Dual Intel Xeon E5-2620 Or Comparable Processor

[alo]

Hi all,

Recently I've been looking into putting together a home virtualization server. My first pick was to use dual Intel Xeon E5-2620's as it'll give me 12 cores to work with. Unfortunately it seems that my pick for a LGA2011 capable motherboard is fairly limited and somewhat expensive.

Could anyone either recommend a good yet inexpensive LGA2011 motherboard or comparable dual processor setup using the LGA1366 socket?

Thanks in advance!

 

[AristideT]

Hi all,

Recently I've been looking into putting together a home virtualization server. My first pick was to use dual Intel Xeon E5-2620's as it'll give me 12 cores to work with. Unfortunately it seems that my pick for a LGA2011 capable motherboard is fairly limited and somewhat expensive.

Could anyone either recommend a good yet inexpensive LGA2011 motherboard or comparable dual processor setup using the LGA1366 socket?

Thanks in advance!

So far there's only 1 consumer grade dual chip LGA2011 board out there. The problem is this:

1. This Asus board is probably the only one you can overclock, server boards tend to not have that feature.
2. This board so far only supports Intel's consumer CPUs. A BIOS upgrade will eventually fix that, but you need a functioning CPU installed to perform the upgrade. Or do you actually need 2 to get started?

A catch-22 at this point.

A

 

[MU_Engineer]

Hi all,

Recently I've been looking into putting together a home virtualization server. My first pick was to use dual Intel Xeon E5-2620's as it'll give me 12 cores to work with. Unfortunately it seems that my pick for a LGA2011 capable motherboard is fairly limited and somewhat expensive.

Could anyone either recommend a good yet inexpensive LGA2011 motherboard or comparable dual processor setup using the LGA1366 socket?

Thanks in advance!

Dual CPU boards are not cheap any way you look at it. The least expensive new ones are around $300 apiece, such as the ASUS KCMA-D8 (a dual AMD Socket C32 board.) LGA2011 has a boatload of memory channels and PCIe lanes coming off the socket and that requires a complex, expensive board to route all of that stuff. That's why you are looking at $200+ even for a single-socket board when you can get an LGA1155 or AM3+ board for well under half of that. Dual sockets just add more traces to route, which is some of why dual LGA2011 boards are so expensive. That and they are very new so you will be playing the early adopter tax unless you wait a few months.

LGA1366 stuff isn't a good deal unless you can find decent LGA1366 stuff (six-core chips) at a pretty steep discount. Anything new in box for LGA1366 won't be that much less expensive than new in box LGA2011 stuff but be slower and have fewer cores and memory slots. A four-core E5620 costs only about $30 less than an E5-2620 but has two fewer cores and fewer gee-whiz things like AVX.

Also, the comment about LGA2011 Xeons being overclockable is incorrect. Intel has locked the bus strap on the CPUs' internal clock generator so you in effect have a bus-unlocked chipset. Overclock Bclk more than 5-10 MHz or so and your whole system locks up because you're overclocking EVERYTHING. You also can't put two Core i7s in a dual LGA2011 board and have them work, you need Xeon E5-2xxx or E5-4xxx CPUs for that.