- 32 nm Westmere
- 12MB L3 Cache
- 95W
Still Incredible Years Later!
06/06/2014
This review is from: Intel Xeon X5650 Westmere 2.66 GHz 12MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 95W BX80614X5650 Server Processor
Pros:
One of the last overclocking Xeons, in 6C/12T dress, a healthy 12MB L3 Cache, and incredibly flexible: single chip, 2P server/WS, and the legendary SR-2 if you want to have fun. Oh, and ECC/REG or standard DDR3.
Both overclock to 4.54Ghz in my SR-2 with Swiftech Apogee HD blocks and the (most incredibly well built) MIPS full coverage SR-2 motherboard block setup. That's with the full 48GB of DDR3, which is running at a very impressive DDR3-2096 6-9-7, 3x EVGA GTX780Ti Kingpins (full coverage blocks and backplates) at 1522/8200, Titanium HD, Intel 2x10Gbit hardware NIC, Areca 1882xi-16i (4GB Cache/battery+NAND backup), hardware PCIe 2.1 x4 to 4+8 External/Internal-header USB3.0, 2x DC S3700 800GB RAID0, 4x Samsung EVO 1TB RAID0, 4x 1TB VR RAID10, 6x 4TB HGST Ultrastar SAS RAID6, and to make sure that the beast can eat, a pair of EVGA 1300WG2 fully-modular PSU's with fully custom made and sleeved cables (a gauge lower/thicker, MDPC-X sleeve). It requires a 20A circuit to itself!
Now, that's a setup I threw together to do some ambient water benching (using a custom test bench instead of a case), cooled by 4x Phobya 1260 rads each with 18x 140mm 178cfm/11.9mmH2O fans push+pull and 2x MCP35X2 (four total pumps).
Normally, I use these chips in one of my servers, specifically for encoding tracks on the fly while in the middle of a recording session (audio production and mastering, I do music and also television/film). Since I record master tracks at extremely high resolution/bit-rate (48bit/384khz usually), the raw audio takes up a lot of space, and factor in the fact that there are (usually) anywhere from 4 (single vocalist) to 16 (2-4 band members, plus spatial and other mics) simultaneous streams, and the encoding can be pushing significantly more data than a "lossless" 1080p/DTS-HD Blu-Ray!
For a while, I was relying on a single machine to encode, but it is frustrating walking into the studio in the morning after a late session to record/mix for a single musician and the previous night's 16+ channel (3-4hr session) still hasn't finished... I ALWAYS work WITH the artist(s) for part of the mixing as I believe that their music should sound how they want, and I do as much as possible to do so, without decreasing the quality of the record, losing the dynamic range (I refuse to participate in the Loudness War, everything I've mastered has a dynamic range limited only by the medium, whether Redbook or DVD-A+ 24/96-192.
I had used these chips first for the workstation, and then for some competitive benching which they survived without requiring so much as a voltage bump, and now they're the hearts of the second encoding rig I built (currently have 4; a 4x12C/24T, a 2x6C/12T, and 2 4x8C/16T, and with the half-dozen minimum different medium for distro, even a single record can utilize all four simultaneously).
Cons:
The 95W TDP, while understandable, limits these chips along with the multiplier, and the 5680's I have are significantly faster (5Ghz easy).
I went through a few trying to find a pair of chips that BOTH worked with all the DIMMs populated on the SuperMicro boards I use for pro work (the 48gigs of the SR-2 is comparatively easy to handle), as even 192GB can be whittled down surprisingly fast, especially when using one or more RAMdisks to cache or buffer writes to any of the HDD arrays that aren't using SSD(s) alongside the 1-4GB RAM courtesy of the Areca/etc controllers.
If you are overclocking, the better your RAM, the better the results in my experience, in particular for benching. The G.Skill Pi's I have rated DDR3-2200 7-9-7 provide a lot more flexibility and for some benches, points, than 1600 6-7-6. The catch is that the currently produced DDR3 "enthusiast" kits are not very well suited for these chips, either; IVB/SB-E/HW/IV-E all benefit from very high frequency, but the on-die IMC and insanely fast L3 cache of the newer architecture have greatly reduced the benefits of the super tight timings we see in kits from just a few years ago, when Nehalem was king and the timings greatly impacted latencies. Thus, even a top quality current kit such as Trident X 2400 9-11-11/2666 10-12-12 or Ripjaws Z 2400 9-11-9 (GSkill provides significantly better IC's in their kits than equivalent priced Corsair, and to get similar yet still usually lesser quality from the latter you will spend 150 to 300 more!), can't get the tight timings these Xeons love.
Retail is too high considering the advances made since their intro, and I got mine out of servers being sold locally (privately), which for the same amount netted me two pair of these and four X5680, 384GB ECC DDR3 total, 1/ea H700, H800, and 9286 RAID cards, two dozen 150-450GB SAS 15Krpm drives, 2 brand new X25M-E SLC 80gig, a K4000, a FirePro W9000, two 6-tuner capture cards, a box of high end Sanyo Denkei and Delta fans, a couple "playback" video cards (5770, 4670, GTS450, half a dozen HH 4xxx series low end for HDMI)...
Just be patient and attentive!
Overall Review:
It is a testament to the performance, design, and functionality that you get from Intel when a processor released a few years back for a few-years-dead platform is outperformed only by its successor. These CPU's can be found all over, and with a bit of patience and knowledge, it's actually incredibly easy to match a pair of these 6core/12thread Xeons (or even the faster models) with a full fledged SSI CEB 2P board from SuperMicro or the like, quite likely with 24-96GB DDR3-1333/1600REG-ECC, for less than what I spent on my 3930K, and do the same with the top model of the line for less than my 3970X or 4960X.
Why "settle" for an APU or E3/i5 based home server when you can do AMD's "Moar Coarz", but do it right?
Sure, it's overkill for an HTPC or (my favorite) your favorite flavor of "Giant Box'O'RAID" storage server, but if you are shopping for a high end processor in the first place, you are probably a fellow member of the "Overkill or No-kill" club.
If you are looking for processors for running a number of VM's, or "grown up RAID" (ie not a pointless 2x128GB SSD RAID0, but hardware, onboard caching, battery and ideally NAND backed arrays), then with very few exceptions, 12 cores (24 threads) is ideal for home use, and will provide a fair amount of room to grow arrays for example (I started with 8x 15Krpm HDD + 2x SSD, and in this one machine currently have 3 separate 8x3TB RAID6E arrays (9total drives per array), 2x DC S3700 800GB SSD RAID0 as a write and current-project cache for all parity arrays, 8x 600GB 15Krpm in RAID0 for temp storage, 2x X25M-E RAID0 scratch array, 4 4x4TB WD RE SAS in RAID10, and the motherboard ports hold the 2x M4 128GB RAID0 OS array (OP'ed 40pct), and the rest are filled with misc 1-3TB HDD as single drives).
Running bi-directional 10GbEth via Intel HW NIC, even stressing every single storage device, simultaneously reading and writing at about 1.2GB/sec, I run out of bandwidth before the processors even break 20 percent in use.
Bottom line: The most economical way to get awesome trapped in a silicon wafer, and every one of the 6 cores is a REAL, FULL CORE with the addition of HT, unlike the 4/6/8/12/16 "core" chips from the other guy, that are 2/3/4/6/8 CORE chips with a variation of HT semi integrated into a small part of the hardware, that lures fanboys out in droves to douse the Internet in a bath of fire from their flamewars.
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- Cheryl L.
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Verified Owner
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Owned For:
more than 1 year
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