Building an Affordable 16-Core, 32-Thread Xeon Monster PC

[Squid Surprise]

Cool. But it has been clear that Pinnacle does use all 4 cores. Lets see what 16 cores show. And yes, i3 has been a grind on my patience. But its blown up now and I wont be looking back as I get something WAY better. I was waiting for better CPU prices to drop in a huge upgrade, but with my Sniper MB fried, Im going to be switching sockets entirely. Maybe even DDR4. But it all depends on what will be best for movie making.

Looks like you're beating a dead horse.... you've already been told what the "best" is - you either don't understand or don't want to understand.... Not only does this 16 core beast beat anything else you can buy that is non-xeon, it's also quite a bit cheaper than any high-end build you can make with new parts.... You were going on and on about how a Pinnacle's speed relied on the frequency of the cores, not how many you had - now it's proven otherwise....

Pinnacle is a silly program to use though - honestly, even the Nero suite out-performs it, and that's a fraction of the price... Adobe Premiere really can't be beat though..

 

[John Lacey]

I get these parts every month or so when my clients upgrade their servers, never thought of using them to replace my fx8350, hmmmm

 

[Adhmuz]

Well the comments section of this post got hijacked by someone so narrow minded it was starting to get sad. He couldn't even be bothered to Google the suggestions being made for him... The whole time I'm thinking to myself what about Vegas? I currently have it running on my 12 thread Xeon x5660@3.8GHz at 90-95% load.

Which brings me to what I've been trying to remember after reading through a whole lot of pointless back and forth ranting, but thank you Steve for being a patient individual, I would have lost it after the third reply. Anyways... This article came about 3 months too late, that Xeon x5660 is a recent purchase that revived an old X58 mother board I had in storage, got it off eBay for roughly $160 and to my surprise it was an unused CPU, it was pristine, frankly I was blown away a 6 year old Xeon had never been used, something that cost upwards of $1000 new. Being Westemere (32nm) it needed a second gen X58 mobo, the only one I had was the Intel DX58SO2, which took the chip and booted up right away, but I did my research and knew it would. Now here's the best part, it's overclockable! originally I had it running over 4 GHz, trust me it was not an easy feat and required way too much voltage but it did it and actually ran at a good temperature on my Nepton 280L ~75C load. However I wasn't happy with only having 12GB of Ram so bought 24GB of Ballistix Tracer, resulting in a lower OC, only 3.8GHz. This is has been a great upgrade so far, games run just as good as they did on my i7 960, I can encode video much faster and lastly I have VT-d support for direct IO meaning a two gamer build is my next step using unRaid.

Unfortunately this is making me want to build a 32 thread beast for encoding purposes, I've been recording a lot of video with my dashcam and it all needs to be reduced and then later hyperlapse'd, a long enough process that would greatly benefit from a system such as this one, even potentially build a quad game tower, but the lack of USB ports will cripple that.

Great article, just so much temptation involved, making me want to build yet another machine. Just for anyone curious about comparing my x5660 to this, my CineBench CPU score.

 

[stts1]

Looks like you're beating a dead horse.... you've already been told what the "best" is - you either don't understand or don't want to understand.... Not only does this 16 core beast beat anything else you can buy that is non-xeon, it's also quite a bit cheaper than any high-end build you can make with new parts.... You were going on and on about how a Pinnacle's speed relied on the frequency of the cores, not how many you had - now it's proven otherwise....

Pinnacle is a silly program to use though - honestly, even the Nero suite out-performs it, and that's a fraction of the price... Adobe Premiere really can't be beat though..

Well the comments section of this post got hijacked by someone so narrow minded it was starting to get sad. He couldn't even be bothered to Google the suggestions being made for him... The whole time I'm thinking to myself what about Vegas? I currently have it running on my 12 thread Xeon x5660@3.8GHz at 90-95% load.

