Can Intel Xeon CPUs do graphics? (Beginner question)

[aliasxneo]

Hello,

Beginner here. I'm looking at putting together a home media server and was planning on using an Intel Xeon series CPU. However, I was reading somewhere that these CPUs do not have integrated graphics in them.

Does this mean I will need to purchase a graphics card just to get this thing to display to a monitor? Obviously I'm not looking at gaming on this thing, but I will need to have it connected to a monitor to perform initial setup.

 

[bailojustin]

Not all xeon cpus dont have graphics, a few do. you want to look for one with onboard graphics, otherwise if it does not have it, you will have to buy a Graphics card to boot up to display yes.

 

[torbendalum]

Some of the Xeon E3 has graphics http://ark.intel.com/products/family/88210/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-v5-Family#@Server
none of the E5 or E7

 

[nikoli707]

like said above, it depends. letting us know what xeon model you are looking at would help. being a home server im guessing it would be a lower end e3 model from a current/recent generation acrhitecture.

e3-1225v3? that processor has an igpu and would likely serve your home server needs extremely well.

torbendalum above linked the brand spaking new skylake family of xeons... here are the haswell based xeons that are defintiely going to be cheaper but not that much different performance wise.
http://ark.intel.com/products/family/78581/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-v3-Family#@Server

 

[aliasxneo]

like said above, it depends. letting us know what xeon model you are looking at would help. being a home server im guessing it would be a lower end e3 model from a current/recent generation acrhitecture.

e3-1225v3? that processor has an igpu and would likely serve your home server needs extremely well.

torbendalum above linked the brand spaking new skylake family of xeons... here are the haswell based xeons that are defintiely going to be cheaper but not that much different performance wise.
http://ark.intel.com/products/family/78581/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-v3-Family#@Server

I was indeed looking at a Haswell: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117316

I looked at the spec page on Newegg for that CPU but I didn't see anything that says it supports integrated graphics.

I may make another thread, but I'll post this additional question here:

How do the xeons compare to the regular i series CPU's for a home server application? I'm looking at serving encoded video to a few clients, running a small footprint home automation server (openHAB), and potentially hosting a single game instance (Minecraft, space engineers, 7 days to die, etc.).

The reason I was looking at the Xeon's was for reliability. I like spending my money once and since this thing will run 24/7 I don't want it dying anytime soon.

 

[nikoli707]

the extremely popular 1231v3 does not have an igpu. xeons are just binned i7s that meet a certain criteria for core temps and vcore. though still a silicon lottery. but for 24/7/365 duty you are better off spending $20-30 more for a xeon over a i5/i7.

1246v3.... it has an igpu and is going to be your best bet for a 4 core 8 thread xeon.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117318

unless you think a 4 core 4 thread xeon would work...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117319

 

[aliasxneo]

the extremely popular 1231v3 does not have an igpu. xeons are just binned i7s that meet a certain criteria for core temps and vcore. though still a silicon lottery. but for 24/7/365 duty you are better off spending $20-30 more for a xeon over a i5/i7.

1246v3.... it has an igpu and is going to be your best bet for a 4 core 8 thread xeon.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117318

unless you think a 4 core 4 thread xeon would work...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117319

Thank you for the detailed information, it is much appreciated. With what you wrote here in mind, does it make more sense to go for the popular 1231v3 and shoot for integrated graphics on the MOBO end?

I'll probably spend 98% of my time RDP'd into the machine and the other 2% setting it up and troubleshooting (when I can't RDP).

 

[aliasxneo]

Specifically, I was looking at this MOBO which states:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K7807IK/?tag=pcpapi-20
Onboard Graphics:1 x D-Sub port, supporting a maximum resolution of 1920x1200at60Hz; 1 x DVI-D port, supporting a maximum resolution of 1920x1200at60Hz; 1 x HDMI port, supporting a maximum resolution of 4096x2160at24Hz or 2560x1600at60Hz

 

[synphul]

Nikoli707 was right, the 1231v3 you were looking at does not have an igpu (integrated graphics) while the 1246v3 does. If you chose the 1231v3 you would need to buy a separate video card just to get picture to the monitor or choose a cpu with integrated graphics.

I don't see any reason why a less expensive i5 with an igpu wouldn't work. I use my cpu's for 4-5yrs and my pc hardly ever gets shut off. Chances are the media server won't be doing any actual processing the majority of the time and idling mostly. Something like an i5 4590 can be had for $180 (no shipping) vs $285 for a 1246v3.

That's a decent h97 motherboard and would be a good choice for either the locked i5 or xeon. Also keep in mind whether using the 4590 or 1246v3 (any cpu with integrated graphics) that it will use a portion of your system ram as video memory up to about 2gb. If you have 8gb of ram installed you may have around 6gb usable memory with the other 2gb set aside for the integrated graphics.

 

[aliasxneo]

Nikoli707 was right, the 1231v3 you were looking at does not have an igpu (integrated graphics) while the 1246v3 does. If you chose the 1231v3 you would need to buy a separate video card just to get picture to the monitor or choose a cpu with integrated graphics.

