Covering earlier posts:
I have just been comparing the i7 980x with a Xeon W3680, they are very similar except that the Xeon supports ECC memory and the 980x does not. Also the Xeon supports more memory types and has better bandwidth;
Seeing as they are almost identical in price and specification, do you think that the Xeon would be better for 3D regarding the memory. Also is this Xeon ovcerclockable like the 980x. I appreciate that Evil-I mentioned about Xeons earlier, but now i cant seem to see which is best? Would it also be a problem to buy a overclocking motherboard for a Xeon?
I'm not sure there is any advantage to ECC memory in this case, in fact only a disadvantage in that it tends to be much more expensive and you have less choice. ECC memory is designed to combat soft errors which are apparently caused by cosmic rays and background radiation (i only read about this so can't confirm its validity). But it seems that if you have a server running 24/7 the ecc memory is heavily recommended as this sort of error might happen once a month or so (and worst case might cause a BSOD), but based in a situation like yours, I'd suggest that it is unlikely to give you much of an improvement in reliability and theoretically will actually slow the machine down slightly.
I'm not entirely sure if normal i7 based motherboard will support the Xeon W3680? They have the same pin layout but the Xeons are quoted as socket FCLGA1366 whilst the i7s are quoted as LGA1366 (which may be the same thing of course...), no idea if there are any differences? So can't really help you there I'm afraid.
So we're again back to the scenario where if you have to buy a Xeon specific motherboard the overclocking options are non existent, and based on the fact that you can make a £200 cpu perform like a £600 cpu with the appropriate tweaking, its worth taking that fact in to account. I think you will have similar constraints with ECC memory, you probably won't get very high speed memory in ECC flavour.
To be honest my friend, the danger we all run is that we spend all our time staring at performance figures and reviews, and what's coming round the corner and actually never end up buying anything. I've started to try and ignore what's coming a little and then work out what bang I can get for my money and what's the best value (not necessarily the cheapest).
My overclocked i7 920 running at 4.2Ghz is giving me the performance of the upper end quad core i7's at stock speed, I couldn't justify spending another £300-400 for maybe a ten percent increase in performance. I'd rather save that money so in another 18 months time when the next shiniest CPU comes out that doubles the performance of my current i7 I can upgrade to that earlier.
Would I buy the newest shiniest most expensive CPU if I had unlimited money? Course I bloody would
I'd probably buy a box full, so if you do have the money I'd suggest the i7980x simply because then you can make it go even faster with a bit of tweaking, which I'm not sure you'd be able to do with the Xeon.
The other thing of course is that compared to your current rig, a rig like mine is faster by about a factor of 10 (**edit actualy nearer a factor of twenty once I checked the results again**)... That's quite a significant improvement anyway!
Have fun buying whatever you decide
Best,
E-I
, though you should take everything with a pinch of salt.
