTS

Well, the usual recommendation there is that you install your hypervisor on bare metal, install Windows in a VM, and passthrough your GPU.