The 6 core 12 threads intel Xeon X5650 goes for about 65 euro on ebay. Stock is 2,66ghz, but it overclocks to about 4,0 - 4,2 ghz on air.
It runs on the consumer X58 chipset which supports the i7-920 to i7-980 cpus.
I personally got the X5670 for 100 euro and it runs 4,4ghz on air.
I had to get that x58 motherboard too, which was also about 100 euro on ebay, but if you are still on that platform it’s a great upgrade.
Personally I’m a gamer and needed the cores for 60fps in games. But I figured that if 3d rendering is still done on cpu, then it’s a cheap upgrade.
My guess would be servers being recycled for the newer platforms and the fact that consumers aren’t supposed to be using Xeon parts so it’s kind of a grey area for information regarding motherboard compatibility etc
But most x58 boards support all their xeon counterparts now with the latest bios update so no longer an issue for compatibility.
It’s a five year old trichannel CPU that’s been EOLed, and sports fairly old transistors. It just happens to be the case that this particular model was always a relatively “lucky” one, much like the 920-980 were spectacularly good and are still viable today thanks to their OC capabilities and the relatively flat curve of progress since then for some applications (which lag in adopting the features of newer CPUs)
It’s not surprising they go for cheap to be honest, and some might be quite battered if they come from farms.
Yeah I pretty much completely agree with Jaco. For instance it has great performance in cinebench 11.5 compared to new cpu’s but in cinebench 15 you can see that the new cpu go faster because of newer instruction sets. Not much, but still. Definitely not worth the price difference.
On the other hand, you mention they can be battered if they are from farms. I have never heard of a cpu going bad. Well, perhaps because of dust and dried out paste, but not the cpu itself. You could even say that a farm cpu is better because it is always on and doesn’t experience the differences in temperatures a consumer cpu has to endure when shut down.
My x5670 is running at 4.4ghz on a mugen cooler with one fan. It hits 65c on prime95 and it’s super stable. I came from a 2500k which I sold. In the end the upgrade was 70 euro for me.
I’m not saying it’s frequent, but farm life can be pretty tough.
Depending on the farm a farm CPU might be in pretty bad shape exactly because some farms are power scaled a lot, meaning the CPUs see a lot of up and down some days and the downs can be in an unfortunate setting in terms of temperature and all.
Hardware turn around when you work at large scale is a cost like any other.
If setting up the farm is 100k cheaper a month for a setup that will, however, burn about 5k worth of drives and cost 20k worth of manpower to deal with it, that farm will annihilate drives daily.
We’ve done just that in quite a few places I’ve worked at, and in one darkening nodes on minimal air conditioning was a lot cheaper than upgrading the A/C, so we cooked more than a node (usually the north bridge back then gave a lot sooner than the CPU).
Modern CPUs, a lot less likely, Intel has spent a lot of time making the CPUs more and more power friendly and self preserving, but the ones from 5 years ago have primitive thermal throttling and hardly any added guards, so yes, it’s possible to get a few of them a bit overcooked, I’ve seen the stashes
I still agree that it’s an excellent buy when you want some cycles per buck on a budget and you’re willing to crawl e-bay and the likes. I’ve been contemplating one for a self-assembled steam box in the living room in fact, just if you can get an idea of where it comes from by the seller id or their other sales it might be worth the added five minutes.
It’s hard to even reliably know the history of these parts but can be fairly certain they’ve been used in some sort of constant running server environment.
Will need to be OC’ing mine soon, haven’t got around to it and totally forgot how much more involved x58 overclocking is.
I had actually downgraded to save some money. Went from a dual socket Asus Z9PE worksation build that I spent thousands on, to this machine now using a cheapo Gigabyte X58 running a £40 x5650 CPU. Personally wouldn’t be too bothered if it konked out after a year… still got my monies worth.
Will be fun to OC without giving too much shiz about it’s lifespan. :twisted:
Hehe, sorry man, didn’t mean for the reply to be overbearing or polemic. Anyway, usually if it runs fine, can take a stress test, and OCs when you get it then it will be fine for a few years at the very least.
