The Xeon E5 Alternative

Intel sells a large range of both Xeon E5 version3 (Haswell) Xeon E5 version 4 (Broadwell) at a wide price range and some may think a Xeon can be a cheaper substitute for the new Broadwell-E Enthusiast processor. Xeons come with a clock speed deficiency and are locked, but the E5-2000 series can be used in pairs in a dual socket Motherboard.

Intel is no fool, as very careful pricing has contributed to the success of their business. Intel is still the biggest semiconductor company in the world as of 2016.

There are other ways to get 6,8,10 core processors but how much clock speed are you willing to sacrifice? 200, 300,500, 800, 1GHz?

In our opinion, over 500MHz is a bridge too far. The ‘affordable’ 6-10 core Xeon parts that the enthusiast Illuminati is gloating about have a base clock of 2.2 GHz, which is too much of a sacrifice. These chips were meant for use in 1 or 2 RU servers were the lower TDP of 85W makes things more manageable in those confined environments.

The current fan favourite is to source five-year-old E5-2670s cheaply from eBay to pair with even harder to find X79 boards which have prehistoric connectivity compared to current boards.

The following table shows alternative Xeon processors in the 2.2GHz range and a minimum of 6 cores, sorted by price. 6950X is NOT too expensive. It’s priced correctly for its cores and clock speed. Thre is no E5-1600 update to Broadwell yet, except today’s i7s.

For ten cores, you only save $100 with the slightly slower Xeon 2660, but you can save $500 if you want to slum it for the E5 2640 with a very low base clock.

The LOCKED 8 core E5-1660 costs MORE than the UNLOCKED 8 Core 6900K/5960X. You pay for the ECC memory support privilege.