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Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

The lack of ECC in consumer grade CPUs is irritating, because when AMD was viable, they had ECC support in most of their CPUs (but you had to make sure the motherboard supported it). You could use a random AMD CPU + a motherboard supporting ECC & be sure of your data integrity.

These days I pay the "server" tax on the machines I build, buying Xeons just to get ECC. If they supported ECC, a normal i5 / i7 would probably be plenty, and the build would be less of a PITA as there would be more and cheaper motherboard choices with workstation basics like audio on board.

And yes, I use ZFS, and am otherwise pretty paranoid..

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The suitability of i5/i7 for most workloads hasnt gone unnoticed at Intel. I expect future i5/i7 to be gimped with respect to IO connectivity to ensure that people doing real computation continue to pay the Xeon tax. For reference see the bits about pcie lanes at http://semiaccurate.com/2015/08/05/intel-plays-press-skylake... . Another place where this shows up is the AVX 512 fiasco where AVX 512 is missing from consumer chips.

Intel has some of the best engineers in the world and make exceptional products. I wish the beancounters at Intel were a bit less into market segmentation.

There are a few non-Xeon Intel CPUs supporting ECC: http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?s=t&RetailSkuAvailable=...

Building some box with ECC memory using Intel is doable for a reasonable price. You don't need Xeon's for that.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16x6xeENVLNySuVxpjfLx...

Notice the two tabs for CPUs and Motherboards.

But as I see it, for Intel CPUs you can only use the rather slow ones (i3, Pentium, Celeron), not i5 or i7.

If you don't mind buying slightly old and power hungry stuff, server grade hardware is actually much cheaper.

24GB DDR2 ECC RAM - £16 (I was VERY lucky to get this one) 2x Xeon X5450 - £22 Intel S5000PALR Motherboard - £30

These specs are roughly equivalent to a 2008 mac pro, which costs around £500.

Yeah, used HP Z600/Z800 workstations (dual hexacore Xeons and everything) go really cheap these days...

Where do you get them from? I use a HP workstation at work, and I'm going to be sad to leave it when I leave my current job.

eBay is a good place to go:

http://www.ebay.de/itm/HP-Z800-Workstation-2-x-Xeon-6-Core-X...

The Lenovo Thinkstation C20 is also a good dual Xeon choice if you can live with a 24GB RAM limit (it's also very compact).

There's also specialized resellers like ITSCO.de and ESM-Computer in Germany (they ship EU-wide).

For ~$1000, a dual X5670 workstation with 12 ECC RAM slots, I think it's an excellent deal.

If you want something newer, the Z820/Z620 are a good choice, they should start rapidly dropping in price soon enough.

These computers are designed extremely well (the 800+ Watt PSUs alone are eons ahead of anything on the consumer market), but even in the rare cases they break the parts are cheap (a replacement system board for ~$100, older but still powerful Xeons also drop in price insanely fast).

I don't know why people buy new midrange PCs for the same price anymore, unless they need the latest processors :-)

Thanks very much for this. It's the Z620 I'm using at the moment, and I think it's excellent. Such a productive machine. Very nice internals too, logically laid out and seems like it'd be easy to upgrade in future.

The performance difference between Westmere (X5000 series in the Z600/Z800) and Sandy Bridge (E5 used in the Z620) looks negligible.

The high end X5670 or X5690 should outperform all but the top first gen Xeon E5.

It uses more power at idle, but the upfront cost is almost halved at the moment...

I'd say you should get a unit with the highest end processors you can find (it will end up way cheaper than upgrading them) and preferably with the 1100 Watt PSU, the rest can be upgraded later and you should have plenty of power for anything (dual GTX 9xx for gaming and stuff :-))

That's not correct. Sandy Bridge was a huge performance jump over Westmere, with ~50% performance for most applications on equivalent models between these two generations. A first gen E5 2640 should handily outperform the X5690, and a current gen (v3) E5 2620 would even outperform that. http://cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

Obviously, the upfront cost of the older hardware is still better value when ignoring power consumption, but the v3 will also support much more and faster RAM, PCI-E 3.0, USB 3.0, and other newer technologies which will matter more as time goes on. You'll also have the option of a CPU only upgrade to higher end E5 v3's or even E5 v4's at a later point in time when those CPU models are more affordable.

I totally missed the fact that the HP Z620/820 supports v2 and v3 E5s. That definitely makes it a better choice for future upgrades.

The X5690 is comparable to the first generation E5-2640 (slightly slower), and the X5670 is comparable to the E5-2620.

Even the first gen E5 has the AVX instruction set, 4 memory channels (vs 3 for the Westmere-EP) and a faster QPI, so it might have better performance in certain applications.

Sorry, I didn't meant to imply the Z620/820 supports v3. Just pointing out that the performance jump in Sandy Bridge was significant.

v1 and v2 are socket compatible, but v3 is not socket compatible with the earlier versions, but will likely be compatible with v4 (Intel socket changes usually happen only every other generation). I'd suggest going all new with even a low end E5 2620v3 if you can, which you could for everything other than the GPUs for under 1700 (based on a Supermicro workstation build).

What's the power cost per year compared to modern stuff?

Are there benchmarks comparing those X56nn with modern E5-nnnns ?

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