Xeon or i7? What's best for dedicated server?

[Tankbuster 1746]

Guys,

I was wondering if any server admins, or indeed people who understand how these things work under the bonnet have any opinions?

Assuming these boxes are all remote and the only access is via remote desktop and they are running Server 2008 or 2012. Given roughly equivalent specs, how does a Xeon match up to an i7 in terms of performance?

By way of an example, how does my Dell R210 vii E3-1270 4x 3.4Ghz with 12 GB of RAM stack up against a Intel Core i7 3770 K @3.5GHz.

My opinion is that the Xeon is great for webservers. It's excellent at taking in a load of traffic, rendering a webpage and chucking the result back out. The i7, however, is better at the intense computational and memory moving tasks that required to be a dedicated server.

Tanky -Paul-

[killswitch 19]

Your E3-1270 is a Sandy Bridge-era socket 1155 processor which means that it is comparable to an i7-2600 (or i7-2600K) in performance (both the 1270 and the 2600K are four-core, hyperthreaded Sandy Bridges at 3.4 GHz).

The i7-3770K is an Ivy Bridge CPU and the corresponding Xeon model would be an E3-1270 v2 (Ivy Bridge architecture @3.5GHz).

Given roughly equivalent specs, how does a Xeon match up to an i7 in terms of performance?

The Xeon variant and the i7 variant of the same-generation CPU architectures are trivially exactly equivalent, CPU performance wise. The difference is that the i7 has a few features disabled (eg ECC) due to nickel and diming market segmentation by Intel.

For your example, comparing the E3-1270 with the i7-3770K, the i7 will be faster due to being clocked higher and it being a later-gen CPU architecture.

Edited December 14, 2013 by Killswitch

[Ezcoo 47]

Agree with Killswitch,

I'd suggest getting i5-4670k or i7-4770k (they're newest and fastest gen, Haswell, while eg. i7-3770k is little slower previous gen Ivy Bridge), putting effort to cooling (decent cooler and good airflow in case) and overclocking to ~4,5 GHz it to get best performance. Fast (>2000 MHz) DDR3 might help with performance too, some have got remarkable boost from it while some haven't.

Edit: Oh, and for the best performance I'd put the game and the server OS on SSD, game could be also put on RAMDisk but it's not necessary at all especially if the game is already on SSD.

[Tankbuster 1746]

The i7-3770K is an Ivy Bridge CPU and the corresponding Xeon model would be an E3-1270 v2 (Ivy Bridge architecture @3.5GHz).

The Xeon is a V2. It just came out as vii when I pasted it in.

---------- Post added at 17:47 ---------- Previous post was at 17:45 ----------

The Xeon variant and the i7 variant of the same-generation CPU architectures are trivially exactly equivalent, CPU performance wise. .

Yes, this is why I am asking the question. :)

---------- Post added at 17:49 ---------- Previous post was at 17:47 ----------

Agree with Killswitch,

I'd suggest getting i5-4670k or i7-4770k (they're newest and fastest gen, Haswell, while eg. i7-3770k is little slower previous gen Ivy Bridge), putting effort to cooling (decent cooler and good airflow in case) and overclocking to ~4,5 GHz it to get best performance. Fast (>2000 MHz) DDR3 might help with performance too, some have got remarkable boost from it while some haven't.

OK, so in the example I've given, the i7 is better but only because it's a newer gen. These are both rack servers so cooling is what it is.

---------- Post added at 17:51 ---------- Previous post was at 17:49 ----------

I'd put the game and the server OS on SSD,

Really? A server isn't moving large texture or model files around. Does it get much benefit from an SSD? I guess it might be nice to write these massive RPT files to them :)

[Ezcoo 47]

Ah, if you have to select between those two, I'd definitely get the i7-3770k then as it's newer gen and thus faster, like Killswitch said. I don't have personal experience from running server on SSD (or RAMDisk) but my friend who's quite experienced Arma server admin says that you do benefit from those - especially if you don't disable that RPT file writing.

[killswitch 19]

OK, so in the example I've given, the i7 is better but only because it's a newer gen.

Yes, but only if we take the example as a comparison between an E3-1270 and an i7-3770K. However, if, as you noted, the Dell R210 actually has an E3-1270 v2 the CPU:s are same-gen. Then, the 1270 v2 may be preferable for a remote server since it probably sits in a more, shall we say "enterprise:y" machine, with ECC memory and other RAS features.

Edited December 14, 2013 by Killswitch

[Hud Dorph 22]

Also bear in mind that a3-server likes Mhz and the i7-3770k are very nice at overclocking -

i seem to remember that u (like me) run your server on your own box.

But dont expect to run certain coop missions on high player counts ..... you know what im talking about :eek:

[Tankbuster 1746]

Dorph;2578257']Also bear in mind that a3-server likes Mhz and the i7-3770k are very nice at overclocking -

i seem to remember that u (like me) run your server on your own box.

I run a test server occasionally on my own machine here, but the one I'm asking about is a rack machine.

[JenJen14 11]

I would use a server based processor and a motherboard that supports ECC RAM.

Would be trading a tiny bit of processor speed for server grade components and error checking.