Is there better option than i7-6950X ?

[JezUK]

I'm planning to upgrade some time this year from my 3-year old i7 4930k and I'm trying to figure out which CPU is better. My picks so far are E5-2679 v4 and i7 6950x. Any suggestions which is better and why? I know one of the advantages of the xeon is that I would be able to add another one on the same PC in a few years time if more performance is needed, thus saving space, but other than that? For example, which one is faster, does the 2 times larger L3 cache of the xeon make any difference in rendering/daily work etc. etc.?

If my math is right, the xeon is 20 cores x 3.30Ghz = 66 Ghz while the i7 is 10 cores x 3.50 Ghz = 35 Ghz. So without overclocking any of them, the Xeon should be 2 times faster? And if I overclock 6950x to 4.40 Ghz the xeon would still be 50% faster?

My main concern with the xeon is the single core performance. If I overclock the 6950x to 4.40 Ghz it will be 30-35% faster in single-threaded tasks, am I right?

Any thoughts are appreciated.

Just my own anecdotal experience.

I've been building my own PCs for at least 16 years, built around 15 over that time. Personally I own an OC'd 5960x (using a couple of inexpensive K4200 Quadros GPUs) but while I was working at my company late last year, I built them a couple of Dual Xeons 2696v3 with the then latest M6000 Quadro GPU (12Gb).

Whilst those Xeons *rendered* in half the time (v. nice ) - I preferred my i7 5960x because it simply felt 'snappier' during everyday usage, while the Xeons would feel slightly sluggish (each time I'd return back to working on those). Hit the render button though and that's when the Xeons would shine.

i7 reliability has never been an issue.

Just my 2 cents.

[Alex_M]

Hmm... Tough choice then. Maybe an option would be to use the xeons as a dedicated render server. My main concern is I'd like to use IPR and we now know that at least for the foreseeable future it won't support DR.

[Morbid Angel]

Hmm... Tough choice then. Maybe an option would be to use the xeons as a dedicated render server. My main concern is I'd like to use IPR and we now know that at least for the foreseeable future it won't support DR.

Ipr supports DR in maya. However its not really a smooth sailing. The issue is the DR in interactive performance requires to send and receive a ton of data over the network. So unless you have a 10 g network, it really suffers in performance. Yeah sure simple scenes work fine. However more complex scenes with lots of textures and geo take long to update and even update dynamically after they loaded into frame. Same issue plagues progressive render with DR. Its one of the reasons I still don't use it

[jasonhuang1115]

Ipr supports DR in maya. However its not really a smooth sailing. The issue is the DR in interactive performance requires to send and receive a ton of data over the network. So unless you have a 10 g network, it really suffers in performance. Yeah sure simple scenes work fine. However more complex scenes with lots of textures and geo take long to update and even update dynamically after they loaded into frame. Same issue plagues progressive render with DR. Its one of the reasons I still don't use it

Good to know. No wonder a while back I had IPR going with DR accidentally checked and it didn't error out. Instead, it kept going but not really interactively or at least as responsive as I hope it to be.

[Morbid Angel]

Good to know. No wonder a while back I had IPR going with DR accidentally checked and it didn't error out. Instead, it kept going but not really interactively or at least as responsive as I hope it to be.

its why the gpu suppose to kill all the present day "DR" functions. Its things like even travel distance between two cpus on the same motherboard degrades performance, not to mention distance over network cable, through ethernet port etc etc. Having all those thousands of cores on one board would be killer. It's gpu rt needs dev time until it works flawlessly