Xeon e5-2697 v4 $108

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Almighty

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Oct 27, 2019
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I regret only getting one of the 2699 last year. Never could find another at a reasonable price. This is tempting but I'm hopeful for 2699 again ha
 
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frogtech

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Jan 4, 2016
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I need some CPUs for Dell M630 blades, they can be configured with either 68mm or 86mm heatsinks, the former is pretty standard and the latter has what is probably a vapor chamber /w heatpipes (or just a heat pipe sans vapor chamber).

They're both described as "for 120W or less CPU" and "120W and greater CPU" oddly enough, I would prefer to use 68MM heatsinks since the bigger ones block 2 DIMMs in each socket (intentionally).

Any recommendations are great value V4 chips?
 
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zack$

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Aug 16, 2018
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I regret only getting one of the 2699 last year. Never could find another at a reasonable price. This is tempting but I'm hopeful for 2699 again ha
Apart from that great deal last year, I haven't seen the 2699 for sub $200, (other than on bidding or BO).

Because the 99's are highest core count processors for the Broadwell generation, they will likely continue to fetch a premium for some time to come.
 
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foureight84

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Jun 26, 2018
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I regret only getting one of the 2699 last year. Never could find another at a reasonable price. This is tempting but I'm hopeful for 2699 again ha
You could always get the E5-2699 V3 instead. The E5 V3 Haswell Xeons have an errata that you can take advantage of via a UEFI mod that will force all cores to run at single-core turbo speed. I did this for a while with dual E5-2660 V3.
 
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gb00s

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Jul 25, 2018
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I regret only getting one of the 2699 last year. Never could find another at a reasonable price. This is tempting but I'm hopeful for 2699 again ha
Market is flooded with 2696v4 ATM which is the 'same' CPU but higher turbo than 2699v4 (3.7 vs 3.6). Some guys had luck with 3.8Ghz. Never tested myself but lot of guys have better single benchmark scores with the 2696v4.

Get two and sell your 2699.
 
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nk215

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Oct 6, 2015
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You could always get the E5-2699 V3 instead. The E5 V3 Haswell Xeons have an errata that you can take advantage of via a UEFI mod that will force all cores to run at single-core turbo speed. I did this for a while with dual E5-2660 V3.
Does the mod work with server suck as the R730
 
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zack$

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Aug 16, 2018
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Market is flooded with 2696v4 ATM which is the 'same' CPU but higher turbo than 2699v4 (3.7 vs 3.6). Some guys had luck with 3.8Ghz. Never tested myself but lot of guys have better single benchmark scores with the 2696v4.

Get two and sell your 2699.
Nah...the 96 is not compatible with all boards owing to it's higher tdp and additional vrms required to run it.

The 99, however, is widely compatible.

Stick with your 99.
 
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foureight84

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Jun 26, 2018
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Does the mod work with server suck as the R730
I am not sure. I've only done that on a C612 chipset workstation board, specifically the ASUS Z10PED8 WS.
Here's one of the original threads.


This was the UEFI driver I used to take advantage of the turbo exploit (GitHub - freecableguy/v3x4: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Processor Max Effort Turbo Boost UEFI DXE driver). If I remember correctly, it requires patching your bios to remove cpu microcodes. This was easy to do for the ASUS motherboard since it has a flashback feature that bypasses signature verification. Then install custom UEFI drivers to enable the exploit. You'll also have to install a tool from vmware in order to patch Windows' microcode as well. It was necessary to repatch from time to time after a Windows update. I don't recall what the procedure was for Linux but I would imagine it's similar and probably easier.

Here we go, an extensive thread about the exploit and how to apply it: What controls Turbo Core in Xeons?

I've attached old instructions I compiled at the time for my system.
 

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i386

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Mar 18, 2016
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What are your use cases for these?
I recently upgraded from e5 v4's to some epyc/threadripper pro/ryzen systems and the newer systems feel "faster" than the e5 systems with fresh windows 10/server 2019 installations
 
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foureight84

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Jun 26, 2018
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Does the mod work with server suck as the R730
Forgot to mention that the mod only works on E5 V3. From what I can remember, the Haswell CPU has legacy designs that allow this to happen whereas Broadwell CPU is slightly different in architecture. I don't remember the full technical details.
 
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e97

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Jun 3, 2015
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What are your use cases for these?
I recently upgraded from e5 v4's to some epyc/threadripper pro/ryzen systems and the newer systems feel "faster" than the e5 systems with fresh windows 10/server 2019 installations
"feel faster" is likely increased single thread performance, modern systems are almost 2x the single threaded performance of v4.
I see the benefit is multi-threaded unless the workload needs modern instructions like AVX-512

Curious as well, is the upfront cost savings worth the power?
 
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