Why buy a Xeon CPU???

[Phynaz]

I assume no one here has one then not even the cheap ones.

Personally or in business?

Personally, no, I'm too cheap.

In business, somewhere in the mid thousands, maybe about 4,000 running in production as I type this. I'd actually have to pull a report to get an exact figure.

 

[heymrdj]

Op must be a teen or something. Running a webhost is not installing apache on windows xp nor is running servers comprised of counter strike and call of duty. Company wide? Hundreds of xeons. We run out of the lightbound DC. Personally? 8 xeons in my 380g6's and 4 E5-2650's amonst me and my brother's home labs.

 

[Phynaz]

Op must be a teen or something.

That's harsh, he's just asking questions. He obviously doesn't work in IT, so the CPU that costs 3x the cost of his entire system doesn't make sense to him.

 

[Shephard]

Op must be a teen or something. Running a webhost is not installing apache on windows xp nor is running servers comprised of counter strike and call of duty. Company wide? Hundreds of xeons. We run out of the lightbound DC. Personally? 8 xeons in my 380g6's and 4 E5-2650's amonst me and my brother's home labs.

You call me a teen but you have a cartoon avatar? Good one.

I have been building computers for a long time but never built a server.

I think my post is a legit question. Many people talk about their home servers but none use the high end chips.

 

[Bill Brasky]

Heavy virtualization (currently 2 domain controllers, 1 application server, 1 SQL server, 1 workstation, but I intend to add several more servers) and at the same time, media server (Plex), voice server (Vent and TS3), and file server. I have a second server that I plan on moving one of the domain controllers to and then I plan on adding several more virtual servers to the big box.

To give you an idea of the size of my new server, here is the config:

1. Supermicro X9DR3-F-O board
2. Currently 1 Xeon E5-2620 (#2 will be added this month)
3. Currently 64 GB of ECC RAM; I'll gradually expand that
4. OS volume is mirrored Samsung 830 SSDs
5. Data array is a RAID6 array running eight WD Red 3 TB drives (array controller is LSI MegaRAID 9261-8i)
6. All drives are in how swap cages
7. Base OS is Windows 2012 Datacenter (runs Hyper V)

Many would take my old server in a heartbeat -- it has been running 24/7 since September 2007:
1. Q6600
2. 8 GB of RAM (that is maxed out and one reason I finally had to build a new server)
3. Two mirrored 200 GB drives for the OS volume
4. Six 750 GB drives in RAID5 array for data (onboard RAID)
5. Base OS is Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise (runs Hyper V)




Lol, Ruby played an integral role in my new server design and convinced me to go big and bad.

SUPER jealous of your WD Red raid 6. I'm currently saving for the motherload of three TB reds. I had a customer purchase 25! of them last week for a monster storage server.

 

[ViRGE]

I think my post is a legit question. Many people talk about their home servers but none use the high end chips.

As someone who just recently built a home server using a Core i3, I'll expound on that.

In all honesty I would have liked to have used the equivalent E3 Xeon, but in practice the cost of the hardware is out of my price range. Between the CPU, the mobo, and ECC RAM, it would have nearly doubled the cost of my server, which isn't something I could afford.

Instead I went with a cheaper build option using the i3, an Asus mATX mobo, and standard DDR3 RAM. While the system had served me fine, I made a conscientious decision to sacrifice some degree of reliability to keep costs down.

But the reason I can get away with this is because I can accept the tradeoffs. An i3 is reliable enough for me. If an error crops up and takes the system down (most likely a BSOD due to a transient memory error), then that's okay. I'm the only person affected, and my server isn't doing anything critical. The time I would lose from the server going down would be worth less than the cost of buying higher reliability Xeon class hardware.

And really that's going to be the case for most home server owners. These are systems serving at best a few people, doing things like storing movie collections, managing client backups, and maybe running a TeamSpeak server for a handful of clients. Reliability, while important, is not critical as no one is greatly impacted if the server goes down.

It's once you start getting into business computing that Xeons start making sense. Time is money, and if your file server or email server goes down, your office productivity is going to grind to a halt; your employees will be collecting paychecks, but producing nothing of value in the interim. Or if your webserver goes down and you run an eCommerce site, now all of a sudden you're losing out on business. Or putting a 4P Xeon server in would be 20% cheaper than getting the equivalent performance (at equivalent reliability) out of 1P Xeon systems. Etc.