Which brings me to what I've been trying to remember after reading through a whole lot of pointless back and forth ranting, but thank you Steve for being a patient individual, I would have lost it after the third reply. Anyways... This article came about 3 months too late, that Xeon x5660 is a recent purchase that revived an old X58 mother board I had in storage, got it off eBay for roughly $160 and to my surprise it was an unused CPU, it was pristine, frankly I was blown away a 6 year old Xeon had never been used, something that cost upwards of $1000 new. Being Westemere (32nm) it needed a second gen X58 mobo, the only one I had was the Intel DX58SO2, which took the chip and booted up right away, but I did my research and knew it would. Now here's the best part, it's overclockable! originally I had it running over 4 GHz, trust me it was not an easy feat and required way too much voltage but it did it and actually ran at a good temperature on my Nepton 280L ~75C load. However I wasn't happy with only having 12GB of Ram so bought 24GB of Ballistix Tracer, resulting in a lower OC, only 3.8GHz. This is has been a great upgrade so far, games run just as good as they did on my i7 960, I can encode video much faster and lastly I have VT-d support for direct IO meaning a two gamer build is my next step using unRaid.

Unfortunately this is making me want to build a 32 thread beast for encoding purposes, I've been recording a lot of video with my dashcam and it all needs to be reduced and then later hyperlapse'd, a long enough process that would greatly benefit from a system such as this one, even potentially build a quad game tower, but the lack of USB ports will cripple that.

Great article, just so much temptation involved, making me want to build yet another machine. Just for anyone curious about comparing my x5660 to this, my CineBench CPU score.

I have seen alot of reviews all back and forth. So your a Vegas lover. Im happy for you. But at the risk of disapointing you, I do Google stuff. And this is what Google told ME about Vegas over at TomsHardware. "Sadly, the sun may be slowly setting on this Strip". That doesnt fill me with wild excitement in the face of other video contenders. But dont mind my post. Keep on lovin on your Vegas.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/professional-video-editing-software-guide,4004.html

 

[stts1]

Looks like you're beating a dead horse.... you've already been told what the "best" is - you either don't understand or don't want to understand.... Not only does this 16 core beast beat anything else you can buy that is non-xeon, it's also quite a bit cheaper than any high-end build you can make with new parts.... You were going on and on about how a Pinnacle's speed relied on the frequency of the cores, not how many you had - now it's proven otherwise....

Pinnacle is a silly program to use though - honestly, even the Nero suite out-performs it, and that's a fraction of the price... Adobe Premiere really can't be beat though..

Im open minded to real proof. Certainly before I lay out my change. There is a ton of scepticizm thats lining up miles behind me. And Im behind the miles thats in front of me. That leaves me scratching my head. Clearly many others have found little use in a system like this after they laid out their nest egg. There is legitimate grounds for both sides of the argument. The machine does work. But its unclear how practicle it is. Im saying with such a comprehensive build article, why not clear away the cob webs with serious proof this can be used in a practicle way. Video is getting huge. Everybody will eventually have dash cams. So lots of people could make use of easy video tools. And that includes cheap super fast PCs that take the wait times out of video editing. More people will be doing it if things didnt take so long or cost so much. This experiment can move towards clearing those questions up. Pinnacle people in the pinnacle forums say Xeon cores is a waste on Pinnacle software. We will soon see.

Somebody else posted that Vegas does use all those cores. I will stick that in my cap. But Vegas aint cheap and theres concern over its future. So I will have to weight it accordingly as I do my research.

 

[BadThad]

Excellent article! Reminds me of the dual Pentium Pro server I bought second-hand long ago. Used it to run SETI and it pumped out the work! Keep these kinds of articles coming!

 

[Coasterguy11]

So, where are you looking at that $70 price tag at? Cheapest one I can find new is about $300. Also, I'm looking to make a good gaming workstation for streaming, would I need to throw a capture card in here to allow for better streaming or is this good enough by itself? Thanks. Great article BTW.

Lots of them on Ebay for $68.75, he didn't mention they were new. The reason they are cheap is businesses are upgrading and tons of them are available....used.