I don't see any reason why a less expensive i5 with an igpu wouldn't work. I use my cpu's for 4-5yrs and my pc hardly ever gets shut off. Chances are the media server won't be doing any actual processing the majority of the time and idling mostly. Something like an i5 4590 can be had for $180 (no shipping) vs $285 for a 1246v3.

That's a decent h97 motherboard and would be a good choice for either the locked i5 or xeon. Also keep in mind whether using the 4590 or 1246v3 (any cpu with integrated graphics) that it will use a portion of your system ram as video memory up to about 2gb. If you have 8gb of ram installed you may have around 6gb usable memory with the other 2gb set aside for the integrated graphics.

So here is where my novice experience comes in: Are you saying I wouldn't be able to use the 1231v3 with that h97 even though the h97 looks like it says it has onboard graphics? I can actually get the 1231v3 for $223 out the door through a cyber Monday deal, so we're talking an extra $40 to upgrade to the Xeon.

 

[Ra_V_en]

Op should ask himself a question what is most important factor here and how much of the actual performance might he need. It might be even not needed to put a i5 there, maybe even some G version of Pentium would be enough. If it was 24-7 server then perfromance/power consumption would be the first factor, especially if it was payed from my own bill. If you know what you need then the talk "have iGPU or not" is a secondary concern, you can always get a dGPU for 10-20$ which might not be as power effective as iGPU but certainly far more powerful.

So what this home media server will actually do? Maybe a Raspberry Pi 2 would be enough lol

 

[aliasxneo]

Op should ask himself a question what is most important factor here and how much of the actual performance might he need. It might be even not needed to put a i5 there, maybe even some G version of Pentium would be enough. If it was 24-7 server then perfromance/power consumption would be the first factor, especially if it was payed from my own bill. If you know what you need then the talk "have iGPU or not" is a secondary concern, you can always get a dGPU for 10-20$ which might not be as power effective as iGPU but certainly far more powerful.

So what this home media server will actually do? Maybe a Raspberry Pi 2 would be enough lol

I'm on a Raspberry Pi 2 right now and it was able to handle the home automation fine but once I started streaming Plex from it I was having all sorts of buffering issues on my blu-ray content.

What I want to do WILL require a server with a CPU chip without a doubt. To answer your question on what it's going to do:

• 
  ■ Use Plex to serve high def content to multiple clients (mostly Roku's)
  ■ Serve as the home automation server via OpenHUB
  ■ Serve as the home storage server
  ■ Serve as a place to host a game server (Minecraft, Space engineers, etc.)

As you can see, it does have quite a bit going on. None of those tasks are extremely resource intensive (with the exception of the encoding which can take quite a bit), but if all were running at the same time I would expect some lower end CPU's to start taking a hit.

It's also worth mentioning that I have verified Plex does utilize hyper-threading when encoding/transcoding so the 4 virtual cores in the Xeon would get put to use.

 

[synphul]

aliasxneo, none of the haswell lga1150 motherboards have graphics on them at all. What they have is a graphics port that works only if the cpu has integrated graphics. Back in the day motherboards used to feature onboard graphics which means the graphics chip was physically part of the motherboard. Now the way it works for 'onboard' video is the cpu has the graphics chip either built into it or it doesn't. If it doesn't, no onboard video. They moved from a separate graphics chip permanently fixed to the motherboard to relying on the cpu and whether it has an igpu or not.

I3's, i5's, i7's all have integrated graphics. Also the 1246v3 which is much more expensive than the 1231v3. If you had one of those cpu's you would install it and plug your monitor into the motherboard's video output. If you get a 1231v3 which has no igpu (no video built in) then the video output on the motherboard is useless. You would need to get a graphics card in addition to the 1231v3.

Even a cheap video card like an hd5450 just for the purposes of getting video to the screen is going to run around $30. You're still looking at the 1231v3 ($223) + hd5450 ($30) = $273. Compared to an i5 4590 at $180 with the graphics chips built into it and capable of inserting the cpu into that h97 motherboard and plugging the monitor directly into the motherboard.

In terms of power consumption, when the i5 and i3 are idling the difference in consumption is around 4-5w or less. They idle around 60w or less. Rather than going from an i5 to an i3 if power consumption is an issue it may be worth looking into a low power cpu like an i5 4570s. The 4570s is a low power cpu around $200 and idle around 23w with the integrated graphics functional. The 4570s also works on that h97 motherboard.

 

[aliasxneo]

aliasxneo, none of the haswell lga1150 motherboards have graphics on them at all. What they have is a graphics port that works only if the cpu has integrated graphics. Back in the day motherboards used to feature onboard graphics which means the graphics chip was physically part of the motherboard. Now the way it works for 'onboard' video is the cpu has the graphics chip either built into it or it doesn't. If it doesn't, no onboard video. They moved from a separate graphics chip permanently fixed to the motherboard to relying on the cpu and whether it has an igpu or not.

