NEw workstation Xeon E5-2687W

[peterguthrie]

I've just built a couple of workstations running the Xeon E5-2670 w/ 64GB Ram, 256 GB SSD, etc. We are extremely happy with the stability and performance for the money. I also have a couple of the latest iCore7 machines also, but they are just not in the same category of performance in our day to day usage.

Good to know. What made you go for the e5-2670? less power hungry than the 2687w?

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

I guess it depends on the system. Some setup are just not good at it. My old 920 machine at home has been running rock solid at 4ghz since the day I bought it.

A lot of people overclock them too much too quick tbh. With OC you need to bake your cpu. U cant just buy it and put at 4.5 within hour of purchase. It has to run at it stock clock for few weeks to bake properly, then slowly up all stuff and it will be fine...

[Donald2B]

I'm no stranger to overclocking and understand proper ramp up...slowly working up to a higher speed. Our machines are far from simple and I would attribute most of the problems to needing high amounts of RAM, allowing for a much higher instability rate. Again this is just our experience here, if you want to overclock by all means squeeze all that performance out of that chip.

@peterguthrie: I chose those due to diminishing returns on the cost / performance. We found that by stepping down I put the saved money towards a higher end Quadro card. (We work with LOTS of engineering data and Body Objects in Max, our GTX 680s were unusable in wireframe mode. The Quadro gives us 10x the performance in those scenes. So it was necessary to maintain productivity.)

@duke2: I would agree 100%. Different machines each brought different issues. Again, I think that running a minimum of 32GB Ram is causing most of our problems. In the end, I would rather take that troubleshooting time and turn it into productivity even if I lose that 15% performance bump.

[Crayox13]

I too am plaining an aditional workstation. Initally I looked at e5-4617 because I want to get a CPU with factory setting of about 3Ghz, don't want to overclock...and then I saw it's one of the rare ones with no hyper-threading I also wanted this one because its newer sandbridge core than 2670w, right?.

So, any suggestions?
about 3Ghz, 6-8 cores, I have a price range but they are MUCH different in Croatia - more expensive...so I don't think that would help you. Also, any suggestions on where to get these xeons in Europe? Like some central European dealership.
thanks

[cecofuli]

Mmm.. I had very bad experience with Xeon. It was a 5445 if I remember correctly.
No possibility to OC and, also FBDIMM memory was expensive and VEEEERY HOOT!!!
In the supermicro board, after some minutes of work (internet, excel) without a fan over the RAM, Windows crashed!!! Really!
I had to put a 12cm fan aver the RAM area, or I could cook a pizza. Also the Southbridge was very hot.
Without my fan, the workstation was very unstable. After some 3 years, the expensive MB, recognized only 2 bank or RAM.
Good service Supermicro, sent me a new MB free. After this experience, I stop with an expensive Dual Xeon ^__^
We are not a big company, and with some 970 in OC we are ok. First, OC about 3.9 is good for this processor. Over, you can have crash an no so increase peformance. I see some 4.3 Ghz version.
but i think they are unstable and very ot. There are no difference for 50 min vs 43 min, in my opinion.
Temperature 62°C under full render. The important is to have low RAM setting.
Also a 970 WS is good for resale. No one wants an old, heavy dual Xeon! But you can sell easily some good 970 Desktop PC with 24 GB RAM.
Single thread is much faster with 4.5 GHZ desktop CPU than 3.0 Xeon. GHz/price is in favour on powerful OC desktop CPU.
About the preview, ok, it's better a dual Xeon =) With the same price of one Xeon, you can buy one good single CPU PC + one good node.
You have much more flexibility with two PC. I have the same opinion for a little renderfarm (5-8 nodes)

[Crayox13]

How is vray with Intels HT? I mean is it using Hyper threading to shorten the render time overall or?
Vlado?

[Crayox13]

How is vray with Intels HT? I mean is it using Hyper threading to shorten the render time overall or?
Vlado?

[Morbid Angel]

How is vray with Intels HT? I mean is it using Hyper threading to shorten the render time overall or?
Vlado?

In theory yes. But I think of HT as a camera's "digital zoom" function. It does not double your render speed, only gain performance of 10%-20%.

I think in a small office i7 is a good price vs performance ratio. You can get a decent i7 for a third of a price of a xeon and yet have it perform as well and as fast as 12 core xeon. What I found was though xeons are expensive, they are way more durable. I had built a small farm for my home office, 6 machines, 1 xeon 5 i7, I had to replace 3 of the i7 machines for various issues, hdd, mb, cpu (cpu burned out due to oc) very rare but happens I guess. While the xeon has been rock solid. This is the same case in our big office, we have 40 machines and half of those are xeons, no problems with them at all. One of them had an issue with a fan but thats it. While i7 do drop out more often, but again they don't cost as much.

I would always recommend (if budget permits) to get xeon as a workstation (I have supermicro and dont like dell's).

In terms of HT, I actually think that HT does not improve your overall performance as much. We had more problems with it then we had good, mainly windows/viewport stability issues in both maya and max, rendering issues, vray had/has issues with some dynamic objects and HT, which vlado is still troubleshooting (I hope).

Lastly and I didn't really have time to confirm this, but I think single threaded operations as a bit faster on i7, or single cores that have a higher clock speeds. So for example if you are doing a polycombine or some sort of operation in max/maya where it only uses 1 thread, i7 will perform faster then xeon, unless xeon process matches i7 process in terms of cache and clock speed. But for sure programs like phoenix fd performed 3-5 times faster on simulations then xeons in our office.