 

[stts1]

Oh I found a HUGE article. The new Skylake is Quad channel memory and Asrock had the kahunas to make a mini board with only 2 memory slots. There was no room for 4. So they effectively threw away half the memory bandwidth just to make a tiny board. You would think nobody would be crazy enough to buy it. PCworld was so amazed they decided to test 2 channel versus 4 channel to see what you loose. Turns out you dont loose squat. In every test, 2 channel was as quick as 4 channel. And thats why Asrock made the board. Skylake 6 core performance in a micro PC. And the reason turns out to be simple. Programs have to be rewritten to load down 4 channel memory. And none do at this point. So 4 channel DDR4 is a waste for the time being until the software world catches up to it. And that may be why the average program doesnt just scream on Xeons. Software makers just havent been writing for it. Heres the article link. And it definitely will influence my thinking about using DDR4 memory. IE I probably wont do a DDR4 system anytime soon.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2982...ing-truth-about-their-performance.html?page=4

 

[cliffordcooley]

Programs have to be rewritten to load down 4 channel memory. And none do at this point. So 4 channel DDR4 is a waste for the time being until the software world catches up to it. And that may be why the average program doesnt just scream on Xeons. Software makers just havent been writing for it. Heres the article link. And it definitely will influence my thinking about using DDR4 memory. IE I probably wont do a DDR4 system anytime soon.

That's like saying you are not going to buy a car that can exceed the speed limits, until the speed limits have been raised to match the cars capabilities. And then settling on a car that struggles to keep up.

 

[Steve]

Oh I found a HUGE article. The new Skylake is Quad channel memory and Asrock had the kahunas to make a mini board with only 2 memory slots. There was no room for 4. So they effectively threw away half the memory bandwidth just to make a tiny board. You would think nobody would be crazy enough to buy it. PCworld was so amazed they decided to test 2 channel versus 4 channel to see what you loose. Turns out you dont loose squat. In every test, 2 channel was as quick as 4 channel. And thats why Asrock made the board. Skylake 6 core performance in a micro PC. And the reason turns out to be simple. Programs have to be rewritten to load down 4 channel memory. And none do at this point. So 4 channel DDR4 is a waste for the time being until the software world catches up to it. And that may be why the average program doesnt just scream on Xeons. Software makers just havent been writing for it. Heres the article link. And it definitely will influence my thinking about using DDR4 memory. IE I probably wont do a DDR4 system anytime soon.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2982...ing-truth-about-their-performance.html?page=4

The Xeons don't use DDR4 memory and none of this is news, at least not to us...

https://www.techspot.com/review/992-asrock-x99e-itx-ac/

And again what the hell? Plenty of programs scream on the Xeons including the Paint Shop Pro equivalent of the video editing world ...Pinnacle Studio 19.

Having given up on clunky Studio 19 I have been focusing my attention on Premiere, I can't stress enough how much better Premiere is for video editing. Someone mentioned Sony Vegas earlier as well, it also sucks and has very poor hardware acceleration support.

Anyway here are some Premiere Pro 2016 CC results for a 20min long 4K encode.

Dual Xeon E5-2670 = 612 seconds [CPU Utilization 60%]
Dual Xeon E5-2670 = 660 seconds [CPU Utilization 90%] HT Disabled
Core i7 5960X = 748 seconds [CPU Utilization 90%]
Core i7 6700K = 864 seconds [CPU Utilization 95%]
Single Xeon E5-2670 = 1025 seconds [CPU Utilization 90%]

The dual Xeons are over 30% faster than the more expensive 6700K, I rest my case

At the moment even Premiere Pro 2016 CC isn't fully utilizing the dual Xeon system but the results are still very good. Even if the Xeon's matched the 6700K that is still an amazing deal given the 6700K costs so much more than the dual Xeons and even with the dual socket server board the setup is cheaper than the 6700K with any Z170 motherboard!

 

[Boulard83]

I got attracted by those processor about 2 months ago. I buyed an Asrock EP2C602-4L/D16, two Xeon E5-2670, two Phanteks PH-TC14S and 32gb 8x4gb Kingston DDR3 ECC for my home server. I dont really need all that horsepower but hey, why not !

