Home server / playground - Xeon or i7?

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bbaber

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Looking to put together a system that will be my always-on system at home. That'll be my DDNS point, maybe DC, definitely virtualization server, gaming would be nice but I also do 3d CAD. My primary concern is speed and responsiveness, future proofing, and lots of cores for virtual machines. This will be my playground for all kinds of stuff I want to tinker with.

Every Xeon system I've been on feels laggy, very slow - no matter how awesome the specs are on paper. Is this a result of ECCram? Is it possible to run a couple Xeons without ECC memory? Would that even help?

What's the best chipset nowadays? Are there considerations between my two options, when it comes to virtualization, CAD, gaming?

Are there any Extended EATX mobos out there that are not geared towards gaming? They all seem to be filled almost exlclusively with x16 slots, and there are a lot of things i'd like to do with x1, x4, x8 PCIe slots. This is kind of the whole purpose of my build - I need lots of interfaces to be able to do stuff with my VMs :)

What would you do?
 
Solution
kanewolf
It may be that your experience is slow and laggy because high performance new Xeons are expensive. Or that the Xeons only had a server access graphics subsystem and not a dedicated graphics card.

User interfaces is a function of graphics subsystem more than CPU. Xeon workstations, are not slow on the user interface.

I don't know how much support for non-ECC RAM there is in dual socket motherboards.

An E5-2xxx CPU will probably be used. It will be DDR3. An E5-2xxx V3 is DDR4.

Even at $3K I probably wouldn't buy a Xeon. I would put the extra $$$ into RAM. 64GB or 128GB. VMs want a lot of RAM. A big M.2 SSD for your provisioning disk.
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bbaber

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I mean money's always a factor, but I really want to invest in a system that's going to last a while. Plus I just like the performance! But I'd say I have a couple grand to throw at it; Keeping in mind that I do have a lot of the other components already

Mostly I'll RDP, but it will also be used like my primary PC, but up on the hdtv in the living room. I don't have a traditional monitor on the desk
 
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kanewolf

kanewolf

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For $2K you won't get new Xeon dual socket. You could probably get E5-2xxx of maybe low end V3. I think for $2k you will be better off with Ryzen 1800 rather than Intel. You could get an X99 and 6 core Intel. You will get better memory bandwidth but fewer cores and a motherboard that is reaching end of sale.
 
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bbaber

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Call it 3k then. But yeah, E5-26xx series is what I was thinking, for the dual-cpu option. But my experience has been that all Xeon systems are quite slow, laggy, the best way I can describe is there's latency in the UI, things take a long time to load, etc.

But the question is about speed/latency in the UI. Would Windows 10 be snappy running on a Xeon w/ ECC? Or would running Xeon w/ non-ECC be sufficient for performance?
 
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kanewolf

kanewolf

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It may be that your experience is slow and laggy because high performance new Xeons are expensive. Or that the Xeons only had a server access graphics subsystem and not a dedicated graphics card.

User interfaces is a function of graphics subsystem more than CPU. Xeon workstations, are not slow on the user interface.

I don't know how much support for non-ECC RAM there is in dual socket motherboards.

An E5-2xxx CPU will probably be used. It will be DDR3. An E5-2xxx V3 is DDR4.

Even at $3K I probably wouldn't buy a Xeon. I would put the extra $$$ into RAM. 64GB or 128GB. VMs want a lot of RAM. A big M.2 SSD for your provisioning disk.
 
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