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Intel Xeon W Workstation CPU Review

2018-04-23
remember how before this thing got wrecked we compared it to a custom core i 9p see determining that the consumer hardware was a better value well those skylake w chips are not exclusive to the iMac pro so what if you were to put one of them in a PC what is a Zeon W and how does Intel justify the hefty premium that you would pay over a desktop core i-9 we're not sure what we do know though is Origin PC sponsored today's video origin offers beautiful custom desktops laptops and life time 24/7 technical support they use only high quality products like samsung's 960 pro m2 SSDs and you can visit origin PC through the link below for a limited time offer so I've got two benches here for us today both of them are running very similar Asus workstation boards like I wouldn't call these guys brother and sister but if they were cousins they probably wouldn't want to get married so there's the X 299 sage that's running the X 299 chipset that you're probably already familiar with and the other one is running a chipset that Intel calls C 422 and you will need a C 422 board if you want to run a Xeon w so with this chipset the main thing that you gain is support for V pro whose claim to fame among other things is remote management with the convenience and vulnerability that comes along with that what you lose is support for Intel's opting storage acceleration otherwise they are pretty similar in their capabilities another feature of Xeon w is official support for up to 512 gigabytes of system memory though it should be noted that some X 299 motherboards are compatible with registered DIMMs meaning that they can also run 512 gigs of ram with a regular core I 9 so then if it wasn't for Intel making ECC AZ on exclusive feature there wouldn't really appear to be any difference between them whatsoever now ECC memory which we've actually covered in more depth before here is not faster than regular Ram what makes it special and what makes it more expensive is the fact that on the fly it can actually check for and correct errors improving overall system reliability this is a desirable feature for any system that's running mission-critical applications as for the CPUs themselves well with a couple of exceptions they line up almost one-to-one with the core x-series lineup which is to say they've got the same at the same core counts and they even fit in the same socket where they differ is in these eons gaining an extra four PCI Express lanes while losing support for turbo boost max though it should be noted that many of them have a higher Turbo Boost 2.0 speed to compensate making that last bit sort of a non-issue and also kind of raising the question in those two why we have to have a software application that only works in Windows for the desktop processors anyway so with both benches assembled all that's left now is to do a little bit of tuning to make sure that our tests are fair the main thing is just to make sure that our memory is running at the same speed which it is so to recap here are the hardware configurations that were running today now let's run some benchmarks starting with our to 8 core chips to see if maybe just baby there is something that we have overlooked yeah okay moving on to our other tests we see the slight difference a 100 megahertz higher base clock makes for gaming actually giving the Xeon w21 45 an edge over its core i7 counterpart so that's good news if you were concerned that your serious business workstation wouldn't be able to game off hours you can put those fears to rest and then as for the heavy multi-threaded tests like blender the differences shrink down to a maximum of 16 seconds and don't really seem to get any worse over time meaning that the difference basically comes down to how high and for how long the chips boost during the early phase of the run thanks to their slightly different turbo implementations so I guess it's time for us to do a quick chip swap here now we're onto our second pair and just like the previous ones the differences aren't exactly striking neither chip really seems to gain a firm advantage over the other and it's a dead heat in our synthetic gaming tests once again light threaded workloads favor turbo boost max and our numbers tighten up considerably when we pour on the juice in blender this time however we've got a maximum delta of about a minute with the 7900 ex taking the crown on the gooseberry render let's try the heavy weights now shall we we've got both systems loaded up with their 18 core variants so which monster cpu is more monstrous well surprisingly our 79 80 wrecked the Xeon w21 95 in Deus Ex thanks to its higher bass and turbo boost clocks and while it's not as big a victory is in our synthetic gaming tests it's still a win for the core I 9 and then it's the same story across the rest of our tests regardless of threading we also saw our biggest upset in blender with the core i9 winning by over a minute and a half on the gooseberry render so if the performance is as similar in real life as the spec sheets would seem to indicate with neither the consumer chips pulling ahead in consumer workloads like games nor the workstation chips pulling ahead in workstation workloads it makes it honestly pretty difficult for me to wrap my head around the reason that this lineup of CPUs and this chipset exists now traditionally Zeon's based on the consumer 11x X sockets only had ECC as their main selling point but those came at a relatively small premium whereas again traditionally the expense of Zeon's with many course well they had the ability to run on dual socket boards as an easy justification but this generation lacks that capability meaning that unless you absolutely need vPro and ECC memory support the latter being something that AMD's entire lineup from rising 3 to thread Ripper supports natively and the former being something that Intel's own consumer products support it kind of smells like mostly marketing but with a subtle undertone of extra PCI Express Lanes so at the end of the day I think what it comes down to is that Xeon has a lot more brand recognition than core does in the workstation and enterprise space so if Intel can charge more for it I guess they might as well but for our viewers I'll say this as long as you don't stand to lose a hundred bucks worth of work every time your system bluescreens due to a bit flip we're recommending to stick with the consumer core I nine private Internet access supports a variety of VPN protocols and types of encryption and authentication which allows you to dial in exactly the level of privacy protection you need here's just a few reasons why you should use P ia VPN it offers IP cloaking so you can hide your true IP address and geographic location it allows you to browse anonymously keeping your identity hidden it allows you to avoid data mining and targeted advertising and block unwanted connections with advanced firewall and filtering capabilities to keep all network 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