EVGA SRX Classified - Is it worth it?

bhm

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Sep 14, 2007
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I am looking at running the EVGA SRX classified as my new board.

For a primarily gaming rig with a small side order of modding (textures/code/renders/etc).

I am just wondering if anyone has one, or a decent review?

Curious as to whether or not the dual xeons cpus (probably 2.3ghz 6 core, x2), will shred gaming as good as a top end corei7, and if not, is it really a user perceivable difference?

((plan on upgrading the cpus to higher end xeons in the future, but for initial build would obviously rather put it into better/more vid cards/ram.))

I have heard from more than a few sources, that they dont handle as well as i7's for gaming.

Anyone got thier hands on her yet, or even a review/benchmark?


Dont let cost ($) factor in! Just looking for performance based advise.

Thanks for your time.








 
Solution
The SR-X board is a sort of strange idea. It forces you to use one or two server/workstation class CPUs, then dumbs the whole package down by requiring non-ECC RAM. It costs more than other workstation/server motherboards that do utilize ECC memory, too. It's only advantage over workstation-class boards is that is has so many PCIE x16 slots.

The only reason that the SR-X Classified board exists is so that you can build a system that scores extremely high on a 3DMark/PCMark benchmark, so that you can brag to your friends. I think it would make more sense to buy an actual workstation board with the C602 chipset (or similar) if you really wanted to build a machine that you truly need that sort of power for.
The SR-X board is a sort of strange idea. It forces you to use one or two server/workstation class CPUs, then dumbs the whole package down by requiring non-ECC RAM. It costs more than other workstation/server motherboards that do utilize ECC memory, too. It's only advantage over workstation-class boards is that is has so many PCIE x16 slots.

The only reason that the SR-X Classified board exists is so that you can build a system that scores extremely high on a 3DMark/PCMark benchmark, so that you can brag to your friends. I think it would make more sense to buy an actual workstation board with the C602 chipset (or similar) if you really wanted to build a machine that you truly need that sort of power for.
 
Solution
Xeon CPU's would give you better performance, but not where you seem to be looking for it.

In gaming, there will be no performance difference (or minimal performance increase) between an i5 and a Xeon.
As always, the bottleneck in gaming will be the GPU. If your playing on a single screen, a single GTX670 is more than enough to max out any modern game and probably a year or two into the future.

You indicate that the rendering aspect of the build isn't all that important, an LGA1155 i7 should be plenty for your needs.
 


The i7-3930K is AWESOME, but it is also ridiculous overkill for gaming. An overclocked i5-2500K could get pretty close to the 3930K in gaming performance. I love my 3930K, though. It handles everything I can throw at it, including two large VMs (I give both VMs two cores and 4GB of RAM to play with, and all three OSes <that is, two guest OSes and the host OS> act like they are each running on a fast computer).

If you decide you want to blow a lot of money going overboard on a gaming system, then the 3930K is plenty of overkill.

In case you still have your heart set on the SR-X, let me go over some gaming information. Most games max out at needing a modern CPU that runs at around 2.4GHz. By modern I mean that the CPU supports instructions like SSE3 and things like that. Some games, however, are very processor-intensive. TF2 is an old game, but because of the way the Source engine works, the game can suffer on slow chips. The number of cores doesn't affect the Source engine, either, because it runs one main thread and a helper thread or two. This means that anything over a dual-core CPU isn't going to improve performance for the Source engine and game engines like it. This means that finding a chip that runs at a high frequency is better than multiple cores or workstation stability.

I figure that those 6-core 2.3GHz Xeons will leave you wishing you had picked something else. My suggestion would be to spend the money getting one of the chips that you want to end up with. That SR-X board will work fine with a single Xeon. You shouldn't have to populate both sockets (though you may have to pay attention to what DIMM sockets you use when installing your RAM. You can always add the second CPU later when you have the money and reconfigure your memory installation (or add more memory) if that is required. Otherwise you are just wasting money buying a couple of Xeons you won't have a use for after you've gotten the Xeons you actually want.
 


It is the perfect chip for anyone who has work for it to do, or for anyone who is very impatient and has enough money to get it.
 


What makes no sense to me is that the CPUs on the SRX are placed so close together that there's no combination of air coolers that can accurately cool down the CPUs. Instead it almost forces you to go liquid cooling with a full custom loop.
 
Thanks for all your responses!

You have convinced me to go with the

i7-3960K (which is roughly same price for the 2x xeons I would have gotten)



My new question is this, Asus P9X79 WS ? or is there a better choice?

(Dont let cost factor in, looking for performance based advice again.)

thanks for your time once again!
 


The Asus P9X79 WS was found by Tom's Hardware to be the highest-performing X79 motherboard available. It is designed to be more compatible with workstation-class cards, such as server LAN cards, RAID controllers, and fibre-channel HBAs. It also simply provides better CPU, memory, and PCIE performance, likely because of the features that are designed to take processing power off the CPU, like the Intel NICs that allow the CPU to offload network processing to the NIC.

I chose the Asus P9X79 Deluxe because I decided that the extra luxuries that the Deluxe provided were worth the tiny tradeoff in performance. I needed to either get the Deluxe board or find a new wireless-n card, because my old card is PCI. I also wanted to get rid of the silly Bluetooth USB dongle I was using, and the Deluxe board supports the latest Bluetooth standard, so it was an easy choice to drop the USB stick for the Deluxe board.

If you are considering using a RAID controller to add hardware RAID performance to the computer, if you just want the absolute best performance from an X79 board, or if you do a lot of heavy network usage, then the WS board would be the best choice. If you would prefer the little bonus features that the Deluxe board offers, then the very small performance hit might be worth it to you. When it comes down to it, though, I would much rather have one of these Asus boards than any other X79 board.

Now, just a bit of information regarding the i7-3960X... It gives you 100MHz worth of extra stock speed for >$400. If you decide to do an extreme overclock, you may be able to push the difference to around 300MHz. By all means, spend all the money you want, but I would never blow more than $400 on 300MHz... maybe an extra $50, but not $400.
 


Yeah that's why I usually say when you do liquid cooling to use a real loop or don't do it at all. Plastic loops like the Corsair H100 don't even remotely begin to compare to what a truly custom loop will provide.



I completely agree - spending $1K on a CPU is an absolute waste when one that's half as much can be overclocked to match and even beat the advertised speeds.
 
i know this thread was solved a months ago but i was wondering if i could get one quick question in. i realize that right now and probably for a couple years any games can be played on a good i7 rig, but what about farther down the line? would using the sr-x with dual xeons perform well years down the line making it worth the cost because of being able to hold off on upgrading for a very long time? I was thinking maybe because of all the raw power you get it would be more future proof than x79 i7 setups. also i do high def film editing and might possibly start doing 3d film editing in the near future.