[Crayox13]

Yes, I would like to get Xeons for their stability too. Now I'm on Opterons, and after 6 years off rendering they still work like new.
Hm, I was thinking between e5-4617 because I want a higher factory frequency, but then doesn't support HT, but on the other hand I like it also because it's newer (sandy bridge) than 2670w.
Also with Xeons - you can get two of them on one MBO

[Crayox13]

Hm, I have another dilema.
e5-2643 vs e5-2687W. One is 4 cores, the other is 8 cores.
Basically, will 8 cores vs 16 cores in total be really used? If vray will scale well enough to 16 cores, than it's worth it, but if not? I remember we discussed this a while back but can't remember what was the conclusion. The system will have 32GB RAM if that helps.

[Micha_cg]

Here my experience: I'm very happy with the Dual Xeon E5-2687W. I use a LianLi Z70 housing that has openings at the top. I build in the CPU fans so, that the air natural flow upwards. The CPU voltage is low set to 1.1V. At the moment I don't closed the housing side and I don't use additional housing fans. Only the Thermalright Silver Arrow CPU fans are used. The smaller ones are integrated in the CPU cooler and the bigger ones are placed some centimeter above the cooler so that the air better flow trough the top opening (complete open). The fans are running at lowest speed and the CPU temps at load are approx. 60°C. I like silent machines and never thought, that a Dual Xeon could be so silent.

The standard Thermalright Silver Arrow CPU fans makes me not happy. The fans can't be fixed on the cooler, it's to difficult on a dual board. But for me it's no problem to lay the fans in the middle of the cooler only. A big problem of the Thermalright Silver Arrow is that the cooler are not planar (see image with a mirror glass on the cooler surface). I abrade it, but don't get it perfect planar, the convex bend of approx. 0.5 ..1mm is to much, but I got the middle area planar and used a lot of thermal compound at the outer area. So finally I got temps that make me happy - my current half hour PPT test show me 58°C.

In the next weeks I will buy some fan frames like this one
http://www.kmcomputer.de/mall/1/pic/12595.JPG
for the top openings, the standard housing fences are to tight.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Here my experience: I'm very happy with the Dual Xeon E5-2687W. I use a LianLi Z70 housing that has openings at the top. I build in the CPU fans so, that the air natural flow upwards. The CPU voltage is low set to 1.1V. At the moment I don't closed the housing side and I don't use additional housing fans. Only the Thermalright Silver Arrow CPU fans are used. The smaller ones are integrated in the CPU cooler and the bigger ones are placed some centimeter above the cooler so that the air better flow trough the top opening (complete open). The fans are running at lowest speed and the CPU temps at load are approx. 60°C. I like silent machines and never thought, that a Dual Xeon could be so silent.

The standard Thermalright Silver Arrow CPU fans makes me not happy. The fans can't be fixed on the cooler, it's to difficult on a dual board. But for me it's no problem to lay the fans in the middle of the cooler only. A big problem of the Thermalright Silver Arrow is that the cooler are not planar (see image with a mirror glass on the cooler surface). I abrade it, but don't get it perfect planar, the convex bend of approx. 0.5 ..1mm is to much, but I got the middle area planar and used a lot of thermal compound at the outer area. So finally I got temps that make me happy - my current half hour PPT test show me 58°C.

In the next weeks I will buy some fan frames like this one
http://www.kmcomputer.de/mall/1/pic/12595.JPG
for the top openings, the standard housing fences are to tight.

The roughtest build I have ever seen.

If u dont like noise u should buy h120/h100 2x units for each of CPU. And Corsair or Xigmatec Elysium case. U could close it completly and have it fully silent. With 2 units of Hxx series u would have no noise at all and 50C during stress...

If u put too much thermal paste that harm ur CPU and makes it cheat more.... more its not better with pastes.

I'll go and pray for ur pc now O.O I'm afraid to ask what happen to graphic card...

Hm, I have another dilema.
e5-2643 vs e5-2687W. One is 4 cores, the other is 8 cores.
Basically, will 8 cores vs 16 cores in total be really used? If vray will scale well enough to 16 cores, than it's worth it, but if not? I remember we discussed this a while back but can't remember what was the conclusion. The system will have 32GB RAM if that helps.

If its 1 socket CPU get 6 core enthusiast CPU and OC IT.

[Micha_cg]

@DADAL: Right, general it's better to use a very thin layer of paste, but I tried to fill the 0.5 mm at the outer area. In the middle I applied very less paste. It looks like my temps are not so bad - today I found this liquid cooled test system here http://www.kitguru.net/components/cp...dr3-review/27/ that run at 68° C. I suppose so the undervoltage brings a lot here.
I think, the cooler contact isn't the best here since I can see a temp difference of 8° over my cores. At the review the core temp delta is 3° only. I suppose so a plain cooler surface would more bring down the temps. I din't know that Thermaltake is selling crap.
At the moment I use a GTX260 only, since Rhino 3D doesn't work better with newer cards. But if Vray for Rhino will support GPU rendering once a day ...

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Humh interesting test... Its pretty weird giving the fact that my 2x Xeon E5530 at stock speeds(I has it OC to 3. otherwise) can run as cold as 55-60 degree using 2x Noctua cooler. I would expect water to be a lot cooler. I guess guys in review used recommended maximum voltage not the minimum as they could... - which can be applied for xeons thanks to their stability and so on... they don't need volt.

They are also using H80 where as I suggested H100 H100 is 2x the size of H80 chance it will be 2x quieter for the same silent noise/performance...

a side note GTX 680 4gb Classified from EVGA.. is the quietest GTX I ever had... comparing to 8800 and 480 gtx... I cant even hear it sometimes @_@