Intel Xeon E3-1270V2 or Intel Xeon E5-1620

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Biren78

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Jan 16, 2013
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Saw both reviews on the site. Any reason to go with one over the other for a game server? Like Minecraft and maybe a CS server?

Isn't the E5-1620 people don't like b/c it is quad core not hex? It is only $310-345 so much cheaper than the Xeon E3 V2's.
 

badatSAS

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Nov 7, 2012
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I think you'll find that while one of the highest end E3 v2's is more expensive than the lowest end E5, the build as a whole will be significantly less expensive if you go down the E3 path.

Going price for an E3-1230v2 is around $210 lately, $240 for an E3-1245v2. Motherboards range from $80 for a non server specific up to $250 for some of the top end Supermicro LGA-1155 server motherboards, with a bunch of boards in between. E5 Boards seem to start at $350 and go up to $600+ for a dual proc

The E3 system should be more efficient (being Ivy Bridge based) - The E3-1230v2 is a 69W part vs E5-1620 at 130W TDP. You'll also be limited to 32GB of RAM.

The E5 system will have lots of headroom to grow - massive amounts of memory and PCIe channels.

Unfortunately I don't know the specific requirements for a minecraft or CS server - but CS is so old it could probably run on anything that still actually boots at this point ;-)
 

sotech

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Jul 13, 2011
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How important is RAM to a Minecraft server? S2011 has a much greater capacity for RAM than S1155, which may tip you one way or the other. Not sure what you're looking at re: the prices of the E3 V2s being a lot more than $310-345 - the only S1155 Xeons that are above those figures are the 1270/1275/1280V2s...

Also, are cores or clockspeed more valuable in that sort of setup (e.g. slower hex, faster quad better)?
 

Biren78

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Jan 16, 2013
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Minecraft is usually CPU clock speed + muchos RAM + ssd. Writes to disk on old hd can make the game lag. With the E5 can go 64GB easy.
 

Dragon

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Feb 12, 2013
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I went through a similar decision making process a few months ago, the conclusion was that the 32nm 130W TDP E5-xxxx runs way too hot and draws too much power, unless it is absolutely necessary to use more than 32G ram, it is not worth it to pay almost double in hardware and power bills.

At this moment the most cost effective choice is E3-1230v2, or some used server with low power server CPU from ebay, they are cheap, handles as much throughput as a 1230v2 but with lots more ram than 32G.

If you are not in a hurry (as in your server won't hit full capacity right off the bat), you might want to stick to old hardware for now and wait a bit it for the Haswell desktop CPUs to arrive in April-June and see how they go, ECC isn't important for a game server so you might find them useful.
 
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Dragon

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Feb 12, 2013
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These are benchmark scores obtained from spec.org:

E51620 - 54/77/207/176
1230v2 - 54/69/192/137
1270v2 - 56/71/200/139

(Integer score/Floating point score/Integer rate score/Floating point rate score)

In my experience Spec.org's scores are much more relevant to real world applications, one way to read the scores is to consider the first 2 numbers represent "how fast do they run single threaded operations", and last 2 numbers represent "how many connections per second do they handle", as you can see those CPUs are very similar.

Benchmark often exaggerate minor differences, unless you run scientific simulations or encode video 24/7 you won't see much difference in real world applications.
 
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mrkrad

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Oct 13, 2012
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I found that no matter how slow your cpu is, having 72gb of ram for sql server+windows, makes read iops = 0 when the database is 40gb plus indexes, writes to the database were all QD1 and log was the only thing that was stressful.

quad core low end e5504, x5650, e5645, e5602 - all just as fast (OLTP) for the users, M5014 with fastpath and 6 samsung 830.

So it depends on the application, but since $65 for 8gb RDIMM, $160 for 16gb (average street price QTY 1), i'd rather have 72gb and a cruddy quad core e5603 - all day long -

think RAMCACHE,ramdisk, SQLOS (huge buffers).

Call me old school but I think end to end ECC is very important. More than 2gb of ram is silly without full ECC (RDIMMS provide data and address line protection, unlike UDIMM).

It would be like putting all that ECC goodness to work , then picking that one intel server nic that is not ECC :) or using SATA drives which do not have IOEDC and only IOECC 1-bit so they can pump corrupted data back into your raid which only ZFS would see..

