[SOLVED] Really no Xeon as good as a i5-3570k?

[trialandimprovement]

Hello lovely forum people.

I have been building my own servers for years, but now for various reasons I have decided to buy a Supermicro server. My server runs a custom single threaded application, there isn't much data and infrequent usage, but it runs a CPU intensive task every now and then and I need it to run quickly.

I have previously built my servers with a i5-3570k as I considered that a reasonable 'medium' CPU (yes I know it's not a proper server CPU, go easy on a guy). The performance of the application on this was not great but acceptable.

Now I am getting a Supermicro I am naturally (?) looking at Xeon processors. But checking out some of the online benchmark websites it seems like none of the Xeon processors can match the i5-3570k for single thread performance. I know server processors are meant for multithreading and power efficiency not single threading but I was pretty surprised as the i5-3570k is kind of cheap and old. Is this really the case or is my research bad?

Thank you very much for taking a look.

 

[trialandimprovement]

volkgren ok, that is very interesting. I assumed since I first built with the i5-3570K so long ago it would be basically trash now. But I guess the industry has been mostly focused in a different direction.

I am very tempted to mess around and maybe build myself again but to be sensible those days are behind me. I think I will get a system with the Xeon e3-1270 v2. It is in my budget and apparently all round as good as / better than my current platform. Thank you very much everyone who has helped.

 

[volkgren]

What makes the i5-3570(K) so good for value is because you can buy them used for around $50. If you were building or even buying a prebuilt system, it would have to be used. Same with the E3-1270 V2, unless you wanted to pay a premium for the new unopened CPU in the box, which will cost more than it did when it was released because they no longer make those anymore.

*Update: I forgot to mention the drawback to buying those used processors is that good motherboards are difficult to find because you also have to buy those used.

 

[k1114]

Probably the main issue with stagnant gains is intel's big issues with 10nm for 2 years. Skylake and its refreshes are all the same ipc so they've been stuck for 2 years. But there have been gains in ipc.

From your ivy i5 to skylake and its refreshes, you should see roughly 15-20% ipc increase as well as newer instructions sets that have helped with larger gains in some software. Clocks rates have also risen some. The 3570k is 3.4ghz, 3.8ghz turbo and coffee i5 9700k is 3.7ghz, 4.6ghz turbo with the 9900k going up to 5ghz turbo.

I don't see why you'd want an xeon e3-1270v2 when it's a sidegrade. You get the same architecture, 0.1ghz increase, and ht. Unless you get it for like $50, I think it's a waste of time and money.

Xeon and i series are just branding. They even use the same dies.

 

[volkgren]

Are you replacing one of your current i5-3570k systems because you want better performance? If so, I would agree that a new Coffee Lake system would be the way to go. A Pentium Gold G5400 would have higher single-threaded performance than your i5-3570K, with the added cost of replacing everything else such as motherboard and DDR4 memory.

 

[trialandimprovement]

Thank you for the extra advice. I am not trying to get any performance improvement. For the first time I am installing servers at a remote location and so I want to have IPMI for the first time, (I'm also getting redundant power and so forth for the first time). I also want to move away from putting servers together myself and start buying off the shelf. It's not an upgrade but a new system. I just want to avoid any reduction in performance (a little boost would be nice) and as little increase in cost as possible. I've been looking into Xeon because it seems much easier to find rackmount servers with IPMI, redundant power, RAID, etc. with Xeon but I'm open to using any processor.

I was thinking of the Xeon E3-1270 v2 (from https://serverfactory.co.uk/servers/rackmount/supermicro-1u-5017c-urf-xeon-e3-1220v2.html ) because it is the fastest option before a couple hundred pound jump to a Xeon E5-1630 V3 (from https://serverfactory.co.uk/servers/rackmount/supermicro-1u-5018r-mr-xeon-v3.html )

 

[Karadjgne]

You could go as high as the e3-1270v2 or e3-1280v2 if sticking with lga1155, moving to lga1150 you'd use the e3-1270v3 etc. Moving from a 4/4 i5-3570k to a 4/8 Xeon is going to land a performance difference on the times you have saturated threads.

 

[Icefisher225]

X58 Xeon with hyperthreading will smack a 3570K around in many applications. They OC easily to 4.2ghz and beyond.
There are also X79 platform Xeon's which are unlocked too.

This is my other PC: X58 Xeon E5640 4 core 8 threads at 4.2ghz running Crysis 2 & CSGO with the Radeon R9 Fury GPU.

My main PC is actually based on x79 xeons- E5-2667 V2's. They hit 4GHz on a single core or 3.6GHz on all cores. The motherboards are wicked expensive but the CPUs are very affordable ($200 or so for the 2667 v2) compared to newer xeons - and they support both ECC and non-ECC memory. The E5-1680V2 is a single-CPU option also for X79 and is overclockable - usually to 4GHz on all cores and beyond. They also support crap tons of system memory (cheap AF ecc ddr3) - enough that you could run a RAMDisk and put the files you need for the super fast single-threaded thing on that to speed it up more.