Ultimately Xeons are for customers whom the extra cost of the hardware is cheaper than the costs of decreased reliability. Or for customers who need to maximize the amount of performance (and the number of cores) available in a single system.

Your frame of reference is that of a home user and that's fine, but it's also why you are asking this question in the first place. As a home user you are not a Xeon customer; Intel isn't even trying to sell this hardware to you. Xeon customers are in an entirely different market, and that means you have to understand something about business computing needs before you can understand why a $2000 makes sense for those customers.

 

[jaqie]

virge is right. for some of these people (which I hang out with) check out the (now very thinly populated) 2cpu forums. With desktop CPUs having gone multicore, multiple socket systems are now very niche. I am one of those people who runs multi socket old systems and if I could afford it run multi socket new ones, but I just can't afford them, there are those like me but with money and those like the others virge talked about there, if you are truly interested in talking with a group of people which DO run and purchase xeons and such regularly.

as a side note, I was a member there for about 5 years before I even registered here. I am an SMP lover.

 

[zebrax2]

I think my post is a legit question. Many people talk about their home servers but none use the high end chips.

You don't see high end xeon cpus used for home servers simply because it is not the intended market that is why it cost $2000+

In corporate environments where you have 100s or 1000s of users depending on the service the improvement in stability simply outweighs the cost of the hardware. eg. A server went down for an hour that a hundred employee need in order to do work, if the said employees have a wage of $12/hr you are effectively then throwing away $1200 already. That $1200 doesn't even include the earnings lost due to lost production.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

SUPER jealous of your WD Red raid 6. I'm currently saving for the motherload of three TB reds. I had a customer purchase 25! of them last week for a monster storage server.

If you're planning on running RAID (especially RAID5 or RAID6), my advice is to buy a RAID card. I'm probably going to do some upgrades on my old server at some point and I think I'll pick up a Perc 6i off of eBay and use that instead of the motherboard RAID.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

You call me a teen but you have a cartoon avatar? Good one.

I have been building computers for a long time but never built a server.

I think my post is a legit question. Many people talk about their home servers but none use the high end chips.

Yeah, for most typical home servers, you won't need high-end equipment. I mean, check the post I made a few posts ago -- my old server (still in use) uses a desktop board and Q6600. It has been going strong 24/7 for 5.5 years now and will probably keep chugging along. Even with 8 GB of RAM, I was running 5 or 6 VMs regularly.

I built one with higher-end equipment for a few different reasons:

1. I hit a wall with my old server in terms of RAM. I needed something with more RAM capacity and my new box can expand to 512 GB of RAM. Most desktop boards currently on the market max at 32 GB (with a couple allowing 64 GB) and that is not adequate.
2. Old server is headless and that is kind of painful at times. My new board has a built-in IP KVM and it is sweet.
3. I chose a dual socket board for a few different reasons. The most obvious reason is expandability. The second reason is that I can see a few servers I'd like to run in the future (hello SWGEMU!) and I'd likely virtualize those and dedicate cores to them. I'm using the 6 core E5-2620s now, but I can upgrade to the 8 core monsters down the road when they're cheaper if I need 4 additional cores over both sockets.
4. My old server had disk performance issues, which wasn't surprising given I was using onboard RAID5. The performance wasn't a showstopper but was annoying. So I elected to go with a new RAID controller in the new server and now that data has been moved over, I'll likely retrofit the old server with a cheap Perc 6i off of eBay to get some disk speed.
5. The Q6600 is a good chip and can handle a pretty substantial load but I believe that as my needs increase (especially in terms of streaming and transcoding multiple 1080P streams), a better solution will be needed. That particular application is better served by more cores as opposed to raw clock speed, which is why I went with the E5-2620 as opposed to a faster quad core model (the 8 core chips were just too much right now).

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Also guys, some clarification. You can get a reasonably priced Xeon system. Here is a sample part list of the board, CPU, and 16 GB of RAM:

1. Board -- you can even get a cheaper Supermicro Xeon board, but this one has IPMI and the IP KVM with virtual media support. Even still, this is priced at a higher-end desktop board price.
2. CPU -- if you want several cores at a cheap price, this guy is a good bargain. It is cheaper than any of the Intel desktop hex cores and while it may have a slower clock speed, if you need cores, this is the one to get if you want to save some money.
3. RAM is where you'll see the price premium kick in. You can get 16 GB of ECC server RAM (Kingston) for around $150, which is about double the cost of standard desktop RAM.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

virge is right. for some of these people (which I hang out with) check out the (now very thinly populated) 2cpu forums. With desktop CPUs having gone multicore, multiple socket systems are now very niche. I am one of those people who runs multi socket old systems and if I could afford it run multi socket new ones, but I just can't afford them, there are those like me but with money and those like the others virge talked about there, if you are truly interested in talking with a group of people which DO run and purchase xeons and such regularly.

as a side note, I was a member there for about 5 years before I even registered here. I am an SMP lover.