I was about to spend ~200$ or even more on a Raid card to *** sata ports to my server so buying all this for ~700$ and selling back my old proc/board/ram just cost about ~400$ so it's only 200$ over the price of a Raid Card and I now have 14 ports on the motherboard.

I do fold in the winter so the processors are loaded 4 to 5 months a year. I also have a camera server on that machine, I juste upgraded my camera recording quality since my old 4core server was limiting my 720p camera's. Not that the recording quality was bad but I can simply use the top notch quality without issue now.

Overall I'm very happy with my setup.

Great review BTW

 

[stts1]

The Xeons don't use DDR4 memory and none of this is news, at least not to us...

https://www.techspot.com/review/992-asrock-x99e-itx-ac/

And again what the hell? Plenty of programs scream on the Xeons including the Paint Shop Pro equivalent of the video editing world ...Pinnacle Studio 19.

Having given up on clunky Studio 19 I have been focusing my attention on Premiere, I can't stress enough how much better Premiere is for video editing. Someone mentioned Sony Vegas earlier as well, it also sucks and has very poor hardware acceleration support.

Anyway here are some Premiere Pro 2016 CC results for a 20min long 4K encode.

Dual Xeon E5-2670 = 612 seconds [CPU Utilization 60%]
Dual Xeon E5-2670 = 660 seconds [CPU Utilization 90%] HT Disabled
Core i7 5960X = 748 seconds [CPU Utilization 90%]
Core i7 6700K = 864 seconds [CPU Utilization 95%]
Single Xeon E5-2670 = 1025 seconds [CPU Utilization 90%]

The dual Xeons are over 30% faster than the more expensive 6700K, I rest my case

At the moment even Premiere Pro 2016 CC isn't fully utilizing the dual Xeon system but the results are still very good. Even if the Xeon's matched the 6700K that is still an amazing deal given the 6700K costs so much more than the dual Xeons and even with the dual socket server board the setup is cheaper than the 6700K with any Z170 motherboard!

Well why did you give up on Pinnacle? As fast as the stuff you got, you cant have been worn out so easily since I been tollerating it on a pokey i3. Were the times just dismal on Xeons or would it not even run at all on them? If Pinnacle is really screamin on the Xeons, why not post what you saw? I have noticed that Premiere is not very cheap. Its a subscription of $240 a year. In 3 years its more than most every video editor most any consumer would ever buy. It just adds to the cost of a dual Xeon machine year after year. Thats not too practicle for the up and coming dash cam peeps looking for cheap, capable, and easy. There might be other programs, but Pinnacle is a program most people could afford. Since you have it, may as well post what it can do.

 

[Goncalo Dourado]

I've bought 2 2670 CPUs and 8x8 ddr3 1333 ECC Registered ram.
I will also get an Asus board for this build.
For cooling, is a pair of Coolermaster Hyper 212x a good option?
Also, if I put a nice GPU on the build, can I game with good performance?

Cheers

 

[Adhmuz]

I have seen alot of reviews all back and forth. So your a Vegas lover. Im happy for you. But at the risk of disapointing you, I do Google stuff. And this is what Google told ME about Vegas over at TomsHardware. "Sadly, the sun may be slowly setting on this Strip". That doesnt fill me with wild excitement in the face of other video contenders. But dont mind my post. Keep on lovin on your Vegas.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/professional-video-editing-software-guide,4004.html

Your ridiculous, I'm not a Vegas lover, I just use what works, and it works for my application... Just because Tom's 5 second review said "Sadly, the sun may be slowly setting on this Strip" means less than **** to me, when Vegas goes away I'll find a substitute and not ***** and complain about it extensively. Mainly because I didn't have to pay for it thus I could care even less if it disappears, but I could always still use it anyways so what's your point? Actually I don't think anyone really knows if you have a point anymore, your all over the place and that's enough for me on the subject.

 

[alexnode]

The problem is what can use all these cores. This article is missing a very important section. A list of software that can make use of all this power. Photoshop cant use it, and I use Pinnacle moviemaker and it cant use it either. What 4k video editing software not owned by Hollywood can use 32 threads? That is what I want to know or a higher electric bill and no audio capabilities wont be worth it.

