Are old Xeon CPUs great price/performance ratio?

w41g872

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I was recently reading on a thread about a new build. The comment below says that a i5-4460 is better than an fx-9370. Therefore, I went to look them up in my daily-used benchmark website: Passmark. And it shows that fx-9370 is around 8000 point while i5-4460 is about 6000. And then I looked them up on other benchmark site such as CPUBOSS and Anandtech and Futuremark, and they all yield different numbers. So I've been wondering, since I usually use old lga 1366 Xeons as the CPUs of my builds, is that a mistake? Since you can get a Quad-Core x5677 on eBay at around $70 and OC it to 5.0GHz, which, by calculation and data from Passmark, is almost equivalent to an i7-4770k. But am I wrong about that? Or will it just perform worse at gaming and better under other situations?
 
Old Xeons are often priced very well for their performance, but there's a catch: the cheapest "proper" used x58 motherboards (that can overclock) start at around $150 on eBay, whereas you can run an i7 6700 on a $50 H110 motherboard with no issue, no need to buy an aftermarket cooler, can use a much smaller power supply, and you get access to all of the newer features available on socket 1151, such as USB 3.1, PCIe 3.0, SATA 3.

I would only buy a 1366 Xeon if I already had a motherboard laying around for it to sit in, and even then, I'd be sorely tempted to put that board on eBay due to how much they fetch these days.

Anyway, what makes you think you can get 5.0GHz out of an x5677 on a 7 year old motherboard? As far as I was aware, most of them can't get above maybe 4.4-4.5ghz. To get there, you'd need to invest in some expensive overclocking gear, and a stock i7 6700 would still be considerably faster.

Regarding the FX-9370, Passmark scores are not the final word. An Intel core has 50-75% better performance per clock, depending on the task, and the FX is only clocked 30% higher than the i5. In tasks that heavily utilize 4 threads or less, the 2 generation old low-end i5 can still be very considerably faster than the FX CPU. In tasks that can fully utilize all of the FX's cores, it will pull ahead, but bear in mind that you have to buy an expensive heatsink, motherboard and power supply to even consider running an FX-9xxx CPU. At that point, you're into modern i7 territory, in terms of price.

When comparing the costs of various CPUs, it's important to not overlook the costs of the entire system, and consider what sacrifices you make by going that route.
 

w41g872

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The reason that made my think of it is because I DID overclocked it to 5.0GHz. And generally in benchmark websites, fx-9370 is better than i5-4460.
About the performance question, even with less overall price (probably) and performance, I can get a decent motherboard the enables me to run 3 memory channels and 3-way sli, plus, I could get a sick looking and quiet H105 water cooler.
 
x5677 - $75
X58 motherboard - $150 (used)
H105 - $105
Larger power supply - +$25
Total: $355

ASRock B150 - $73 (2x PCIe 16x slots)
i7 6700 - $315
Total: $388

You're right in that you're not going to get triple SLI on a B150 board, but scaling is abysmal past 2 cards, and is almost certainly not worth the costs. Plus, ten times out of ten the i7 will be faster, even than a 5ghz Xeon with triple channel ram. It will draw a fraction of the power, and be running on a new motherboard with a warranty. Better still, there are still 2 more generations of CPUs being released on socket 1151 that may offer upgrades down the road.

That's not to say you might not snag a great deal on an x58 board, or do a lesser overclock using a moderately priced heatsink and throw the economics back in favor of the 1366 Xeon, but there's something to be said for running a new CPU, with new instruction sets, on a new motherboard with a warranty, and be able to do so with a fraction of the power consumption and heat output.

~

Regarding the FX CPU, whether or not it's faster really depends on what you're doing. There are plenty of cases where the 9590 gets beat by an old i3 in games:

tr_proz_12.jpg


There are also cases where the FX CPUs hang with i5's and even approach i7's:

f4_proz.jpg


^ While drawing several times the power, of course.

The problem with FX CPUs is that their performance is inconsistent, due to terrible per-thread performance. If you buy an i5, you know you're going to have a solid experience in any game. Passmark scores do not reflect this - things are quite a bit more complicated than a single number can convey - and that's really all I'm trying to say.
 

w41g872

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Well, first you should still factor in the air cooler for CPU. And I got a question: Aren't FX-9370 and i5-4460 both 8-threads? Why does it affect performance because of threads?
An additional point I want to make is that lga 1366 Xeon will bring a more budget build on mid-low end. Like I can get a mobo & W3530 for less than $60 and put money on a better graphics card. I won't use it on a $1500 build, but I will definitely use it on a $700 one.
 
i7 6700 is a 65w CPU and runs cool and quiet with the included stock cooler. Every generation of Intel CPU has drawn less power (K- models aside).

FX-9xxx is an 8-core CPU.
Core i5 is 4-core 4-thread, Core i7 is 4-core 8-thread. Intel CPUs perform higher despite having half of the cores and much lower clockspeeds.

I could potentially see some value in the Xeons in a budget build, especially if you can score a motherboard for $60. A Skylake Core i3 might well perform better in games than a stock Xeon though, and you can get CPU + motherboard brand new for less than $175, no need for a cooler, and the CPU will probably only consume somewhere in the range of 40 watts, whereas the Xeon will be more like 3-4x that at stock, more when overclocked, and thus will need a more expensive power supply too. If you're doing rendering or compiling, things shift in the Xeon's favor, as the i3's tremendous single-threaded performance will take a backseat to the Xeon's greater core count and higher overall throughput.

But gaming? I think the Xeon will lose, and will be more expensive too.
 

w41g872

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The power consumption is not that bad. You could power it and a GTX 980 with a single 500W PSU, and you can get a EVGA 600W one at $40 (Or Logysis 550W at $25 regardless of stability), plus a cooler at around $20, which, is still cheaper than a single i3-6100.

I am somewhat confused by the threads part. If 4 threads is enough for gaming, why does i7 have 8 threads? If the game can pull 8 threads, then the workload will still be distributed on 4 physical cores, right?
 
i7's have 8 threads because 99.9% of Intel's customers are not gamers. They don't design these CPUs for gamers.

The i7 has hyperthreading, which allows unused parts of a core to work on a second task simultaneously. Modern CPU cores have so many different resources, that any any given moment, most of them are unused, and hyperthreading allows some of those unused resources to be used to work on something else.

If two tasks both need the same resources, hyperthreading gives only a small benefit - maybe 15-30%. If they're completely different (e.g. one task is floating-point heavy, the other, integer) the performance boost can be closer to 100%. This is rarely seen in benchmarks, though, because benchmarks typically load up all of the cores and threads with the same task.

Games typically don't use more than 1-4 threads very heavily, so it's uncommon for an i7 to be significantly faster than an i5 in gaming. However, do something in the background at the same time, and the i7 can really stretch its legs. For other tasks, such as rendering and encoding, the i7 is a far better CPU.