Buyfag Thread: Xeon / Opteron Edition

I've noticed more than a few people here have purchased used desktops with server CPUs and motherboards (Xeons and Opterons) that are a few years old. My current desktop is almost 10 years old now, and these look like great values, since servers seem like the best of the "old" systems a person could buy and use for years into the future (dat L2 cache).

I'm wondering how well these work in place of a more normal i5 or AMD FX system. I'm sure you can't overclock with them, but do they come with drivers for desktop OSes like windows 7, do they have PCIe slots that take gaming GPUs, can their power supplies handle cards that require 6- or 8-pin PCIe connectors or even two of them? Could I fit a really big CPU cooler like my Hyper 212+ into most cases? Do server CPUs often have different mounting bracket arrangements than desktops? Could I still use my (perfectly good) Enermax 500W ATX power supply? Stuff like that. I'm pretty unfamiliar with entry-level server hardware and what it can and cannot do. If anyone has moved to a server system for gaymen, and especially if they have moved their old GPU/SATA SSD to it, I'd be interested in hearing how it went for you.

IDE/PATA support would be nice but I'd be almost as happy to throw that old shit away.

Also general buyfag thread, fun allowed. Show off and discuss your latest purchases or anything you've got your eyes on.

g-guys?

...

Hyper 212+ fits into most cases
u r k

They're usually not worth it. CPUs are close to hitting stagnation so I wouldn't worry about it too much unless you really have a ton enough cash to blow on them. Which I assume you do.

It doesn't work better than an i5 or FX because

Most games can't utilise all the cores.

You cannot overclock it., which means it's slower and has worse performance than an FX or i5 or i7

Server CPUs are meant exactly for what they are named, servers. If you have a ton of processes open then it could be worth it but it's garbage for gaming. It's like how dual CPU boards don't mean shit for gaming.

You can look at the benchmarks for fastest gaming rigs as well. Literally none of them use server CPUs because that's not what they optimised for.

iirc, server cpus aren't that much different aside from the higher wattage, CPU sockets, and the removal of the iGPU

enjoy ur power drain though m8

This is blatantly false.

OP, if you really want to get answers just go on a search engine and type in "server CPUs gaming".

The answers will all be obvious but the fact you didn't know sooner worries me, OP.

noyce

I guess that wouldn't bother me, though quicksync is kinda neat.


Forgot to mention in OP:
I currently have an LGA 775 Core 2 Quad (65nm).
I see some old Xeon desktops for sale in my area at about $200-$300. Not sure on just what specs (I plan to check next week) they have but I seem to recall they were low- mid-range Xeons from the Nehalem and Sandy Bridge era. 4-6 cores.

I'm willing to re-use my current GPU and SATA SSD, and power supply if necessary. Idgaf about power consumption, I already have my C2Q OC'd to 3.6 Ghz @ 200W power consumption.


I'm not looking for the best performance here, just a significant step up from my current system (which has pretty weak single thread performance) at a low price.

Then just get an i5 and overclock it.

I assure you that a xeon can't beat that (for gaming).

Same as with professional GPUs here's little difference in practical usage, a CPU from the same architecture / generation will perform pretty much the same clock to clock.
You do lose a few features (mainly iGPU and OC) and the ones you get will have no real usage for games most of the time.
Overall it's worth it only if you pay less overall.

older server parts are still going to be more expensive than similarly aged desktop parts and perform worse. no point.

the performance of the cpu is irrelevant

the motherboards for those chipsets are outdated and use different standards. IDE instead of sata, AGP instead of PCIe

if you do get a mobo that can take a modern gpu, enjoy bottlenecking it with 2-4 weak cpu cores because essentially nothing uses more than that

That's exactly what I (might) be dealing with here.
There's a place near me that sells surplus equipment from a science-y workplace by the dozens every week.
They do sell a lot of normal i5/i3 desktops that they buy by the 100s, but they are almost always those "slim" desktop cases that can't take full-height PCIe cards. Probably have 300w power supplies, too. Just your basic bitch barely-customizable desktops.

I would much rather buy an old "workstation" computer that can handle a real GPU and real GPU power consumption. That means getting a full-size ATX(ish?) case with a Xeon or maybe Opteron.

I'd much rather browse dozens of random 2-4 year old workstations at one place that received clean power their whole lives and buy one right away than get on craigslist and drive all over town and deal with random slobs.

Also, this place tends to have tons of really old computer parts, like mid-90s SCSI card old. Is there anything like that I should pick up for the lulz? They're usually in a giant bin labeled "everything $5".

If you're just cannibalizing your old computer for most of the parts and only looking for a cheap cpu/mobo/ram set then why should any of that stuff matter?

Because last I checked, Intel wanted $200 just for a quad core CPU.
And I'd need a new motherboard.
And RAM.

shit, misread your post
I might look into that :^)

As much as Xeon can be decent for games Opterons are not usable as a gaming CPU, they're comparable clock to clock with the respective generation they're based on but they're fucking clocked at 2.8Ghz at best coupled with an architecture that's pretty shit unless it runs at very high speeds (4+Ghz)

When it comes to brands what's best? Is ASUS as bad as this chart ironically suggest?

