ES Xeon Discussion

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Aluminum

Active Member
Sep 7, 2012
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AFAIK you cannot use ECC Memory with X99.
X99 Classified 18-core Xeon CPU and ECC RAM Compatibility - EVGA Forums

Last time I've used EVGA was with X58 (so ages ago) and either early Westemere Xeons and retail Xeon worked very well.
In the PC enthusiast market, EVGA is (was?) the top, so I would expect a decent compatibility :)
ECC and Registered work absolutely fine on X99 with the proper cpu, if they don't you should pick a better OEM for your xeon builds. Asrock officially supports both, so they are a safe bet.

Load reduced not sure, I believe it requires more things implemented on the board. You can get 32GB dual-rank normal registered dimms at about the same $/GB as retail 16s, so only the obscene memory needs should care and they would probably buy a dual socket "real" server board anyways.
 

Aziz

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Nov 15, 2016
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Selling my two E5-2698v4 's on ebay.
Once I settled on the Asus Z10PE-D16 WS I had no issues for months.


I think I'm going to replace them with a pair of v4 2667 / 2687w and pick-up some clock rate. Maybe build a second system if that works out well.
for how much would you be selling them ?
 

JGab

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Nov 18, 2016
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Hello, I am new to this forum. Like most, I am seeking help in deciding on a ES E5 chip for a 3D rendering workstation that I want to put together. I started my search about 3 weeks ago. I surfed the web close to its entirely and was about to give up on the ES chips until i found this thread. This thread is most likely the holy grail of ES xeon chips. I spent all night yesterday and some this morning reading though all of the 49 pages - which caught me up to speed on almost everything I need to know.

All I need is consultation so that i don't end up buying the wrong mobo or a bad chip that doesn't reach optimum turbo for most of the cores.. Also, i'm not sure if i should get ECC Ram, or regular DDR4, or DDR3... etc. Also, i don't know what would be a sufficient amount of ram... 16gb?

Since i will be mostly be using Vray and Keyshot for rendering (I know for sure that keyshot can utilize up to 256 cores), I want to focus on obtaining 2 chips with the highest core count... I believe the Xeon E5 2698 v4 is where I should be looking at - 20C and 40T. Having two of these puppies would exponentially increase my workflow here at home. No more leaving my current i7-3615 working all night to get a 300dpi render. Correct me if I am wrong, but GHz does not affect rendering performance... am i right?

As for mobo, i was thinking about the AsRock EP2C612D16-2L2T that was suggested in this article . The article mentions that this mobo lacks the fast SSD connectios. Should i be looking at a different mobo? Maybe the ASUS Z10PE-D16 WS ? Consequently, I am confused if i need to buy another chip to be able to flash the mobo to update the bios.

Also... I'm clueless at to what power supply i should get and cooling paraphernalia.

Selling my two E5-2698v4 's on ebay.
Toysrme: I saw your post on ebay . I'm slightly interested. Although, a little skeptical... did you end up fixing your issue booting and installing windows? I know you ended up using several different boards but you were not able to get the bios to read the usb... right? Let me know what you have learned. Could it had been that your chips weren't identical?
 

Toysrme

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Aug 16, 2016
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I think vray and keyshot are two of the few that scale well on core counts. Many 3d programs a simple consumer i7-6700k would run rings around the big-iron xeons.

Props to Pugetsystems.com for the articles.

Keyshot Multi Core Performance



Mental Ray Multi Core Performance



AutoDesk 3ds Max 2017 CPU Performance
"The most obvious trend is that the dual Xeon E5-2690 V4 was easily the worst performing CPU in 3ds Max for the three aspects we tested. To be fair, that setup is really going to shine when using Mental Ray, Keyshot, V-ray, or any other multi-threaded rendering engine and isn't really intended to be used for the tasks we tested."









On the ES chips; if you're running the Broadwell-EP 's stick with SuperMicro, Asus Z10PE's or try an asrock.


As far as mine; after working through some things... I wound up having to change the bios/uefi USB settings because my Asus board was causing windows to crash. Some USB 2 / 3 issue with some legacy USB 2.0 devices that I've never had an issue with in any other board in 15 years. (Including three different x99 boards).
 
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Rand__

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Mar 6, 2014
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Just to get confirmation - the probability of an ES cpu running on a genuine Intel Server board would be around nil?
 

