This is a short post for people with Gigabyte X79-UP4 wondering if they can upgrade their CPU to a 12 cores Xeon E5 2697v2. It's probably not interesting for the rest of the world! As I found absolutely no success story online with this motherboard/cpu combination, I drop it here for the archives :)
In 2014, I made myself a decent setup with a X79-UP4 and a i7-4930K 6 cores CPU. Six years later in 2020 it is still a very nice workhorse and doesn't pale in comparison to more modern setups. As an example the 2018 Macbook pro 6 cores i7 I'm using for work is far bellow in terms of performance under load (mainly due to thermal throttling). The 4930k is still a really appreciated CPU, and overclocking it under (simple) water cooling I can get 6 cores running altogether at 4.3Ghz easily.
Just recently, after upgrading my GPU for a Radeon RX5700XT and memory +32GB, I started to wonder if I could get a better CPU for my setup. So I started looking towards the Xeon E5 line.
When I picked the i7 4930k in 2014 it was priced at $600 but at the top of the line of the Ivy bridge CPUs was standing the Xeon E5 2697-v2 - 12 Cores, 24 threads - for a bit less than $3000! It was the best CPU you could fit in the $6000+ 2013 Mac PRO I was drooling on at the time.
The e5 2697v2 is still sold by Intel new at $2000, but you can find used ones for much less. I picked mine for $170 directly from China!
When I checked Gigabyte specifications I realised that
unfortunately, the Xeon E5-2697v2 was not on the list of supported CPUs. Strangely all the CPUs of the Ivy Bridge-E family are there but not this one (and a few others). I contacted Gigabyte support and got an answer like "If it's not on the list, it's not supported. We recommend using CPU's from the list". Fine, but not supported because not-tested, or tested and not working? 3 weeks later, the request is still open and not properly answered... Congrats support.
Well, 3 weeks, was actually the time needed for the CPU to arrive from China, at this price I didn't wait and decided I'd take the risk to try by myself ! I could see no reasons why all the family would work but not this one...
and I was right ! It's perfectly working! and as I'm on a summer vacation, I take some time to tell the world about it or at least drop the information here just in case someone else is googling on the same path.
So is it really an upgrade from an overclocked 4930k ? hmmm not an easy answer.
My Geekbench score for the overclocked 4930k was 975 single core and 5884 multicore (all 6 cores running at 4.3 Ghz). The non-overclocked E5 2697v2 is a bit disappointing with scores of 678 single core and 6439 multi-core. That's respectively -30% and +9.5%.
The E5 2697v2 - like most Xeons - is locked and therefore not easily overclockable. I started playing with the bus clock which is the only way to squeeze a little more juice out of it and I got honourable 759 single core and 8480 multicore scores. Respectively -22% and +32% / 4930k oc. But to make things worse the 113 MHz bus clock boost led to some instability with my GPU...
Of course with a non-overclocked 4930k that would be a different story and to be fair I've been using my 4930k at specifications speed for 6 years totally satisfied and just started overclocking it few weeks ago only because I was going to receive the new CPU. It's been running rock steady on overclock since then though.
On the temperature side, under standard/idle use (browsing/video) I reach 40° with the xeon when it was 60° with the oc 4930k. Under heavy load (Cinebench) I would reach 80° with the 4930k and I top a 60° with the Xeon...
Using my system, I definitely cannot feel the -30% penalty on single core performance and for some workloads, it might still be a nice improvement. Compiling Tensorflow was taking about 1h to compile, I will try and see how much it takes now.
Oh but wait, I'm just reading there is the Xeon E5 1680v2 -8 cores, 16 thread - with one interesting particularity in the Xeon line... he's not unlocked and I have the feeling that with this one one could beat the single core performance of the 4930k and probably get close to the multicore performance of the 12 cores E5 2697v2 when overclocked ! See how close they are non overclocked
So I guess I could sell my 4930k and order a E5 1680v2, just to try.... or just stop here and wait...
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