My first dual socket board was some Suprrmicro board with dual Pentium Pros. The Pentium Pro is STILL my favorite Intel CPU of all time and while I no longer have that board, I do still have a Pentium Pro workstation in the garage.

 

[Rubycon]

My first dual socket board was some Suprrmicro board with dual Pentium Pros. The Pentium Pro is STILL my favorite Intel CPU of all time and while I no longer have that board, I do still have a Pentium Pro workstation in the garage.

Ditto!

I used to joke around saying (non pentium pro users) were amateurs.

We regularly used an 8 way Corollary Pentium pro system equipped with 200MHz 1MB L2 processors. Those were awfully expensive but then again so were the SGI workstations next to them!

 

[tweakboy]

If you do serious video editing or DAW, gl

 

[Wall Street]

Keep this in mind on the cost: Companies have IT Departments that have many workers who each make $50k-100k per year. Buying a bunch of $2,000 CPUs every 3-4 years in no big deal in this scenario.

Most offices use remote desktop, active directory, exchange, intranet services hosting and a variety of other network intensive tasks. Once upon a time this meant a room wall to wall full of servers, but now with virtual machines you can have 1 rack doing all of these tasks. But loading everything up onto a couple systems via VMs means you need tons of RAM, tons of throughput and tons of processing, hence these Xeons having several cores, support for buffered RAM and QuickPath inteconnect (vs. DMI in i7). These chips aren't meant for hosting your home web server.

 

[heymrdj]

That's harsh, he's just asking questions. He obviously doesn't work in IT, so the CPU that costs 3x the cost of his entire system doesn't make sense to him.

You call me a teen but you have a cartoon avatar? Good one.

I have been building computers for a long time but never built a server.

I think my post is a legit question. Many people talk about their home servers but none use the high end chips.

There are many many cultures around the world, it would do you well to learn about and understand them and take away the good that comes from that, than to nitpick on certain aspects of it.

He says he's built lots of systems. Typically people that are interested computers don't retort answers to their questions with repeated answers of "but games don't use multicores!". You had many legitimate replies but the answer was still "games". That limited focus, the inability to see something outside of your own known view of computers, is why I labeled you as a teen. When I was a teen I did the exact same thing. Who would by a Xeon instead of a Pentium 4? My Commanche 4 server can easily host people and play at the same time on pentium 4s!

If you had labeled your question to refer to only home servers, I would have replied differently. But you seemed to be taking your argument to everything, business, corporate, and beyond. So if I misunderstood that you were only talking about home systems and home users I apologize.

 

[peonyu]

Its apples and oranges.

You are comparing a home used server, a Core 2 duo would be sufficient for that. A 8 core Xeon is intended for heavy traffic sites like Amazon, Ebay, Newegg or for a Blizzard game server which may have 10,000 or more people playing on it. Some sites need two 8 core Xeons to cope with that traffic so thats why there are two slot server boards out there..

And since Xeons have less downtime and higher performance they make the company more money in the longterm aswell, if a C2D server goes down then thats money lost as nobody is buying anything. A Xeon server might not have crashed since it is more fault tolerant out of the box [ECC memory and other perks come in to play here].

 

[Fox5]

As an alternative to Xeons, AMD AM3+ supports ECC and all virtualization extensions at no additional cost. And performance wise, AMD's desktop cpus will blow away a comparably priced Xeon.

 

[jaqie]

.....fox5 fails to get it, too. Different market entirely.

AMD has 2p and 4p server cpu/mobos as well, those are actually used a lot in the server market nowadays.

 

[smakme7757]

I remember back in the day when i said the same thing. Who needs "Insert server grade hardware component here".

Now it's all about I/O - Need more I/O.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

As an alternative to Xeons, AMD AM3+ supports ECC and all virtualization extensions at no additional cost. And performance wise, AMD's desktop cpus will blow away a comparably priced Xeon.

Comparing apples to oranges. Compare Xeons to Opterons, not desktop CPUs.