It's a great setup for pro software, like 3ds max, maya, blender, cinema 4d, nuke, flame, inferno etc unfortunately most of the prosumer apps are not build with the idea of having backbone servers for rendering. They try to maximise the performance of enthusiast hardware instead.

We have 3 double xeons v3 28cores 56 threads @ 2.6ghz plus 3 six core i7 workstations. Overclocked at 4.2 ghz. So a dual 8 core xeon will produce approximately 52 ghz... While 25 ghz for 4930k. It sounds like a really good idea.

 

[stts1]

Your ridiculous, I'm not a Vegas lover, I just use what works, and it works for my application... Just because Tom's 5 second review said "Sadly, the sun may be slowly setting on this Strip" means less than **** to me, when Vegas goes away I'll find a substitute and not ***** and complain about it extensively. Mainly because I didn't have to pay for it thus I could care even less if it disappears, but I could always still use it anyways so what's your point? Actually I don't think anyone really knows if you have a point anymore, your all over the place and that's enough for me on the subject.

I might just build a super Xeon machine so I can hook it to a hater smacking machine just so it would hunt you down and super smack all the hate out of you. Now that would be a video worth paying Premiere for.

 

[john fickling]

This was a great article and I look forward to more.
But you are asking us to buy an old MB using old memory and so forth.
Extreme caution is needed before doing this. It is usually a mistake!
A cheaper less powerful current CPU in a brand new MB with modern features may well be a better choice.
The reason I buy new CPUs is that I need the new MB features.
For example I have an E3-1225 V3 that kills in overall performance an E3-1275 simple because the V3 Cpu uses a more modern mb with a pci express slot 3.0 while the 1275's MB only has pci-E 2.0 slots and I am using 12gb/s raid.

 

[Raoul Duke]

Why?...........Because it's there, because you can, because you enjoy it. isn't that enough?
And you don't have to sell your family into slavery and re-mortgage your house for this one.
Build on!!

 

[handruin]

I found this article from other sites and I've been part of a group of people who have been building servers on these surplus E5 2670 V1 CPUs. Currently I'm sitting on two systems each with two E5 2670 v1s (SR0KX revision) and 128GB of RAM. I opted to go with the Intel S2600CP2J motherboard and 1333Mz RAM given the price was so good. There is a reliable supplier out of Colorado who has bundles with the CPUs, MB, and RAM. They’re selling the CPUs used at $65, the motherboards at $175, and the ECC ram (8 x 8GB) for $85. Then I sourced a new Intel case (P4308XXMFGN) and internal components such as shrouding, heatsinks, etc to make a genuine Intel server setup from a seller on eBay that accepts lower offers. I can link to both if it’s appropriate but I’m not here representing either them on their behalf.

What I’m interested in is the details used to encode the videos under handbrake. On both of my setups I’m running ESXi and I have a Server 2012 VM with 16GB RAM and 16 cores. I ran handbrake on two movies that I’m working on converting from Blu-ray to a 1080P 24FPS video file encoded using h.246 and put into an mkv container. When I run handbrake on this VM, all 16 cores are pegged near 100% utilization and I confirmed on the ESXi server that it’s not just the guest OS reporting this but the machine is genuinely 100% utilized. When compared to converting the videos on my workstation (which is a i7 4790K) this 16-core beast is a decent improvement in reducing the time to process my Blu-ray movies. I’m interested to know what differences in the handbrake settings caused the system in this article to not be able to fully utilize all cores under handbrake when running a single instance. I realize multiple instances were run to gain a benefit but in my setup I don’t need to do this.

 

[needforsuv]

I think the E5-2687W or E5-2690 will be even faster

 

[kacedaniels]

Thanks Steven for the time and effort putting together this article. You have put into words what many of us have probably done as a mental exercise.. cruising through eBay looking at older, cheaper technology trying to figure out if it still has any use in our life.. or just the fun of putting together that illusive "insanely fast system for hardly any money" system that won't make the wife mad once the bills arrive.. "Look honey, this would have cost me a bajillion dollars a few years ago.."