JGab

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Nov 18, 2016
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Props to Pugetsystems.com for the articles.
No kidding, i was actually going to buy a rig from them.. but then i said "heck, i bet i could build one for less," and here is where i am at. They have great documentation. I'm wondering if 3D Max uses GPU to render. I mainly use surface (Alias) and solid (Solidworks) modelers to create my work, so after selecting my cpus, i will be contemplating if i should spend the money saved on a quadro, or save more money on a geforce. But to render, i used Vray and Keyshot... mainly keyshot since it is a better UX interface.

Has anyone used a ES v4 chip with a SuperMicro mobo?

Thanks everyone who has contributed to this thread... so much useful information.
 

JGab

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Nov 18, 2016
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Many have. Usually working fine with v2 Bios.
Has anyone used the SuperMicro x10DAX ? It supports 3-way Geforce SLI.. so it has that going for it.

What do you guys think about these:
Intel Xeon E5 2690 V4 ES QHV5 2.4GHz 14Core
Intel Xeon E5-2683 v3 2.0GHz 14-Core
Xeon E5-2683 V3 SR1XH 2.0GHz 14Core
Xeon E5 2686 V3 QS QG7V 2.0Ghz 18Core
Intel Xeon similar to E5-2698 v4 ES 2GHz/20C/5MB
Intel Xeon E5-2698 v4 20c -> this one says its 2.00 but it clocks at 2.20... is that possible?

-Thanks!
 
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Rand__

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Mar 6, 2014
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Not me, but it should work based on it being a SM board. Not sure you could use HyperSpeed successfully on earlier steppings, but that will depend on the details.
That one cpu is (base) clocked at 2.0 but has a turbo clock of 2.5 (according to the screenshots o/c).

And which one to get depends on use case and budget;)
 

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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@ColPanic IMHO it's much much less important the actual CPU model # and much much more important the stepping, and if it's 'stable' or not.
I believe at the beginning of this thread (first couple pages) there are some great guidelines to follow re: reliability, and CPUs that actually WORK :)


I got an ultra cheap E5 v4 2828L something like $110 and it's worked fine for my backup box and is super low power! Sucks I can't find motherboards this cheap I have 2 more v3s that need a home but not dropping $300+ on a 1P board that's for damn sure.
 

Ellwood

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Nov 20, 2016
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I looked through the thread for about half the pages, but didn't see anything addressing it. I see this chip on eBay, Intel Xeon E5 2680 V2 ES QE4Z 2.8GHz 10Core 25MB 130W 22nm LGA2011 Processor CPU | eBay But there's nothing regarding that ID on CPU-World. Looking at the hardOCP spreadsheet didn't really help me determine if it's a later stepping, or one to avoid. I see it's 130w vs 115 for the retail, is that a big deal? Mostly, looking for vmware. I have an older ES, can't remember which one (6c, 2.2ghz, 65w), but it doesn't allow EVC with what's supposed to be the current chipset (and everything enabled in the BIOS).
 

Rand__

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Mar 6, 2014
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Its a little confusing - its stepping 2, ES2 but remarked which usually indicates retail like stepping (ie at least QS).
So its not the latest but not a terribly early stepping either.
Whats your issue with EVC? Dont have an issue with that on my v4 L0 ES cpus?
 

merxxdc

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Nov 13, 2016
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my 2660v4 qhzf 2nd revision does 1800 c15 but as far as I know no longer available for 270 or anywhere else for that matter. Also, it's a gamble between steppings. So I pay around 16cents for every 1 cinebench score.
 

Ellwood

Member
Nov 20, 2016
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Whats your issue with EVC? Dont have an issue with that on my v4 L0 ES cpus?
Before I came and really ready these threads, I bought what was labeled as CPU Intel Xeon E5 2640 V2 ES 2.2Ghz 15MB 6 Core 22nm LGA2011 60W R0 Processor.

It works fine, except when I try to put it into Ivy Bridge level EVC, I get the standard vmware error about some of the processor functions aren't enabled, check the bios, etc, etc. It's a Supermicro X9SRL-f, and as far as I can tell, I've enabled everything in the bios, so it must be the chip.

I finally found how to migrate the vcenter to a lower level EVC cluster, so it's running fine in Sandy Bridge mode (my other host is a Haswell 1231), I just figured I'd look at a little upgrade.

Should I just save that little bit of cash and wait for the v3 or v4's to come down in price?