As a Server Technician (been in the server business around 15 years) I love seeing people using Xeons and keeping them circulating on the used market.

I love old Xeons due to how stupidly cheap they are for what you get

It's an absolute tragedy that, from Skylake onwards, Intel started c0ckblocking consumer grade motherboards from using Xeons. Haswell and Broadwell were the last generations to allow this. These companies and the regulators / politicians in their pockets claim to care about the environment but where the rubber hits the road, they clearly dont give a toss. Older xeons that companies replace could be used by general consumers in cheap desktop builds, instead of ending up as e-waste. seems there's a rather large cognitive dissonance here. Stated policy goals and interests arent always in sync with their actions. Wonder why that is lol

You might get a little bit more of gaming performance by disabling hyperthreading on those CPUs. There's a bit of overhead with hyperthreading that harms applications that are not optimized for 16+ threads such as all games basically. It will also reduce a bit the power consumption which should allow better clock speeds if you are hitting the power limit of that CPU

It's amazing to see the xeon performing so well in gaming and holding up to i7

Id love to see you test out the e5 2667v4. Base clock of 3.2ghz and a bost clock of 3.6ghz Dont think it would be bad for a $10 USD cpu.

My most recent build, Sept 2023, is an x99 with dual XEON E5 2699 v3 CPUs (18 cores, 36 threads, $36 per CPU), 64gb ECC (8x8gb), and a 4tb m.2. It's an absolute monster and it was a super inexpensive build for the power it provides. I'll be upgrading to a used 24gb 3090 before the end of the year.

*E5-2697 v3 with HT disabled = 14 cores/14 threads @ 3.6GHz* _or_ *E5-2696 v3 with HT disabled and 8 cores disabled = 10cores/10threads @ 3.8GHz* Are the best for gaming right now. _*Assuming turbo boost unlock is implemented in both cases._

I just replaced an i7-5820k with an E5-2687W V4 (12c/24t). It does all core boost at 3.2Ghz. That Xeon is more expensive than the Xeon you are using here but still relatively cheap for what it is. Still trying to figure out what useful things I can do with it, but with my Titan Xp in it, it can still play some games while I try to figure it out.

The reason BCLK doesn't work on most processors anymore is that motherboard manufacturers save money by not including an external clock gen on the board itself so every bus is synced with the front side and changes to the bclk cause instabilities. On boards that do still include a external clock gen bclk overclocking is an option.

Timely video! I just got my Xeon 2660v4 yesterday and will be putting my media computer together today

Great video, here in Brazil it is quite normal to assemble xeon kits for a gaming PC, I would love to see tests on your channel in the future with the xeon 2667 v4 and 2690 v4 (best value for money).

I remember subbing when you had 15k. Good work bro!

Those older Xeon CPU's are a great bargain really, especially if you're doing more productivity tasks and a bit of gaming, rather than the other way round. I currently run an old HP Z620 workstation PC, and although my GPU is utter shite it runs fine, it'll run Diablo 3 relatively well but not great. Excellent video as always!!

I would love to see you add stuff like temperatures for the CPU tests and add a test for 4k video encoding using ffmpeg. They're not gaming related, but would be decent info none the less.

That was quite interesting. One thing I think you could add to these types of reviews, is power consumption. It would be interesting to see how much power they draw too, as especially with electricity prices being more expensive, I think it's an important metric to look at too.

Great stuff but I believe gaming performance would be better with equally cheap E5-2667 v4 & E5-2697 v3 (w/Turbo Boost Unlocked BIOS & HT disabled). Please consider these in another video! Thank you!

great video, would've loved to see a comparison without hyperthreading though!

Hey man, looking great in yourself :) Haven't checked in on the channel for ages and wow, looking so well. Pleased for ya 👍👍

Impressive performance in most of the titles! It would be interesting to see how those AMD Server CPUs (I think Opteron before Ryzen came out) would perform.

Still happy with my E5-2696v3 build...paired to a new HuananZhi X99TF + RTX 2080Ti (undervolted) + 48GB DDR4 Corsair Vengeance (XMP, 4 channel, 2133Mhz). I prefer the locked V3 as the TURBOUNLOCK using MiyConst's Mi899 is very easy to do and it really opens up performance that makes the V4 less appealing (though V4 has slightly better IPC). The turbounlocked all-core is still limited by TDP...which on the 2696v3 is 145W. With all 18 cores, 36 threads it will all core to just under 3.8Ghz when gaming. For heavy loads approaching 100% utlization, it will downclock to 2.8Ghz all core. CBR23 multi hits 14,050 pts. Not bad for a CPU that costs around $45 and a total build (excl keyboard, mouse, and monitor) running around $640 (incl. case and PSU).

