What is the appeal of Xeons?

[Deniedstingray]

So i always see videos / threads of people using Xeons for gaming and im confused why that is. My understanding is that they have more cores but lower clockspeeds which should make them worse for gaming right?

Can someone explain this Xeon for gaming concept to me?

I know i have CPU tag but this still confuses me.

 

[Cdog042501]

Lots of cores and processing power and can be highly overclocked

 

[Cdog042501]

Overclocking increases clock speeds making them exelent gaming cpus

 

[JQB45]

Typically you can not overclock a Xeon processor. It used to be that you could buy Xeon's with 4 cores and hyper threading for less money then a i7 processor which made them popular alternatives to the likes of the i7-4790(k).

 

[Cdog042501]

You can oberclock them that is the only reason people buy them because overclocked they are beasts

 

[Deniedstingray]

Typically you can not overclock a Xeon processor. It used to be that you could buy Xeon's with 4 cores and hyper threading for less money then a i7 processor which made them popular alternatives to the likes of the i7-4790(k).

Is it actually worth the money? I dont plan to try it but that sounds like an interesting idea.

 

[Cdog042501]

I think so you can pick one up for around 30-60 bucks on ebay all zeons are,are old server chips sold for cheap and can be oc for great proformance

 

[Ecky]

Xeons are often identical to Core CPUs, especially i7's. After a few years, companies upgrade their servers and dump tons of older Xeons into the used market, which are often cheap drop-in upgrades for aging systems.

 

[Murissokah]

Xeons are processors made for Servers and Workstations. They support larger amounts of memory, ECC (memory error-checking), multi-CPU configurations. They are also certified for 24/7 workloads.

There are some drawbacks for consumer use, though. Since they are reliability oriented, most Xeons will simply not work out of spec (meaning they will not overclock or use XMP profiles). Some E3-1XXX Xeons are very similar to their desktop counterparts and actually come unlocked, but this is more like an oversight by Intel than a feature.

Your assumption is right, being a server/worstation product, they are usually a worse alternative for gaming, being more expensive. There are some very specific models that can be actually viable for consumer usage, with a lower price point.

My main build runs a Xeon E5-1660 v3, which is essentially a server version of the i7-5960x. The reason I got it was that it was a pull-out from a server at work. It does not overclock and won't boot if I change a single MHz in memory spec. Left at stock, I usually leave it running, with a week or so of uptime before I reboot it for updates. It runs Windows Server 2016.

I do gaming on this PC too, which works flawlessly.

The reason some professionals prefer Xeon workstations is reliability. ECC may prevent the occasional flipped bit that can corrupt memory (look up "cosmic rays". No, I'm not kidding). Depending on your line of work, a single hard reset may justify the cost. You can also amass an ungodly amount of RAM with Xeons (mine can do 768GB). This can be necessary in certain workloads.

 

[boosted1g]

It really depends on what family of Xeon you are looking at.

Durring Haswell days the e3-2xxx serries Xeons used the same socket 1150 and gave you near i7 performance at just above i5 price point, the only drawback was slightly lower clock speed. For a buget gaming/video editing rig this was a great bang for buck CPU.

There were some older generation Xeons that were overclockable and people used them for that.

Outside of that though, the Xeon processor lines are locked, usually more expensive then there consumer counterparts but are good for things like ECC memory support. The other big bennifit to Xeon in server systems is you can get Dual and even Quad CPU boards. This again is no gain for gaming. but is perfect for server virtualization.

 

[Susquehannock]

Indeed. Depends on the family. The Westmere Xeons (socket 1366) can be decent overclockers in the X58 based boards. Some even benchmark relevant by today's standards.