Intel E5-2640V4 matched pair - $110 shipped @ eBay

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fortytwo

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Sep 26, 2020
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Yeah, mainly coding, few VMs, occasional video / photo editing (Davinci resolve, lightroom). I think getting 12700 will serve me better.
 

Jaket

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Jan 4, 2017
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the 2697's v4 are sometimes under $100 too.

It is weird comparing these old (like 8 year) monster cpu's against a modern one. Newer cpu's the clock speed is much higher and the instructions per clock is much higher.

For gaming this will often result in higher performance because games often only can use 4 to 8 cores with diminishing returns.
And, I dunno, my Quicken software seems to be single threaded too. Maybe some javascript. A single iperf stream. who knows.

But I think it depends on what your workstation is doing. If you're doing a lot of big render jobs, they will probably be able to use all the cores you throw at it, for instance.

I'm actually about to replace my E5 2480 v4 with a I7-7700K. Only four cores instead of fourteen. cpubenchmark says the big old cpu is only twice as fast though. But my main home server requirements need better idle power usage and the igpu quick sync transcoding, so it should be more useful.
These CPU's and others are typically only really suggested for hosting services if you ask me. Then again price for performance is quite nice for those wanting server features such as ECC ram, and more PCIe lanes and drive support.

Otherwise if just performance per CPU newer gear is the route to go even more so the new Ryzen stuff is hard to beat.

We picked up 10 of these I believe for $140 I believe per matched pair.
 

Stereodude

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Feb 21, 2016
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IMHO, a modern multicore consumer CPU + motherboard is probably a similar price to these really cheap "outdated" Xeon multicore processor + motherboard given the current motherboard pricing. The modern consumer CPU system has some sizeable advantages for most users.

An "outdated" Xeon multicore processor is still potentially useful if you want ECC, have need of extremely large core counts, or perhaps need a pile of memory.
 

Glock24

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May 13, 2019
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IMHO, a modern multicore consumer CPU + motherboard is probably a similar price to these really cheap "outdated" Xeon multicore processor + motherboard given the current motherboard pricing. The modern consumer CPU system has some sizeable advantages for most users.

An "outdated" Xeon multicore processor is still potentially useful if you want ECC, have need of extremely large core counts, or perhaps need a pile of memory.
If you go low end then sure, but an B550/X570 board goes for at least $100 and a decent AM4 5000 series CPU goes for at least $200. Non ECC DDR4 costs like twice than LRDIMMs.

For less than $500 I got a board with SAS controller+10 SATA III ports, 16 core E5-2697a v4 and 128GB DDR4-2400.

The only advantage I see of using more modern consumer hardware as a server is lower power consumption and hihger single core performance.
 
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eduncan911

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If you go low end then sure, but an B550/X570 board goes for at least $100 and a decent AM4 5000 series CPU goes for at least $200. Non ECC DDR4 costs like twice than LRDIMMs.

For less than $500 I got a board with SAS controller+10 SATA III ports, 16 core E5-2697a v4 and 128GB DDR4-2400.

The only advantage I see of using more modern consumer hardware as a server is lower power consumption and hihger single core performance.
I'm just jumping in here to say... That was exactly my sentiment for my homeserver of the past 10 years (E5 V3 generation). However, I hit far too many limits with that way of thinking.

The biggest was the limited Ghz speeds of E5 V1-V4, where Plex transcoding can't happen with 4K (and sometimes not for high-bitrate 1080p). My OBS remote instances couldn't encode at 1080p @ 60 Hz with all of the streaming inputs, etc. Then came the handicapping with SPECTRA/Meltdown exploits (yes, we are still finding them - last one was early 2022, and needed yet more patches - patches to BIOS that no one is supporting in these old E5 BIOSes, so it's up to the OS to mitigate) - these have greatly slowed the processing of all E5 versions. The only true mitigation is to disable SMT (Hyperthreading). That hurt.

Then there is no onboard iGPU of E5 series (no h/w plex transcoding), no onboard M.2 slots (had a pile of M.2 collecting dust - and i generally use all the slots in my servers with GPUs), AES-NI is on the slower side of a cheap i3-10th gen. And so on.
 

Stereodude

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Feb 21, 2016
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If you go low end then sure, but an B550/X570 board goes for at least $100 and a decent AM4 5000 series CPU goes for at least $200. Non ECC DDR4 costs like twice than LRDIMMs.

For less than $500 I got a board with SAS controller+10 SATA III ports, 16 core E5-2697a v4 and 128GB DDR4-2400.

The only advantage I see of using more modern consumer hardware as a server is lower power consumption and hihger single core performance.
I'm not sure how you did that... Typical market prices for those three are more than $500 combined. The CPU is $140, the RAM is $200'ish, socket 2011-v3 motherboards are $250+. And, you got a CPU that's got a comparable Passmark score to a Ryzen 5600x with >2x the power consumption. For most buyers this is not a good tradeoff. They don't need 128GB of RAM or ECC.

I'm currently putting together an E5 v4 server. I had a specific interest in ECC and 256GB of RAM. Otherwise I wouldn't be messing around with these.