It would be very interesting if this processor was tested in multiplayer games like BF2042 and BF4 of BF1, as back when these games came out they were very demanding on processors and needed higher core counts for smooth gameplay. Another very good video btw 😀👍

Great, thank you for letting me know about this, just ordered one, homelab upgrade for $16

Informative video. Thank you.

Great video! Is it possible that you also show us the power usage by the CPU?

always a relaxing watch on the bus

Love your vids, and when there's xeons, even more!

Have you ever thought of also trying emulation for these cpu? Rpcs3 is one of the most cpu intensive programs i know and it would really cool to see how it would manage it

Incredible I'd be more than happy using this chip... Thanks for the video 👍

Great video! I'm using a 1650 v3, which has the benifits of higher base and boost clocks but is still insanely cheap and can be paired with quad channel RAM in a cheap Ali Express board.

I just got a Dell workstation and put dual E5-2698 v3 processors in it. So i have 32 cores and 64 threads. It's a bit impractical but the whole system including the processor upgrades was under $300 and it came with 32 gigs of ram. And I am going to mainly use it as a workstation.

At the moment there aren't really the chinese remanufactured boards to make the platform cost cheap, BUT Skylake Xeons are getting pretty cheap as well, both LGA 3647 and LGA 2066. Cascade lake ones aren't ridiculously expensive either, but still a fair bit more than skylake. My main PC currently uses a Xeon W-3235 that I got for $150 from china, but the board was also $350, so it may have been cheaper to get a 5900x and a decent AM4 board. As luck would have it though I get some nice to haves with the xeon I wouldn't get had I gone with high end AM4, 6 channel memory with ECC support (cost wise I was also able to pick up that RAM for a little less than $1/GB on a 96GB kit), and 48 PCIE lanes usable. So with a GPU and 1 NVME drive in I've got 20 lanes to spend, checking the block diagram on how they're wired might be important though don't want certain things sharing bandwidth.

Dual E5-2690v4 user here. Have saved loads of money using them for my video/photo workflow. Haven't not used Xeons since early days of LGA 775 pin modding

I'm still using a Xeon E3-1230 v2 (similar to i7 3770) and I have to say that it's still pretty nice for me (it's 11 years old, incredible). I can do anything I want without any problems. I don't usually play the latest and greatest AAA titles, but it could defend itself if that was the case (Cyberpunk, AC, TLOU...). Anyway, for esports and normal tasks it's still a pretty decent and enough cpu

I'd been watching you for a while and must realised you're the guy rich always talks about in the df podcast

Wow! This is great.

Thank you for this review.... :)

Could you show the motherboard, ram and cooler used in the test/config? Thanks.

I built a secondary PC for the living room recently and would have loved to have used a capable older CPU. Windows 11 support was a decisive factor into picking up a Ryzen 3100 instead.

My favorite AliExpress x99 board is the Machinist X99-K9, it's like 60 bucks, and has 4 mem channels, good VRM, and the pcie lanes are routed correctly, so no weird compatibility with the 5820k and 6800k

I used a 5820K for years and upgraded to a 5960X - overclocked as much as possible. It lasted for 2yrs before going "pop" and taking the motherboard with it! Good times.

It's an interesting choice, nice to have options.

Great video, really enjoyed. Any thoughts on newer "Scalable Xeons"? Like the 5122 or a 6138. Available for under 100 quid each but you do need a more expensive platform. Would be great to see some performance number on those. If of interest, I can send you a spare 5122 I have.

can we just appreciate how well Cyberpunk 2077 scales with high threads counts? we're seeing a bit over 50% total utilization here, so it uses 16! threads, which is *a lot* for a game

So Cyberpunk peaks at 66% CPU usage while all the other games rarely hit 30%, Starfield included. I read that CP2077 used up to 8 threads only but it's gotta be more than that for sure. I would have expected Starfield to also use more CPU threads.

could you maybe also do cinebench r23 benchmarks? would be easier to compare since many reviews use r23 nowadays

I too, love old zeons! I just bought a xeon e5 2687w v4 for less than $40! 12 core 24 thread running 3Ghz stock to 3.5Ghz boost clock. Running like a champ on a Gigabyte x99p-sli board. Also won the silicon lottery with a 1650v3 recently! Overclocked to 4.5 no problem. Probably will get it to 4.7 or higher with some fine tuning.