I3's, i5's, i7's all have integrated graphics. Also the 1246v3 which is much more expensive than the 1231v3. If you had one of those cpu's you would install it and plug your monitor into the motherboard's video output. If you get a 1231v3 which has no igpu (no video built in) then the video output on the motherboard is useless. You would need to get a graphics card in addition to the 1231v3.

Even a cheap video card like an hd5450 just for the purposes of getting video to the screen is going to run around $30. You're still looking at the 1231v3 ($223) + hd5450 ($30) = $273. Compared to an i5 4590 at $180 with the graphics chips built into it and capable of inserting the cpu into that h97 motherboard and plugging the monitor directly into the motherboard.

In terms of power consumption, when the i5 and i3 are idling the difference in consumption is around 4-5w or less. They idle around 60w or less. Rather than going from an i5 to an i3 if power consumption is an issue it may be worth looking into a low power cpu like an i5 4570s. The 4570s is a low power cpu around $200 and idle around 23w with the integrated graphics functional. The 4570s also works on that h97 motherboard.

Ah, that explains it. Excuse me for my confusion on the matter

Thanks for the details, that really helps clear things up for me. Two questions if you don't mind:

How do you know what the idle power usage is?
Does the integrated graphics portion idle if there's no video input connected?

Thanks!

 

[synphul]

There are sites that test the power consumption at the wall based on various configurations. Some use integrated graphics, others use a dedicated graphics card and they state which card they use. It's not cpu only power, rather system idle so includes the small amount of power consumed by a hard drive and motherboard. The more devices connected the more power will be consumed.

These are a few power consumption tests.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8774/intel-haswell-low-power-cpu-review-core-i3-4130t-i5-4570s-and-i7-4790s-tested
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7963/the-intel-haswell-refresh-review-core-i7-4790-i5-4690-and-i3-4360-tested/2
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/intel-haswell-refresh_6.html

It will also vary slightly whether you choose to use haswell's c6/c7 extreme low power sleep states (and whether the power supply can handle those extended sleep states) as well as how you set up your power plan if using windows. For instance whether you set the power plan to performance, balanced, power saver or set custom settings for how long before the monitor powers down, hard disks etc.

Integrated graphics should idle when the cpu does and likely won't take much power when the monitor goes off (sleep mode). Just a fraction of the power as when it's being used and if it's a media server then chances are you won't be using it a whole lot other than setting things up or maintaining it. You could turn the monitor off and the igpu should idle with no video output reducing what little power it consumes and heat as well.

No worries, you weren't wrong exactly. Motherboards did used to have onboard graphics and the ones that did had a video port on the back. Otherwise people used the video port on the graphics card for their monitor. So yes, that was a thing. Some amd cpu's (called apu's) have integrated graphics. Intel has integrated graphics in nearly all their recent cpu's and instead calls it an igpu (integrated graphics processing unit). When you look at the metal cover on a cpu like the i5 4590, underneath it are not only the 4 cpu cores but also a graphics card (albeit a very small one).

The only thing is since the integrated graphics don't have a large board like a video card does, there's no room for its own video ram so has to borrow from the system memory. Same as older video chips integrated to the motherboard.

 

[Ra_V_en]

As for the concern of the hyperthreading usage by Plex:
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/39729/transcoding-questions

In short: it's expected to be 15-40% boost with HT

Also for consideration is a hardware support for encoding/decoding the content, in which case you have to dig out can you benefit from Intel QSync or better look over some nVidia card with H264 decode/encode support:
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/155402/h-265-hevc-h-264-avc-hardware-encoding-for-use-in-plex-media-server

If you do find a benefit of having a dGPU for this purpose then iGPU is out of the equation.

Automation probably wont hurt the performance much, especially if it was fine with Raspberry.

Storage server needs a decent HDD's/SSD's possibly with RAID0/1/10 depending how much of concurrent connections it would serve also what is your idea of redundancy in case of fault. Also network aspect has to be taken into consideration, will it be a single Gbps tube with some custom QOS or a dedicated network connection for each of the crucial service, etc.

Game servers (specifically Mincecraft) usually tend to put a load on a single thread, thus faster cores will benefit here.

All in all it looks like you indeed need a bit of a horsepower but do you need 4 cores with or without HT is question that probably nobody would be able to answer here either without proper experience or testing.

Lots of things to consider as you can see, seems your first question seems trivial considering other things here.

 

[aliasxneo]

Thanks for all the help!

Here is my final build for those interested:

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-4690 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor ($200.99 @ SuperBiiz)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler ($19.99 @ Newegg)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H97M-D3H Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($68.00 @ SuperBiiz)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($29.99 @ Newegg)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($29.99 @ Newegg)
Case: Cooler Master N200 MicroATX Mid Tower Case ($29.99 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: SeaSonic X Series 400W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully-Modular Fanless ATX Power Supply ($109.99 @ B&H)
Total: $488.94
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-11-30 06:05 EST-0500