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Cheap Xeon as basis for workstation?

flat-6

flat-6

flat-6

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
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Location
Lancaster
Hi Guys,

At the moment I have an AMD X4 955 Phenom unlocked to 4 cores, with 12gb ram and an SSD.

Its getting a bit slow for stuff I'm doing in Visual Studio (dev) with video encoding. I have no interest in modern games so no requirement there. I was looking at either doing a G4560/B250/DDR4 build or from some googling it seems you can build a cheap and powerful workstation out of old server bits; like two Xeon 2670s. I don't mind a bit of work so this seems like an interesting route. Is this a crazy idea?
 
Personally I'd build a cheap Ryzen system as it'll perform great without all the power use of an old Xeon system, it'll also be more upgradeable.
 
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flat-6 said:
I was looking at either doing a G4560/B250/DDR4 build or from some googling it seems you can build a cheap and powerful workstation out of old server bits; like two Xeon 2670s. I don't mind a bit of work so this seems like an interesting route. Is this a crazy idea?
Click to expand...

Neither of those is a great idea. The G4560 despite being much newer only has 2 physical cores (although does have HT for 4 threads), so I doubt would provide that much of a boost (although will no doubt save power).

With regards to the cheap and powerful workstation - the server bits tend to be cheap for a reason - they aren't suited for normal use (due to heat and therefore cooling noise, and high power requirements). Having built a couple of dual CPU systems in the past (e.g. dual 771 quad xeons), what starts as a "cheap" project can quickly spiral out of control as you realise that finding coolers to fit is difficult, coolers that are quiet is even more difficult, and then start running into unexpected problems such as cooling Chipset that are designed for high passive airflow rack environments.

If you really want to go down the workstation route, I'd encourage you to look at prebuilt OEM workstations such as the Dell Precision series or HP's Z series.

As has already been said though - AMD's Ryzen offer high core counts (and Hyperthreading) and all are overclockable. While the initial outlay may be greater - it allows you to keep to "normal" parts, and avoid issues with heat, noise or power consumption.
 
A single Xeon is easily possible in most normal X99 boards which negates the whole "hard to find a cooler" argument, as any standard 2011-3 cooler fits.

Can pick up some really cheap 12-16 core xeons on eBay, just beware of two things, 1) there are a lot of ES chips that you need to avoid, and 2) your average Xeon will be lower clocked than the consumer chips.

I ended up with a cheap E5-1620 v3 (£100, boxed, sealed) as a stopgap whilst I source a higher end part. Under my water cooling, the CPU sits at around 27c idle and high 50s at 100% (Prime95). Cool as a cucumber.
 
paradigm said:
A single Xeon is easily possible in most normal X99 boards which negates the whole "hard to find a cooler" argument, as any standard 2011-3 cooler fits.
Click to expand...

OP specifically mentioned "two xeons", which can be a lot more difficult to actually find two coolers that fit.
 
Oh indeed, but I'd definitely say that a single 16 core/32 thread would be more than adequate. Heck if it's not then a single 24c/48t is still doable on an X99 board.

Why make things overly complex when the requirements can (most likely) be met in a single socket.
 
Thanks all. Will look into Ryzen stuff too.
paradigm said:
Can pick up some really cheap 12-16 core xeons on eBay, just beware of two things, 1) there are a lot of ES chips that you need to avoid, and 2) your average Xeon will be lower clocked than the consumer chips.
Click to expand...
What are ES chips that I need to avoid?
 
Well they are typically clocked notably lower than their OEM and Retail counterparts also, but yes they are fully working parts.
 
You could go for 1366 socket. I picked up a Xeon 5670 (6 cores 6 threads) for £45 from here, it easily overclocked to 4Ghz. Dual socket motherboards for 1366 are cheap as chips too.
 
flat-6 said:
or from some googling it seems you can build a cheap and powerful workstation out of old server bits; like two Xeon 2670s. I don't mind a bit of work so this seems like an interesting route. Is this a crazy idea?
Click to expand...

Not crazy but you won't get the same performance as with a new system obviously. My backup rig probably falls under that category though it wasn't built as such it just evolved over time (was my work computer until I replaced it). Mine has the following spec:

Dell Precision T5400 workstation
2x Xeon E5450 (3GHz quad core)
12GB DDR2-533 ECC in quad channel
120GB SSD
2x500GB SATA3 in RAID1
ATi HD5870 1GB
DVDRW
875W PSU

You could probably build something similar (or less/more depending on needs) fairly cheaply. To put it in perspective that unit minus drives/GPU would be worth less than £100.

Obviously you have to consider that while you can get loads of cores by going for an older Xeon, they are slow cores these days (even with LGA2011) and so won't come close to matching the per core performance of a modern CPU.
 
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