Gadgetory

not long ago I compared the Intel Pentium G 4400 and AMD athlon x4 860 K there never to determine which budget CPU games should purchase both cost well under $100 and G 4400 which is my preferred choice for gamers which is to skylight cores and a whopping 3 megabyte l3 cache which is especially whopping when compared to the 860 K is complete lack of an l2 cache at all the G 4400 isn't a bad budget processor but what if I told you for about the same money you could be rocking an octa-core processor based on a fairly modern CPU architecture with a truly massive 20 megabyte l3 cache huh what if I told you that well it's true and there aren't really any strings attached the processor in question is the xeon e5 2617 a server grade processor that just four years ago was retailing for 1550 us today can be had for just 5 percent of the original retail price now picks mine up on eBay for just 75 us which works out to only be 125 Australian including shipping from the state's don't cheap right for that money you get an 8 core 16 thread 32 nanometer Sandy Bridge EP processor clocked at 2.6 gigahertz so the 3.3 gigahertz maximum turbo frequency as this is a xeon processor it can also support ECC memory along with standard ddr3 memory clocked up to 1600 megahertz running in quad-channel compte if you own the other piece of the equation is an intel x79 motherboard which can be also purchased online for a fair price expect to pay just under 200 US or a little less than 300 Australian in comparison the core i7 4960 expose just 6 cores that they are clocked higher than 3.6 gigahertz the 4096 DX also is a smaller 15 megabyte 3 cache though it can support slightly faster ddr3 1866 memory what's most important to note here is that the 49 60 X began selling in late 2013 for one thousand dollars and today you can still expect to pay that same ridiculous figure for one those wanting an intel 8 core processor in their desktop system limited to the core i7 59 60 X while it's a very impressive CPU it comes to the tune of 1050 US dollars or a wallet melting 1600 Australian spec wise the core i7 59 60 X and xeon e5 20 60 70 and actually quite a similar on paper with the only significant difference being the change in cpu architecture from Sandy Bridge to has well I'm not suggesting the e5 2670 will be faster or even as fast as the 59 60 X but don't expect it to be much slower either given the extreme price difference that's really something obviously an 8 core processor was going to crush the Pentium G 4400 what about the much more expensive Core i5 6600 K and i7 6700 K processors let's go to the benchmark lab and find out the memory bandwidth performance of the e5 2670 is greater than that of the core i7 6700k and Core i5 6600 k processors and 39 gigabytes per second the l1 cache performance however is quite a bit slower as the xeon processors based on two generation old architecture now the three DPM benchmark runs through six algorithms for a specified number of particles and steps and calculates the speed of each algorithm then sums them all for a final score for single threaded tasks the e5 2670 is going to lag behind higher clock processes such as the 6600 K and 6700 K though it's still faster than the FX 283 70 the multi-threaded performance on the other hand is very impressive placing the e5 2670 smack bang in the middle of the 59 60 X + 67 okay the synthetic Cinebench r15 is a popular benchmark for measuring raw CPU performance with single and multi threaded this time we see the e5 2670 is closer to the 6700 K than the 59 60s in performance but it crushed the FX 83 17 and Core i5 6600 k if compression is you game then take known as the a5 2670 isn't a great deal slower than the 59 60s it is however world's faster than the 6700 K providing 60% more performance the multi-threaded test those of you into complex spreadsheets will love with the a5 2670 has drop-off and completed the famous Monte Carlo workload in just 2.9 seconds which again placed it between the 59 60 X 60 700 K both of which are obviously very fast desktop processors not into Excel maybe Photoshop CC is more your jam if so the e 526 70 will also impress here as it completed the workload in just 13 point 4 seconds once again placing it between the 6700 K and the 59 HDX the x264 HD benchmark measures encoding performance here we see that although the e5 2670 is quite a bit slower than the 59 60 X it does manage to out-compete the 6700 K while it wipes the floor with the core i5 6600 K + FX 83 70 it wouldn't be right if I didn't include some gaming benchmarks so here they are and first up we have the Witcher 3 Wild Hunt in the CPU intensive town of novigrad we see the a5 2670 hangs in there with the 59 60 X making it slightly faster than FX 83 17 the lower clock speed of the e5 2670 does hurt it a little bit in Just Cause 3 there considering we are testing with the geforce gtx 980ti the performs are still very good certainly much better than the FX 83-73 526 17 you can again be found lagging behind the desktop processors this time in grand theft auto 5 still for such an affordable processor a minimum of 80 FPS is nothing to sneeze at the Boston section of fallout 4 seems to suffer from a coding bottleneck if that is the thing in our tests using the latest version of the game just 30% of the e5 2670 was being utilized and while all threads are being actively used none were being maxed out these results were included because the game is hugely popular but they should probably be taken with a grain of salt finally we have call of duty black ops 3 and here the a5 2067 you performed very well getting the most out of the geforce gtx 980ti graphics card with an average of 123 FPS the a5 2670 was faster than the core i5 6600 k and much faster than the FX 83-70 this video came about after watching a tech gaming weekly live stream where brian from tech yesterday talked about the insane bargain that is the xeon e5 26:17 comes to secondhand deals brian is the man so I jumped on ebay and quickly pulled the trigger after landing the processor for 125 Australian I've since grabbed a second before even last 110 dollars I plan to eventually throw them together on a dual socket server board for some SMP 16 core action honestly if I was looking at building a new computer today I'd be very tempted by a secondhand xeon e5 2670 and in the company x79 motherboard the combo can be had around $250 from reputable sellers on ebay with that you just need to add some ddr3 memory in your away just make sure you don't buy an engineering sample and don't be confused by the xeon e5 2670 v2 which is a 10 core version that costs around six times more in comparison the FX 83-70 system that we tested will cost you around the same figure if you opt for a low-end AMD 970 motherboard the difference being you get considerably more performance out of the second-hand Xeon setup including 75 percent more performance in applications such as Photoshop CC 100 percent more in WinRAR gamers also stand to benefit from the xeon e5 2617 as it crushed the FX 83-70 and all tests realistically it wasn't a great deal slower than the core i5 6600 k the cpu that'll set you back $250 loan applications and games that take advantage of all eight cores will see the e5 2670 lan pretty much right between the core i7 6 to 700 K and 5960 x which were a $75 processor is obviously a serious deal the only other drawback to the e 5 2016 7 year other than is limited and locked clock speed is the x79 chipset the x79 was barely an upgrade from the x58 chipset that came three years before it essentially you got two extra USB ports two additional PCIe x 1 lanes and a pair of SATA 6 gigabits per second port upgrades still the x79 speed you said might not impress but it does include all the essentials and more modern hardware such as m2 nvme SSDs can be added using a PCI Express adapter card the answer of x79 extreme 6 that I bought for testing work very well I'm still playing around the overclocking as limit that may be so far with 107 megahertz base clock I've only been able to extract around 10% more performance so nothing to write home about it's also worth mentioning that the xeon e5 2670 is a 115 watt processor that seemed to generate a similar amount of head as a 140 watt 59 60 X so decent cooler is in order so what are you waiting for go get yourself a 16 threaded Xeon for the price of a modern budget processor do it now