I agree with your basic premise for this build.. for SPECIFIC tasks using SPECIFIC software, this system has real value. But I do have a couple of problems with what you wrote..

First, yes the CPUs are dirt cheap but.. a compatible NEW motherboard isn't. I couldn't find the Asrock EP2C602 online at $280. It is out of stock at Newegg (Google cache page shows it was out of stock before your article was published.. and $310 when in stock), not available at NCIXUS.com, Microcenter.com or Frys.com. It is available at Amazon.com but through a 3rd party for $600 ($310 when Amazon did have it in stock). Searching for an alternative motherboard with the X79 didn't produce much better and negates a big chunk of your argument for getting a Xeon E5-2670 in the first place. None were found at NCIXUS.com or Microcenter.com, Frys.com were all "Available for In-Store", and only two "open box" X79s were available at Newegg.com. Amazon.com had plenty but most were $500 or more with the EVGA X79 132-SE-E77-KR being the cheapest ($356.48 shipped). Of the only two X79 motherboards offered NEW, each had only two each available.

It would have been nice if you mentioned where you got this motherboard for $280, WHEN you got it, and where more (or something similar) can be bought NOW.

Secondly, you may have overstated how well Premiere works with a many core/thread CPU. An article from PugetSystems from August, 2015 (https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CC-Multi-Core-Performance-698/) stated..

""if you search for "how many cores does Premiere use" you will find forum thread after forum thread saying "as many as you can give it!". That is somewhat true - Windows reported all the CPU cores as being under 90+% load - but our testing showed that Premiere Pro was not able to effectively use all of those cores.. at lower core counts Premiere Pro ranges from being decent to excellent in terms of utilizing each CPU core. The problem is that at a certain point (as low as only 4-5 cores) the parallel efficiency drops off dramatically.. generating previews was actually more efficient at utilizing higher core counts than encoding was. We still saw a drop off after anywhere from 4 to 7 cores"

It seems to full utilize a many core/thread CPU, specific and usually costly software is needed. This expense isn't factored into the calculations on whether this really is a "cheap/inexpensive" build or not.

Again, thanks for the thought provoking article. Unfortunately perhaps a bit more complicated in realistically putting together this system as cheaply as it first appears and utilizing it to it's fullest potential.

 

[handruin]

Thanks Steven for the time and effort putting together this article. You have put into words what many of us have probably done as a mental exercise.. cruising through eBay looking at older, cheaper technology trying to figure out if it still has any use in our life.. or just the fun of putting together that illusive "insanely fast system for hardly any money" system that won't make the wife mad once the bills arrive.. "Look honey, this would have cost me a bajillion dollars a few years ago.."

I agree with your basic premise for this build.. for SPECIFIC tasks using SPECIFIC software, this system has real value. But I do have a couple of problems with what you wrote..

First, yes the CPUs are dirt cheap but.. a compatible NEW motherboard isn't. I couldn't find the Asrock EP2C602 online at $280. It is out of stock at Newegg (Google cache page shows it was out of stock before your article was published.. and $310 when in stock), not available at NCIXUS.com, Microcenter.com or Frys.com. It is available at Amazon.com but through a 3rd party for $600 ($310 when Amazon did have it in stock). Searching for an alternative motherboard with the X79 didn't produce much better and negates a big chunk of your argument for getting a Xeon E5-2670 in the first place. None were found at NCIXUS.com or Microcenter.com, Frys.com were all "Available for In-Store", and only two "open box" X79s were available at Newegg.com. Amazon.com had plenty but most were $500 or more with the EVGA X79 132-SE-E77-KR being the cheapest ($356.48 shipped). Of the only two X79 motherboards offered NEW, each had only two each available.

It would have been nice if you mentioned where you got this motherboard for $280, WHEN you got it, and where more (or something similar) can be bought NOW.

