Skylake Xeon Gold: worth the the upgrade from E5 v3?

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Markess

Well-Known Member
May 19, 2018
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Northern California
Someone nearby is selling a Motherboard/CPU combo with Xeon Gold 6135 (Skylake SP, 8C/16T, 3.4Ghz) & Tyan mothernoard for $150. My home setup includes two Haswell systems with E5-2667 v3, also 8C/16T. One is my desktop, and the other is running Unraid. Looking at Passmark benchmarks for the closest match, the Xeon Gold would be a bit faster.

So, I'm wondering if there's any other advantages in upgrading to Skylake, from Haswell other than the systems being newer and faster? Looking on Ebay for comparison, the price certainly seems good, and (hopefully) I could reuse the DDR4-2133.

Thanks.
 

BlueFox

Legendary Member Spam Hunter Extraordinaire
Oct 26, 2015
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Considering the E5-2667 v3 goes for ~$250 on eBay, you'd be silly not to take the effectively free performance upgrade. Even if you bought faster RAM, you should still break even.
 
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Markess

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May 19, 2018
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Considering the E5-2667 v3 goes for ~$250 on eBay, you'd be silly not to take the effectively free performance upgrade. Even if you bought faster RAM, you should still break even.
Thanks! Wow, I'd had no idea that the E5s were worth that much. They'd been gifted to me, and I never checked what they were going for.
 

Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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Is that Gold 6135 not a ES or QS chip ? That’s way cheap. Too cheap unless there is a reason not mentioned why it should be so cheap.
 

bayleyw

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Jan 8, 2014
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The motherboard is worth way more than $150, so its still a good deal. If its a QS its fine, but avoid ES unless you really know what you're getting yourself into, the Skylake ES2's were kind of buggy.
 

Markess

Well-Known Member
May 19, 2018
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Northern California
Is that Gold 6135 not a ES or QS chip ? That’s way cheap. Too cheap unless there is a reason not mentioned why it should be so cheap.
You nailed it. It was cheap because they'd had a pricing error. The motherboard price was correct, but they want about 20 times more for the CPU now.

The motherboard is worth way more than $150, so its still a good deal. If its a QS its fine, but avoid ES unless you really know what you're getting yourself into, the Skylake ES2's were kind of buggy.
I can get the motherboard by itself for $85, so I'm tempted to get it just to play with & get a low end CPU off Ebay until there's more on the secondary market. I think this generation is old enough that there should be more retired enterprise product availability soon?

Thanks for the advice on QS/ES. I definitely DON'T know what I'm getting myself into with this generation hardware, so its good advice for me!
 
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