At home?
Liquid cooled and OCed 4770k with a Titan.
Separate SSDs for OS (two 840s one for Linux one for Win) and three 1.5TB drives in raid 5 off the motherboard’s secondary controller for storage.
At work I lost count
I’d like to have a Steam box and a better player (Currently also using my NAS as media centre for some things) in the living room and was contemplating a relatively cheap build with a X5650 or equivalent for it and using some spare parts.
The only software I ever see flattening it out up top is the stuff I write for myself or testing. Not doing any rendering or sims at home a quad core with HT is the only way I have hope to see 25% of it in use most of the time instead of the 5 to 8% of the 16 or 32 virtual thread ones I had at work
Hehe, yeah just kidding of course. I had to as this is the xeon 6 core thread.
Anyway, yeah I only use photoshop and that has a hard time to use more than 1 cpu at a time.
But I got it for games. Assassins creed unity is a bitch and needs all cores, it had 99% load on my 2500k at 4.4. Also battlefield 4 online 64 player play is more fluid now. And late game civ 5 keeps running at high framerates.
I expect more games to support 6 core and higher as the consoles have 8 physical cores now. At 1600mhz but still.
And directx 12 will most likely lessen the load on the cpu, which will extent the lifespan of my good old xeon. Which is still really cool to say
Just wondering if the X5690 is better value than the X5670, for a dual Cpu motherboard (e.g, EVGA SR-2).
I always thought that Intel Xeon’s were clock locked and couldn’t be Overclocked!
Anyway for a Maya render slave isn’t more cores better that faster cores!
Both the X5650 & X5690 are both Hex core but the X5650 is a 2.x Ghz and the X5690 is 3.x Ghz, the pricing is almost triple for X5690 compared to X5650!
Can anyone recommend a dual Cpu Motherboard that can overclock the X5650? Also does anyone have a link for a guide on how to overclock the X5650!
Clock is almost never locked, it’s actually the multiplier that is locked/unlocked in some CPUs and not in others.
Most Asus motherboards for duals (e.g. Z10PE) offer at least clock and voltage regulation for Xeons, you can look for a chipset compatible one and look at the list of CPUs certified and whether they are locked or not, and scour forums for past experiences to see what CPUs seem to yield and which don’t.
Recent Xeons also have a considerable gap between low bound and high bound clock for power reasons, some motherboards (I only have first hand experience with the Z10) can be set up to try and keep the low bound clock higher up than average if the CPU is well cooled.
In the case of some ES E5s there actually are unlocked multiplier units floating around, but I don’t think you can blindly pick any off the lot. You should be able to find the stepping codes for which are and aren’t though, as the lock came (or came off) only at a certain point in the production only on some models.
Thanks ThE_JacO/nzweers for your very interesting information.
I am still torn between an
Asus z10pe-d8-ws (only because it has a M.2 Sata port)
Dual intel xeon e5-2620 hex core ($400each on amazon US)
DDR4 ram (future proof board)
and the yester-years solution
Evga SR-2
Dual Intel X5650, older tech that does a similar job but at half the cost! Even without overclocking the base rate it still seems ok for rendering! But i understand with a decent cpu cooler/fan you can overclock easily.
Hmm seems like the only way to win this toss-up is gonna be with my bank balance! (or the wife as some may say)…
Also a few minor questions; what motherboard are you using nzweers?
What is a Engineering sample in chip terms?
What is a matched pair?
What is a stepping code?
Seems like the best bang for buck is gonna be with the X5690’s…
Hi there, I’m using a single socket board. An Asus P6TD Deluxe. But check the thread above, it has many, many boards. By the way, this Asus does not officially support xeons, it is not on the supported list on the asus site.
As for the other questions, I don’t know exactly. It didn’t matter for a single cpu setup and I do not know if it matters for a dual socket solution. I haven’t dived into it. Just google for sr-2 overclocking and I bet you can find answers there.