G'day Random, It is crazy these once Extremely Expensive CPUs are now found so cheap & funny how the CPUs were 2x-5x the cost of the Motherboard when new but now Motherboards are the expensive part of the Combo even exceding 5x-10x the cost of a CPU in some markets.

I love videos like this. I collect and test Xeon CPUs from the v3 and v4 era because they're very fun to play around with. I have most of them. Have you considered the E5-2697a v4? It is also a 16-core v4 CPU, but it clocks as high as 3.6ghz, and will clock at 3.1ghz for all cores. At about $65 right now, it's a decent upgrade from the E5-2683 v4.

Just for consumers wanting to buy one of these.. some info as I'm using two of these in my desktop. I have a setup with two of this exact cpu (it brought me to this video), 64gb DDR4 and a 3070 ti and considering I only had to buy the board, case and GPU it's a beast, runs pretty much any modern game at 1080p, some at 1440/2k, I run Arma 3 servers off it with around 10-15 players and can play while hosting with no issues at all. I'm aware there are better GPUs but that's what I could afford when I built it, and to match an ageing xeon it's more than enough. Sadly the motherboards are expensive for a dual slot, power usage is extremely high and they get HOT! You definitely need powerful cooling, I have 6 fans in my rig and it's as you imagine...loud. Water cooling may be a better option but as I've never configured water cooling I went for fans. I'm a virus lab tech and got the cpus and ram for free around two years ago and I'd be skeptical to purchase them myself if doing this build, while it's cool having a 32c/64t PC, the power usage and cooling are a huge concern and compared to a modern cpu designed for gaming they will fall behind, as I mentioned I host my own Arma 3 server with work and online friends so it's why I have this build. In total the build cost me around £700 ($800-900?) with the gpu and motherboard being almost equal in price at the time I bought them.

I built an older dual socket dell workstation with two E5-2680v4s (14 cores), and they are absolute work horses. DDR4 ECC is coming down nicely too and recently upgraded it to 256GB of memory. It’s not the most power efficient setup to act as a home server, but I can throw anything at it and it does well. And for the price, they really are still a great choice, and better than just becoming more e waste.

I've been eyeing one of the numerous motherboard/xeon combos on Aliexpress for quite some time now, I was always curious about how they actually performed and I'm glad to see it's much better than people have told me online. I wonder how it is for emulation, given that it seems to be a rather CPU intensive task?

I have an sli 1080s system running with an i7-6850k on an x99 deluxe mb 64gb of ram, and use it for some AI tasks, running 3d printers, laser engravers, and whatever else I need in my craft area.

@8:38 check out that Ray-Tracing shadow in his hand!

It would be nice to see the perf difference on a four channel board with hyperthreading disabled.

I had no idea you could pick these up for so cheap. I have a couple of top end X99 boards just sitting about doing nothing, one holding my old faithful 5960X that was supposed to become a system at some point. I forsee a bit of building fun in my future!

Using e5 2696v3 as backup pc for two year now, last year used it with 3080 untill zen 4, 18 core 36 threads beast 3.8ghz with turbo boost mod, set to 10 core 20 threads will give you locked 3.8ghz on all cores. Performs really nicely, in most scenarious matching my previous 5800x. That massive 45mb of cache certenly helped it a lot.

Would it be possible to do a video about the 2400ge pro? You can find them inside such small SFF pcs for cheap and can make for a little simple gaming pc

I have just finished building a Truenas Server with this chip, with Supermicro M/B and 128 GB of ECC RAM. Super sweet, and lots of grunt. 10Gbe makes Davinci Resolve edit with no buffering or freeze frames.

Considering the clock speed differential the Xeon held up way better than I expected. Would love to see this compared to a 4790k or so.

Try the Xeon E5-2667 v4 (8C16T, 3.2Ghz, 3.6Boost). Biggest upside is +20% better single core performance. Noticeably snappier and performs better in games. Downside is -20% multicore, but only for tasks that can use that many cores to begin with. Price is similar, TDP is higher at 135W, but I've never seen it use more than 90W or so.

Awesome video! I love old Xeons! Would it be possible for you to test the E5-2696V4 22-core behemoth in this way also? I'd love to see how it compares since in single core applications it can boost to 3,7 ghz!

