In the two months since Intel unveiled Broadwell-E, I've been going back and forth with my decision to invest in one. We received the 10-core Core i7-6950X for review and while it was an attractive scrap in terms of functioning, it came at a seriously ugly price. At $1,650 we recommend taking a hard pass on the 6950X.

Frankly, the older viii-core 5960X was difficult to justify at $1,050, and then the slightly updated 6900K for $1,100 doesn't exactly accept us whipping our wallets out. Spending over $600 on the 6-cadre 6850K isn't too appealing either... So, what'southward an enthusiast to do if they require more than the 4 cores in Intel'south mainstream desktop Cadre i7 processors?

One solution would be edifice our beastly 16-core/32-thread Xeon E5-2670 workstation featured back in April. For nether $one,000 we picked upwards cadre components including two 8-core E5-2670 processors, a new dual-socket LGA2011 motherboard and 64GB of DDR3 retention. Throw in a case, power supply, graphics card and some storage and you take a seriously capable auto for the price of a Core i7-5960X.

In terms of performance, our affordable Xeon build really stuck information technology to the 5960X past a rather large margin in more than one test. When the uber expensive 6950X appeared, nosotros fabricated certain to pit it confronting the dual-CPU system and to our surprise the Xeons stood stiff, even coming out on top in a few tests.

One solution would be edifice our beastly sixteen-cadre/32-thread Xeon E5-2670 workstation featured dorsum in April.

It was interesting to find that in many of the application and encoding tests, this older Sandy Bridge-EP build was able to put up a real fight. In terms of performance vs. cost it tends to come out well on top with the only blotch being its power consumption. The dual-Xeon organization pulled 300 watts in our Hybrid x265 test while the Core i7-6950X setup needed simply one-half that corporeality.

Of course nosotros were comparing ii viii-core processors to a single 10-core chip, but the main upshot was the iv-generation-old Sandy Bridge compages.

This put us on the hunt for affordable Xeon processors based on the Haswell-EP or maybe even Broadwell-EP architectures -- it certainly seemed mere wishful thinking that nosotros would come beyond a relatively cheap Broadwell-EP Xeon.

Our search put us on the trail of Intel's Xeon E5 2630 v4, a ten-core Broadwell-EP part that runs at a base of operations clock of ii.2GHz simply tin can boost up to 3.1GHz depending on the workload.

Typically, you'd spend something like $700 for this processor -- substantially more than the $70 we paid for each of our E5-2670 v1 processors -- however, it's possible to purchase the E5-2630 v4 for equally footling as $200 on eBay. The just catch is that they are engineering samples (ES), not retail chips.

The examples we've come across are based on release stepping (SR2R7), so motherboard compatibility won't exist an result, providing the BIOS has been updated to support Broadwell-EP processors.

One time upon a time it was rare to detect Intel engineering science samples, only today they appear online in huge volumes. Looking only on eBay for case, thousands of these E5-2630 v4 ES chips have been sold with countless more still in stock.

Typically, we suggest fugitive ES chips when possible, but $200 for a ten-core/20-thread Broadwell-EP processor really is too difficult to pass up. With and then many of yous asking what these chips perform like over the past few weeks, we've decided to find out.

The Build

The previous build using the Xeon E5-2670 v1 processors was put together on a pretty tight budget and and then nosotros went with i of the about affordable Dual Socket R (LGA2011) motherboards we could discover.

Since nosotros are spending more than twice equally much on the processors this time ($400), nosotros decided to become with a more capable motherboard. Having been so impressed with the previous Asrock Rack motherboard, we picked upwards the EP2C612D16-2L2T on Newegg for $580 (which is now $100 cheaper if you needed farther temptation).

This is a Dual Socket LGA2011 R3 motherboard that adheres to the SSI EEB form factor, measuring 12'' 10 xiii'' (thirty.5 cm ten 33 cm). Announced way back in September 2022, the EP2C612D16-2L2T gained Broadwell-EP back up in March via BIOS version 2.10.

At the heart of the EP2C612D16-2L2T we find the Intel C612 chipset, a 7w role that was built using the 32nm process and offers Gen 2 PCIe support for upward to 8-lanes, six USB 3.0 ports too as x SATA 6Gb/southward ports.

Asrock Rack has expanded SATA back up to a dozen ports with the inclusion of a unmarried Marvell 9172 6Gb/south controller. Given that this is a two-yr old motherboard, you won't detect fancy storage options such as M.2. High speed SSDs will need to be integrated using PCI Limited adapter cards.

There are a total of sixteen DIMM slots with support for NVDIMM (Non-Volatile Dual In-line Retentiveness Module). Each processor is connected to 8 DIMMs and of course quad-aqueduct memory support exists. Both RDIMM and LRDIMM modules are supported at speeds of DDR4 2133/1866 and 1600.

Onboard nosotros detect three PCIe 3.0 x16 expansion slots along with a further 3 PCIe 3.0 x8 slots. That ways at that place are 72 PCIe iii.0 lanes on tap -- impressive stuff.

Ane of the cardinal highlights of the EP2C612D16-2L2T is network support. Out of the box you get a pair of 10G network connections courtesy of the Intel X540 controller. In add-on there are a pair of Intel i210 controllers for a pair of Gigabit Ethernet connections. Finally, in that location is as well a single dedicated IPMI LAN port.

The ECC memory this board can back up is generally meant for servers, where any data corruption is unacceptable. Since this isn't actually a business organisation for nearly of our readers, we went with standard UDIMM modules from Thou.Skill, rather than equip the lath with ECC retentivity.

Ideally we wanted to populate every DIMM slot with DDR4-2133 memory then we reached out to our good friends over at G.Skill. Happy to oblige, they served upwardly 16 4GB sticks of Ripjaws V DDR4-2133 memory for a total capacity of 64GB, which will allow both Xeon E5-2630 v4 fries to enjoy quad-channel retentiveness support.

Chiliad.Skill sells this retention in 16GB quad-channel retentivity kits for simply $74 each, taking the total toll for this build to only shy of $300. For those wondering, the retention operates at CL 15-15-15-35 timings using 1.2 volts. The modules are available with either red or black estrus spreaders and we went with cherry.

Equally with our previous dual-Xeon build, we equipped the processors with Noctua NH-U12DX i4 coolers. Noctua's DX line have go a popular choice in high performance quiet cooling solutions for Intel Xeon CPUs. The latest i4 revision supports the LGA2011 platform (both Square ILM and Narrow ILM) and comes with a 120mm NF-F12 'Focused Menstruum' fan.

Thanks to its slim design with a fin depth of 45mm, the NH-U12DX i4 ensures piece of cake access to the RAM slots. When installed parallel to the slots, it will not overhang the memory even with two fans installed. For those concerned nearly space, the NH-D9DX i4 is an even more than compact choice. At $lx, both the NH-U12DX i4 and NH-D9DX i4 are well priced and come backed by a six-twelvemonth manufacturer's warranty.