Good to know, will keep that in mind.


ASUS is just a meme brand now, right?

Also that chart makes no distinction between motherboards (which apparently no one can make properly) and graphics cards.

Depends. Are you going to render a lot of video? If so moar coars are always nice. But really it gets down to clock speed + IPC.

I'd imagine an E5-2690 would perform a lot like a i7 2600k, and frequently on eBay I see that part go for the same or less as the 2600k despite the fact that it's non-engineering sample. Maybe there's the OC factor but really you don't need to warm up a high end SB even to this day, so that's not really a problem. Maybe a little slower overall but not too much. Also you may be able to use ECC RAM, which might help system stability a little bit (not much though, maybe not even noticeably).

Anyway I have a few old servers and they run out of the box on Win7 and even lightweight Linux distros, so compatibility is fine usually.

Now PSU issues are more prevalent if you get a used HP or Dell server system, sometimes they use ATX connections but don't have the same power pinout.

If you need an IDE port there's plenty of old PCI cards that add exactly that on, if your mobo doesn't have that already.

First of all there are a metric shitload of Xeons, so there's not really one general answer as far as compatibility and such. Furthermore, as others have mentioned, most of them are not really good for gaming rigs, but a few are. In particular, the most popular Intel processors usually get Xeon equivalents without an igpu. The Xeon equivalent of the 4790 is fairly popular.
All that said, they are rarely a good deal for a gaming rig, but sometimes you can get a steal on two or three year old machines that were leased by the government or a large business.
Just do your homework before you pick up a given CPU that you find.

Whichever brand has the cheapest prices where you can grab them easily, there's really not that much difference nowadays, pretty much every brand has all the same features and the only difference left is specific gimmick models or custom cooling systems (which all perform very similarly generally), reliability isn't really different pretty much the last big thing I can remember was sapphire trying to sell 7850/7870/7950 with shit capacitors that would have catastrophic failures sometimes, I like ASUS for mobos and gainward for GPUs but that's just me
>tfw DFI is dead and gone


ASUS does a few good but overpriced meme-tier mobo like the ROG ones, the sabertooth used to be just really good back with the 990FX model but now it's all about that retarded heat shield and stupid shit you will never use it's still good hardware but overpriced, their lower end mobos are unremarkable and priced worse than competing brands
ASUS GPU are all overpriced to shit and not really any better than what you can get elsewhere.
Anything with the ROG label in general is terribly overpriced, especially monitors and vary between good to terrible.

Motherboards:
ASUS, MSI
ASRock
Gigabyte

Graphix:
ASUS, Gainward
MSI (AMD), XFX, EVGA
MSI (NVidia), Gigabyte, Powercolor, Zotac

???

My Asus mobo blew up due to a retarded as shit northbridge setup, while my Gigabyte mobo is running perfectly fine even though the lack of sata channels is a bummer.

That's basically exactly what I'm looking at here, yep.


Nice. I got an old 250 GB IDE hard drive that still works, so yeah.


F


They were going through a phase.

Server CPUs are made for a high level of parallelization, where multiple tasks are able to run at once, which is beneficial to servers.

Regular consumer and professional CPUs are designed with high single threaded/single core performance . This is why most i7s nowadays use 4 physical cores with hyperthreading and call it a day. Because there's little benefit to having a million low IPC cores when for direct interfacing tasks you could benefit more with less high IPC cores.

People have this contrived notion that the latest Xeons are good for gaming because they're the most expensive and thus must be higher end. This is wrong unless you pay a thousand bucks for just the CPU alone. Otherwise an i7 will be higher end than a Xeon.

Also I would seriously hold off going anywhere near AMD until we get more info about Zen. Literally NONE this years, last years, or even the year before thats premium device lineup had an AMD chip, and for good reason.

Oh yeah, and to add on my third point about how people have this false notion about Xeons premium-ness

The newer Xeons will be using Intel Atom based cores to reduce power consumption. Only the highest-tier Xeons used for supercomputers are going to have decent cores

But that's false at the very least partially, you do have Xeons like the Intel E5-2603 v3 which are like you said made with parallelization in mind since they're 6 cores with HT @ 1.6Ghz and that have no equivalent in the desktop world, they do still have about the same single thread performance as a regular desktop Haswell running at the same speed (more or less since it's Haswell-E and not really Haswell)

On the other hand take the Xeon E3-1245 v5 and it's pretty much the same thing as any desktop skylake i7 (4 cores with HT @3.5Ghz / 3,9Ghz turbo) and it's like 300 bucks so it's not exactly high end either, those cheap "not an i7" Xeons have existed since the first Core iX generation which is why it might be interesting to try and look for one of those if you're looking at a secondhand build, and even sometimes brand new ones have deals that can make them viable against a regular desktop CPU or at-least used to since now you need a server chipset to run any Xeon even if they share a socket with your desktop mobo.