I've got a nc360t here, only when present with another nc360t, will cause massive memory corruption. your PCI-E bus can do this. Without ECC - would you know? Yes when it crashes or corruption has occured.
 

Dragon

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Feb 12, 2013
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I found that no matter how slow your cpu is, having 72gb of ram for sql server+windows, makes read iops = 0 when the database is 40gb plus indexes, writes to the database were all QD1 and log was the only thing that was stressful.

quad core low end e5504, x5650, e5645, e5602 - all just as fast (OLTP) for the users, M5014 with fastpath and 6 samsung 830.

So it depends on the application, but since $65 for 8gb RDIMM, $160 for 16gb (average street price QTY 1), i'd rather have 72gb and a cruddy quad core e5603 - all day long -

think RAMCACHE,ramdisk, SQLOS (huge buffers).

Call me old school but I think end to end ECC is very important. More than 2gb of ram is silly without full ECC (RDIMMS provide data and address line protection, unlike UDIMM).

It would be like putting all that ECC goodness to work , then picking that one intel server nic that is not ECC :) or using SATA drives which do not have IOEDC and only IOECC 1-bit so they can pump corrupted data back into your raid which only ZFS would see..

I've got a nc360t here, only when present with another nc360t, will cause massive memory corruption. your PCI-E bus can do this. Without ECC - would you know? Yes when it crashes or corruption has occured.
Well OP wants to run a game server, not a bank, so I suggested E3-12xxV2 which support only UDIMMs and not RDIMMs. That may sound silly to somebody but if my data is so mission critical that I require Registered ECC every step of the way, I wouldn't use a M5014 (no ECC for its onboard buffer/cache) and I wouldn't store the data on a bunch of Samsung 830s (no capacitors on SSD = loss of data on power failure).

As of 2013 running raids on anything except ZFS is also silly, and even with ZFS bit rots can still occur somewhere along the chain, the only way to be 100% sure is to compare the data after each write.
 
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mrkrad

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Oct 13, 2012
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Encryption requires ZFS like validation?

9260-8i has ECC ram. 72bit (64+8 or 32+8). M5014 does too. If you are using the ram on the raid controller, you are doing it wrong, you want to bypass it AKA DIRECT I/O - CTIO. Why the 9211/9271 are faster/just as fast as the 9260/9265 - nobody is buffering.

The capacitor issue is blown out i'm afraid. Hard drives do not have capacitors. do you think they do?

Your power supply has a capacitor. I have capacitor sata power plugs (4 to 1). I'll agree the samsung is not enterprise like the intel 320 but then again, sata itself is shit (Compared to sas). Keep backups - we can agree there.

Full Disk encrytion with FIPS_1402 sas drives (seagate constellation ES.3) requires decrypt valid at disk level.

Bitlocker would fail bit rot on a decrypt on the o/s level.

Bit rot cannot be avoided without end to end ECC, and you most definitely need to do ZFS verify on READS.

I wouldn't recommend a server that doesn't have redundant power.

Hell even the cheap ML110G7 lowest end HP tower has dual rail RPS and hot swap drives these days. Run a UPS to PHASE A and another to PHASE B and use APCUPSD to cleanly shutdown. It's solid.
 

Dragon

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Feb 12, 2013
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Encryption requires ZFS like validation?

9260-8i has ECC ram. 72bit (64+8 or 32+8). M5014 does too. If you are using the ram on the raid controller, you are doing it wrong, you want to bypass it AKA DIRECT I/O - CTIO. Why the 9211/9271 are faster/just as fast as the 9260/9265 - nobody is buffering.

The capacitor issue is blown out i'm afraid. Hard drives do not have capacitors. do you think they do?

Your power supply has a capacitor. I have capacitor sata power plugs (4 to 1). I'll agree the samsung is not enterprise like the intel 320 but then again, sata itself is shit (Compared to sas). Keep backups - we can agree there.

Full Disk encrytion with FIPS_1402 sas drives (seagate constellation ES.3) requires decrypt valid at disk level.

Bitlocker would fail bit rot on a decrypt on the o/s level.

Bit rot cannot be avoided without end to end ECC, and you most definitely need to do ZFS verify on READS.

I wouldn't recommend a server that doesn't have redundant power.