Secondly, you may have overstated how well Premiere works with a many core/thread CPU. An article from PugetSystems from August, 2015 (https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CC-Multi-Core-Performance-698/) stated..

""if you search for "how many cores does Premiere use" you will find forum thread after forum thread saying "as many as you can give it!". That is somewhat true - Windows reported all the CPU cores as being under 90+% load - but our testing showed that Premiere Pro was not able to effectively use all of those cores.. at lower core counts Premiere Pro ranges from being decent to excellent in terms of utilizing each CPU core. The problem is that at a certain point (as low as only 4-5 cores) the parallel efficiency drops off dramatically.. generating previews was actually more efficient at utilizing higher core counts than encoding was. We still saw a drop off after anywhere from 4 to 7 cores"

It seems to full utilize a many core/thread CPU, specific and usually costly software is needed. This expense isn't factored into the calculations on whether this really is a "cheap/inexpensive" build or not.

Again, thanks for the thought provoking article. Unfortunately perhaps a bit more complicated in realistically putting together this system as cheaply as it first appears and utilizing it to it's fullest potential.

Depending on your needs you can get a high-quality dual socket genuine Intel S2600CP2J motherboard for $175 from natex.us. This type of multi-socket platform is crossing over into a different category and class of system that most people typically don't use. It's not uncommon to see inefficiencies in software given that it was not targeted towards platforms of this caliber (it's the scale out vs scale up). Once you make the leap into a system architecture that has more than one socket there are many other things to consider. For example, PCIe lane planning for optimal IO card efficiencies or parallel software threads that need to communicate may have inefficiencies if they need to cross the QPI lanes to access the other socket and memory banks.

 

[Squid Surprise]

It's amazing how many posters haven't gotten the point of this article... This article isn't comparing this build to the average PC... It's comparing it to an enthusiast build, specifically the 5960.... Regardless of whether specific pieces of software fully utilize 16 cores is largely irrelevant - the 5960 uses 8 cores and costs vastly more....

Why pay through the nose for an 8 core processor when you can get 16 for vastly cheaper, AND it will outperform the 5960 in virtually every task?

Stts1: You have completely missed the point despite numerous people trying to tell you... You're using Pinnacle... Great.... The only question is whether the 5960 or 6700 can outperform .... They can't.... So MOVE ON!!

Whether you, personally, need this build isn't really relevant....

 

[stts1]

It's amazing how many posters haven't gotten the point of this article... This article isn't comparing this build to the average PC... It's comparing it to an enthusiast build, specifically the 5960.... Regardless of whether specific pieces of software fully utilize 16 cores is largely irrelevant - the 5960 uses 8 cores and costs vastly more....

Why pay through the nose for an 8 core processor when you can get 16 for vastly cheaper, AND it will outperform the 5960 in virtually every task?

Stts1: You have completely missed the point despite numerous people trying to tell you... You're using Pinnacle... Great.... The only question is whether the 5960 or 6700 can outperform .... They can't.... So MOVE ON!!

Whether you, personally, need this build isn't really relevant....

I got a ceiling fan. Its got 10 blades. I got it really really cheap at a flea market. Its an awesome ceiling fan. It will turn my place into a huricane. If you walk under it while your drunk, it will know you over. But I have found that huricane mode is not very practicle. It blows all my mail all over the place. So in reality, I can only use it to its full potential on those hot days where everything is put up and battened down. So its easier just to use my $6000 central air conditioning. No house cleaning needed.

And it will NOT outperform everything on every task. Lots of tasks are single threaded. All those tasks it will actually UNDER perform. Thats the problem with this. And it would appear the Pinnacle is one of the underperforming tasks.

 

[dividebyzero]

First, yes the CPUs are dirt cheap but.. a compatible NEW motherboard isn't. I couldn't find the Asrock EP2C602 online at $280. It is out of stock at Newegg (Google cache page shows it was out of stock before your article was published.. and $310 when in stock)

Which Newegg site were you looking at? The U.S. site shows the board currently available for $313. Failing that you could try the smaller sellers - although the SuperMicro X9DRL-IF-O for the same price seems like a more attractive option.