Older dual Xeon vs modern single


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Thinking about jumping on the dual Xeon bandwagon.  I am running several Dockers, with several more planned, and I am playing with the idea of a Windows VM to run Blue Iris (CPU hog).  Having headroom to grow would be nice.  I'm on an i5-2500 presently, which is adequate, but a few more full time Dockers will stress it when they're all hitting at once, and a VM with Blue Iris is out of the question on this CPU, if I want to have room to add more than a few cameras.

 

Looking at Supermicro 1356 boards with two E5-24xx v2 CPUs.  I think a modern Intel single CPU in the 6+ core range above 3.5ghz could match or best it, but maybe not if I can score two of the higher-end 8 or 10 core Xeons.  

 

I looked at the 2011 socket, and there doesn't seen to be any standard ATX mainboards.  v3 is an option, but a good dual board + CPUs is way up there in price.

 

I know the issue of power consumption will come up, but if I go with v2's (Ivy, 22nm) I should be in better shape overall.

 

I also tend to build with tech from a few generations past, as a general rule.

 

The other issue is cost... 16GB of ECC RAM is $40, and I wouldn't need much more than that, at least initially.  An ebay'd pair of midrange v2s is still cheaper than a Haswell or Broadwell i7, at least from what I can tell.  I'll be using an existing tower chassis, and passive heatsinks aren't terribly expensive.  I don't need all the fancy m2, sata express, etc offered by newer Intel chipsets. 

 

Then there is the issue of having a legit server board with IPMI and all the stability, vs an "enthusiast" board meant for gamers or office use.

 

Any thoughts?

 

Thanks.

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I'm going to have a pair of quad core E5620's for sale soon cheap, so if you do plan to go the socket 1366 route keep this in mind. I realize they are only quad cores so 8 threads total times two is 16, its a place to start and you can upgrade from there. The older tech is a real deal for sure but power consumption is definitely something to think about. Let us know how you decide to go.

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i'm on SuperMicro X8DTH-6F | CPU: Intel Xeon X5680 3.3Ghz. Look at my sig for more details. i'm with single CPU now, but was with both too - built some offsite backup server with similar mobo, and reused 2nd CPU from main server. 

and i'm very happy with this old build, i'm on ESXi with five total VMs - two Windows, two Linux and unRAID, but overall activity is not so high so i can live with one CPU. my board have 7PCIe slots and if i need more than 3, then i must have both CPU installed.

and according to electricity - calculate number of months/years how fast you will pay this small more amount of electricity according to price you will pay for new hardware.. for me, new hardware costs much more than difference of electricity you will pay.   

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You're either going to pay more for a modern processor upfront that gives you better power usage, or pay for more power over time with cheaper older processors. So you'll pay either way. How much depends on usage.

 

For me, I like cores. Many cores. A lot of usability problems on here seem to be from people asking their "servers" to do too much. On my current main machine, I can simultaneously run 3-4 plex transcodes (not streams, transcodes) 3-5 vm's at full utilization, a couple dockers, large file transfers across the network, and have no problems with performance and still have room to grow.

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Raw power isn't  the whole story if your primary use case is video. H.265/HEVC, which is used for 4k video and is said to provide the same video quality at half the size for any resolution, requires significant power to decode, or a very cheap Brasswell Celeron (8 bit decoding). And 10 bit decoding is near impossible without a ton of power or a Kaby Lake. If I were buying today, I'd definitely be looking seriously at the Kaby.

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40 minutes ago, bjp999 said:

Raw power isn't  the whole story if your primary use case is video. H.265/HEVC, which is used for 4k video and is said to provide the same video quality at half the size for any resolution, requires significant power to decode, or a very cheap Brasswell Celeron (8 bit decoding). And 10 bit decoding is near impossible without a ton of power or a Kaby Lake. If I were buying today, I'd definitely be looking seriously at the Kaby.

Look there for example about H.265/HEVC: http://www.techspot.com/article/1131-hevc-h256-enconding-playback/page2.html

even with 4 year old Celeron you can play H.265/HEVC file at about half processor usage..

but i agree, it all depends on your usage patterns 

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1 hour ago, bjp999 said:

Raw power isn't  the whole story if your primary use case is video. H.265/HEVC, which is used for 4k video and is said to provide the same video quality at half the size for any resolution, requires significant power to decode, or a very cheap Brasswell Celeron (8 bit decoding). And 10 bit decoding is near impossible without a ton of power or a Kaby Lake. If I were buying today, I'd definitely be looking seriously at the Kaby.

 

If you decode the video on unraid you usually have a VM with a GPU that decodes the video, so not really important with CPU power. 

If you meant transcoding, you are more on track, but seeing that both Plex and emby can use a GPU (Plex mostly iGPU) for transcoding, CPU power isn't that important. 

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4 hours ago, saarg said:

 

If you decode the video on unraid you usually have a VM with a GPU that decodes the video, so not really important with CPU power. 

If you meant transcoding, you are more on track, but seeing that both Plex and emby can use a GPU (Plex mostly iGPU) for transcoding, CPU power isn't that important. 

 

I don't use my server with VMs for playback. I use client boxes. Ability to transcode multiple HEVC streams would be high on my list of features. I'm waiting for the Xeon server version of the CPU to come out.

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2 minutes ago, HellDiverUK said:

Unless you get free electricity, don't even consider the older system.  

 

At work I replaced an old Poweredge 2950 with dual Xeons with a newer Poweredge R515 with dual 6-core Opterons, and the power consumption was cut by 66%. 

Can you provide numbers in kWh? if you cut 100 kWh per month for example, it's about 20EUR/month (here in Latvia/EU), or about 240EUR per year, or about 1K in about four years.. then look at your systems price difference and you will get your math :)

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2 minutes ago, HellDiverUK said:

The 2950 with 8x500GB 7200rpm Seagate drives and a pair of Xeon E5420 used over 400W (I think about 420-460W?).

looks like your system is running at full load constantly?

my current mine server with one X5680 Xeon(with 10+Hdd, see my sig for details) is running at about 200W.. and as home/small business workload isn't very high...

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Just now, uldise said:

looks like your system is running at full load constantly?

my current mine server with one X5680 Xeon(with 10+Hdd, see my sig for details) is running at about 200W.. and as home/small business workload isn't very high...

 

Not really, running as a NAS for 4 people doing video editing and general office stuff, along with WSUS etc.

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8 hours ago, HellDiverUK said:

 

Not really, running as a NAS for 4 people doing video editing and general office stuff, along with WSUS etc.

 

dual E5520's  on one of my servers with a handful of 2.5 drives doing similar stuff, 2 desktop users, 2 NAS file transfers and an automated backup running:

 

58d4473be363b_ScreenShot2017-03-23at6_03_51PM.png.14666b9e2ea25f387daf0f59e0f658b9.png

 

 

my dual x5670 server is a little higher.

 

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