grimsonfart :
Hey
I am soon going to build a new gaming desktop, and i was thinking about getting a Intel XEON E5645, mainly because i can buy another one later on if i need to. I was thinking about using EVGA Classified SR-2 because it supports dual socket.
So my first question is: Will the XEON E5645 run games well?
Second question: If i get two XEON's will it run games alot faster or just a tad bit?
Third question: Is the 980x better than the XEON E5645? If so, is it possible to run two 980x on dual socket mobo?
THANKS!
My two cents:
1. The Xeon E5645 will run games well when paired with a suitable GPU. Pretty much any CPU with more than two cores and clocked higher than about 2 GHz will be just fine, as will dual-core CPUs clocked in the upper 2 GHz range or better.*
2. Games generally use 1-2 cores and sometimes up to around four cores. One E5645 has six cores and adding a second one will not increase framerate as you are not even using all of the cores on the first E5645. It might actually slow down your games as adding that second CPU now completely changes how the system has to access its RAM. LGA1366 and later Xeons as well as all Opterons use a separate bank of RAM for each CPU (using
NUMA.) It takes a little longer for one CPU to reach memory on the other CPU, and that increase in memory latency can slow down your games. Dual CPU setups are for people who run programs that need a lot of cores and a lot of RAM and RAM bandwidth. Games don't benefit from any of those.
3. No Intel desktop CPUs can be used in multi-CPU setups since the PIII was retired. Only Xeons can work in multi-CPU setups. Putting two 980Xs on a board would at best result in only one CPU running, and at worst neither will work and you just get a bunch of beeping and a failure to boot.
Also, the SR-2 and Xeon 5600s have been out for quite a long time. The current and often a bit faster parts are the new LGA2011 Xeon E5-2000 series. EVGA even has a dual LGA2011 board for these CPUs (the SRX). I'd look towards these parts if you want to make a new dual-CPU Intel system instead of the E5645/SR-2 unless you can get the LGA1366 stuff for cheap. However, it looks like you'd be better off in getting something like an i5-2500K/i7-2600K/2700K or one of the single-CPU LGA2011 i7s instead of a dual unless you are doing other things that aren't gaming.
*Note: There are two definitions of "running games well." The one I use is that you are able to get a playable framerate (generally 30 fps) or better when paired up with a suitable GPU. Human vision is rarely able to detect flicker in image sources with a flicker frequency greater than about 30 Hz (30 fps.) The image looks like a single image at that point. Film movies run at 24 fps, broadcast TV runs at 29.997 fps- those values weren't arrived at by complete accident. Your game running at 30 fps, 45 fps, or 327 fps all looks the same. Personally when I am playing games, I am looking at the game itself and as long as it looks fluid, I don't care what the framerate counter says.
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