It's amazing that no matter the specs of the system, Starfield always runs horribly.

that flying ct agent in 5:51 *yeet

Xeon powa!!! Still using one, first gen E5.

i think for such a old cpu it performed good

I luv X99 boards.. They're so loaded from m.2 slots to wifi module slot, just literally customizing your build at ur hearts content, plus not to 4get d ecc rams that are so stable..

Was that test on Cyberpunk 2.0 or an older version? How did it play on foot with areas with heavy crowds?

Crazy how well Cyberpunk scales with cores.

I think you'd get a snappier platform with something like an 8-10 core with a heavier singlethreaded punch, like a 2689 v4. It's a bit hard to go for a V3/V4 xeon these days, since ram is the same and used R5/i5s sell for peanuts too...but the V2s....with $40 boards and $30 for 64gb of ecc ddr3 you can still build a decent pc for about $4-500, which is pretty impressive these days.

actually i got the xeon e5-2687w v4 paired with asus m ws x99, paired with 3060 12GB, and 20GB of ram ( i know it looks odd), but for 1080p gaming in high setting, i'm pretty glad for old xeon for enjoying some games ❤

I just ordered a 2696 for the heck of it. Haven’t used a Xeon since the original slot II.

well i a, daily driving a xeon 2699 v4 and it's a dream with lots of IDE instances, containers and vms at the same time, for back end development it's sure a nice chip to have

Have you tried the AMD Epyc processors from 2018 yet, 32 core variant?

Can you disable cores for higher boost speed with less core count?

Thanks!

My fourth gen system was xeon powered. Ran for years. I7 power with low cost

Since its a dual-capable processor imagine using that. 32 cores for 32 dollars!

16 cores 32 threads is some pretty neat server specs.

Did you compare the WATTS? 16 Cores vs Stock vs overclocked?

Xeon E5 2690 v4 here with RTX 2070 Super and one stick of 32GB 2400 RAM and it runs Starfield flawlessly:)

Hey there mate! I noticed on Amazon they are selling an HD 6770 with 4GB DDR5 VRAM. I was wondering if you could do a review of this refresh.

The price of well featured x99 motherboards is murder

can you change the bios or isntall a modified bios for better xeon processor speeds

ive been on old xeons since x58. still rocking a e5-2697v4.

1:10 "Welcome to Good RandomGaming Morning"

Id be curious to see what xeon you would recommend. Or is it just better to get a ryzen thats a year or two old?

can you please tell me how you're able to get riva tuner to display your CPU and GPU model name and type ? i haven't been able to figure that one out yet

it's insane to think about how cheap these are for what you get, the entire kits are so accessible, how i wish i had options like these back in the days! i'm just glad that people can start with an already solid build from the get go!

I use a Xeon E5-1650 0 in my HP Workstation Z420 under Ubuntu. Xeons are really good for what they are. My old housemate left a load of parts after he moved out and they helped me do a really cool budget build.

Is there a way to get that kind of Xeon with unlocked cores? It would be a beast if you could OC at least couple of the cores about +500MHz from the boost clock.

I'm running a Xeon E3 1270 @ 3.60Ghz and so far have had zero complaints. Mostly using it for VR games and stuff.

I would love to see a video of the old 7th gen extreme processors. Here in the US you can get an i7-7800x for $35 while the i7-7700k is still close to $100.

Not a bad showing from the old Xeon! I still think it’s a substantially better chip than any of the older Opterons from AMD for the sheer amount of cores you get & their superior IPC. Also surprised at how well it managed to push a 3060ti of all cards; I have mine OC’ed to around 2100mhz on the core and have it paired with a R5 5600 @ 4.8Ghz. Naturally it performs better in my case, but this older chip with a locked multiplier was getting decent utilization out of the same GPU (minus the OC)

Recently trying to build a big NAS and the Dell PowerEdge R730 came up with these chips, the duo CPU is basically free, $100 for the server case and motherboard, $100 for 128GB RAM, some hard drives and everything will be fully enterprise grade

Grabbed a 2670 for $4!!! Awesome videos.

Can you please test Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart?

Used to have an i7-5820K + GTX 970/1070 PC. Beast of a PC, even in 2020-2023. Now I have an i7-13700K + RTX 3070 PC.

I have been looking at the old xeon w-2195 with 18 cores and 36 threads. haven't check the price of it though, hope its cheap

Are you testing with Spectre protection on or off?