Hello everyone, new to the forum. First a quick thank you for the outstanding information gathered in this thread.
As many other here, I'm intending on building a new workstation pc (dual cpu build). As I'd like to try to get as much bang for my buck as possible, I began seriously considering getting hold of some ES xeons.
As far as I can tell many have already dealt with the japanese trader "icomputer_parts_international" with mostly positive experiences. I'm interested in a couple of chips they're offering and your collective expertise on those would be very welcome:
E5 2666 v3
This one kinda hits my sweet spot on core count and per core speed. However, it's not listed by intel. Further investigation showed, it might be a custom made chip for amazon and is therefor not listed by intel. I'm not sure how trustworthy this chip is. According to the cpu-z pic it's a close to retail revision. However, it's named "Core i3/i5/i7", so the information on this one is pretty much all over the place.
Any help on what to make of this offer will be very much appreciated!
E5 2690 v3
E5 2680 v4
With only the available information, I suppose those two can be considered rather early engineering samples, or am I mistaken?
And from another trader located here in Germany (at least according to ebay):
E5 2658 v4
E5 2658 v4
Two auctions for the same model. I think someone already posted somewhere in this thread that the B0 revision for those is misleading. Seeing the reduced per core speed compared to the retail version I suppose it has to be an early engineering sample right?
Btw, what sorta puzzles me is, that the product description is pretty much the same as with the japanese trader. Might they be affiliated and just work with various accounts in various 'official' locations?
My next step would be to contact the sellers and try to get further information on those chips, i.e. pictures of the two actual chips I'd end up buying and screenshots of what hwinfo64 has to tell about those chips.
Lastly, a little background information on what my machine is intended for. I'm mainly going to use it as an audio workstation. My current PC (i7 3930K) has served me well for the last 4 1/2 years. However, with my latest projects I've constantly been on the edge (sometimes over) of what my machine can provide. I've been hesitant of just building the same machine with up to date parts (i7 6850k for instance) since I'm not sure wether this would leave me enough headroom in computing power to feel comfortable for the next 3-4 years. Thus, the consideration of building a dual CPU machine. The difficulty I'm facing is, that the official information you'll get on audio recording and editing software most of the time says a higher per core speed is to be prefered to a higher core count in terms of overall performance. And it's really difficult to find xeons that are similar to their 68xx/69xx counterparts but simply dual CPU capable.
Apart from that, some casual gaming will also be the case, and from what I can tell of this thread so far, a higher base clock is less likely to leave me with an unwanted bottleneck.
Any constructive feedback on my usage scenario will also be welcome!