Hell even the cheap ML110G7 lowest end HP tower has dual rail RPS and hot swap drives these days. Run a UPS to PHASE A and another to PHASE B and use APCUPSD to cleanly shutdown. It's solid.

1. LOL what encryption, who the hell encrypts a game server?

2. If the SSD cap issue is "blown out" then what do you call this issue between UDIMMS and RDIMMS? Show me the the data that compares failure/error rates between UDIMMs and RDIMMs and why is it relevant when the OP is hosting Minecraft.

3. You didn't bother to identify the OP's situation that's why you've been missing the point, if one is to operate at your "safety standard" where RDIMM is required, one would realize bit rot is caused by radiation and can happen not just in memory but across any point along the chain, including ANY point on the raid card, and at that standard nobody who take things seriously would use Samsung 830s for databases.

4. Mechanical disks have caps and can use its spinning momentum to finish writing the buffer, so again it's not relevant.

5. The power box down your street corner has capacitors, what's your point? If one is uptight about having memory address parity then one shouldn't use Samsung 830s for databases, period. Your "power suppply capacitor" and "capacitor'd sata power plugs" won't do jack for the Samsung 830 if it is the SSD PCB that breaks down, that the whole point of putting caps in 320/710/DC S3700 the first place.

6. Again, what Bitlocker? Who uses bitlocker for minecraft?

Bottom line, the OP doesn't need to spend extra hundreds and waste extra 40W+ TDP for a E5 just to have extra RDIMMs to run a minecraft server, the E3 will do unless he is certain his server will reach full capacity of a E3 quickly, before the next generation of CPU arrive.
 

Mike

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May 29, 2012
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I wouldn't even try getting HA for a gameserver. I don't know if you want to have it hosted professionally but i wouldn't get multiple psu's at home, probably not even colocated because of the increase in size. A capacitor for a 3.5inch regular harddrive isn't feasible although the idea of flushing the buffer to disk is.

I can't really advise you on minecraft but for the CS server i would just get the stuff that uses the least power. You can probably run 10 times the servers, populated, without noticing.
 

Dragon

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Feb 12, 2013
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I wouldn't even try getting HA for a gameserver. I don't know if you want to have it hosted professionally but i wouldn't get multiple psu's at home, probably not even colocated because of the increase in size. A capacitor for a 3.5inch regular harddrive isn't feasible although the idea of flushing the buffer to disk is.

I can't really advise you on minecraft but for the CS server i would just get the stuff that uses the least power. You can probably run 10 times the servers, populated, without noticing.
Yes, the E5 costs way too much, runs way too hot, draws way too much power for an average game server.

As for caps on 3.5" disks, well yes and no, there are some tiny caps on mechanical HDDs, they aren't used for powering the entire drive like the ones on SSDs, but just to power the chips that allow the HDDs to do their last writes using remaining momentum. They look like the ones on the top left of this picture:

 

Biren78

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Jan 16, 2013
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Your power supply has a capacitor. I have capacitor sata power plugs (4 to 1).
Have a link to these? Do they work for you?

On the game server, no way I will do HA. That's part of life. Now using some sort of shared and cached san solution 1 day might be an option but not right now.

Leaning toward the E5 just to get more RAM in the box.
 

Scout255

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Feb 12, 2013
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The only ones I can find are these: http://www.amazon.com/Silverstone-Connectors-Stabilizing-Capacitors-CP06/dp/B005DD28XG
These caps are not super caps and are for voltage stabilization and not for data integrity for SSD's.

Would certainly be a nice product to have out there, something with a large capacity of super caps for each connector which would allow the use of cheaper and faster SSD's in a home enviroment. Unfortunately I can not seem to find anything like this.....
 

Biren78

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Jan 16, 2013
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The only ones I can find are these: http://www.amazon.com/Silverstone-Connectors-Stabilizing-Capacitors-CP06/dp/B005DD28XG
These caps are not super caps and are for voltage stabilization and not for data integrity for SSD's.

Would certainly be a nice product to have out there, something with a large capacity of super caps for each connector which would allow the use of cheaper and faster SSD's in a home enviroment. Unfortunately I can not seem to find anything like this.....
Wonder why so hard to find. I'd imagine a cable or backplane PCB size supercap would be much easier to place than 1 internal to a 2.5" PCB.