 

[Shephard]

Yeah, for most typical home servers, you won't need high-end equipment. I mean, check the post I made a few posts ago -- my old server (still in use) uses a desktop board and Q6600. It has been going strong 24/7 for 5.5 years now and will probably keep chugging along. Even with 8 GB of RAM, I was running 5 or 6 VMs regularly.

I built one with higher-end equipment for a few different reasons:

1. I hit a wall with my old server in terms of RAM. I needed something with more RAM capacity and my new box can expand to 512 GB of RAM. Most desktop boards currently on the market max at 32 GB (with a couple allowing 64 GB) and that is not adequate.
2. Old server is headless and that is kind of painful at times. My new board has a built-in IP KVM and it is sweet.
3. I chose a dual socket board for a few different reasons. The most obvious reason is expandability. The second reason is that I can see a few servers I'd like to run in the future (hello SWGEMU!) and I'd likely virtualize those and dedicate cores to them. I'm using the 6 core E5-2620s now, but I can upgrade to the 8 core monsters down the road when they're cheaper if I need 4 additional cores over both sockets.
4. My old server had disk performance issues, which wasn't surprising given I was using onboard RAID5. The performance wasn't a showstopper but was annoying. So I elected to go with a new RAID controller in the new server and now that data has been moved over, I'll likely retrofit the old server with a cheap Perc 6i off of eBay to get some disk speed.
5. The Q6600 is a good chip and can handle a pretty substantial load but I believe that as my needs increase (especially in terms of streaming and transcoding multiple 1080P streams), a better solution will be needed. That particular application is better served by more cores as opposed to raw clock speed, which is why I went with the E5-2620 as opposed to a faster quad core model (the 8 core chips were just too much right now).

What about a Xeon like this?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819117288

Quad core Ivy Bridge.

The two comments on it are by gamers. Not sure why you would buy that over 3570k.

 

[scannall]

What about a Xeon like this?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819117288

Quad core Ivy Bridge.

The two comments on it are by gamers. Not sure why you would buy that over 3570k.

For gaming use a 3570k is likely a better idea. The heat is a *little* more manageable since it doesn't have on board graphics, and is a 69 watt part. The second reviewer sounds like he didn't know what he was buying, as he was expecting that model to have hyperthreading. Like perhaps he was hoping to get an i7 equivalent for a lot less money.

 

[Tuna-Fish]

What about a Xeon like this?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819117288

Quad core Ivy Bridge.

The two comments on it are by gamers. Not sure why you would buy that over 3570k.

For the ECC. It's literally the same ivy bridge chip that is in all those desktop cpus, except that ECC hasn't been fused off and Intel promises it better reliability.

The question simply becomes: "If this system crashes, or worse, has an undetected memory error that doesn't crash the system, how much money will you lose?"

If this box runs something that is critical to your business, just avoiding two-three crashes during it's lifetime could easily be worth the premium of it and the more expensive board and ram. Everyone is talking about web servers here, but remember that damn near everything is running on a computer these days. Somewhere in every supermarket there is a computer that runs the registers, and if that computer goes down, the supermarket won't sell anyone anything. Just one crash at a bad time could easily cost tens of thousands in revenue. If Intel sells 50% less crashes for a few thousands of dollars, that's a very easy trade to make for a lot of people.

 

[Sleepingforest]

I don't think the reason for Xeons is really that complicated. Think about it this way: when you're running a private server for a couple of friends, a part failing is annoying and costs you $120 to replace (I figure no part of a very basic i3 server costs more than that).

If a large business has their server fail, they are out thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars. They still have to pay the employees for showing up, but the employees can't be productive or work. Time is literally money.

For example, if Anandtech's servers crashed, they would lose a considerable amount of money in due to lost ad revenue as people migrate somewhere else for tech news (perhaps permanently).

This money easily exceeds the cost of even several Xeons--all of which are necessary to deliver content to consumers. Anandtech hundred of thousands of people--that requires far more than a home server, which only needs to connect to 1-2 devices at once.

Now, these parts CAN be used for gaming, but there would be no benefit. Gamers don't require the dozens of threads or terabytes of RAM that servers do, and they see no benefit from ECC protection in RAM.

So, in a way, you are right--there is no point FOR YOU or for any gamer to get a Xeon. A 3570K is a much better purchase since games depends more on clockspeed than threads. BUT there are uses for Xeons.

You're basically arguing that "I have never seen a need for Xeons, thus nobody needs them." You look like King Lear: he believes that because he was abused by his daughters, everyone's troubles must come from their daughters (Act 3, scene 3, search for the line "pelican daughters").