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The Intel Xeon E5 2660 sample arrived in a plain black box. No air cooler for us today anyway – it has to be liquid cooling, to keep temperatures and noise levels to a minimum.
The Xeon E5 is one of the most complex processors that Intel have designed to date. There are 8 physical cores, each of which have hyperthreading support to give a total of 16 threads. The E5 2660 has a massive 20MB Level 3 cache onboard, even more than the Core i7 3960K Extreme Edition. Officially it has support for memory rated to 1,600mhz in a Quad Channel configuration. There are 40 PCIe plus 4 V2 lanes and two high speed QPI links.
The Xeon E7 range of processors are designed for use in 4 socket and higher servers, so the E5 has to cover a wider gamut of deployment situations.
The E5 2660 slots into the middle of the E5 range – clocked at 2.2ghz and with a TDP rating of 95W. The Xeon E5 2600 is the first CPU to truly integrate the IOH functionality for 40 lanes of PCIe Gen3. The E5-2687W is the fastest clocked E5 – an 8 core 16 thread design running at 3.1ghz with a power consumption rating of 150W.
The Quad channel IMC in the Xeon E5 also supports DDR3 LRDIMM to allow for densities up to 768GB – 24 x 32GB modules.. Intel Turbo Boost 2.0 is incorporated which helps improve performance while maintaining a dynamic, efficient power curve.
That is one insane motherboard. very impressive featureset. not that expensive either, I was factoring in £400 before I got to the conclusion.
That GSKILL ares memory looks like it was made for the board.
Good results, not for me, but I can appreciate the workstation desire for this. over £1,000 for the chip puts it firmly in the market for rendering and video work.
Shame they cant be overclocked, but I see their more expensive Xeon’s cost quite a bit extra so wouldnt make much sense for them logistically.
These are great chips. they will always be locked out. the pro market doesn’t want unlocked chips, instability ALWAYS occurs with overclocking.
Still I understand your point. would be nice to see performance at 4.5ghz. would be interested myself to see the headroom. 8 cores might heat up more than the 6 core 3960 and 3930. although im sure 4.5ghz would be possible with the H100.
mega review Zardon – ive always loved Xeon processors. we adopted 6 of the new E5 2670 in our business for the network and serving clients.
Our IT guys are always singing their praises for being 100% solid. personally im not into overclocking so id be happy with one of these, if I could justify the cost. 3930 is next on my list, but ill run it stock speeds.
Is the C606 chipset also suitable for a normal non-xeon build? I am planning on using this board for a future build since it is cheaper than most high-end X79 board, and I don’t really trust the first generation of X79 boards.
This board works with 2011 slot processors, including the 3930 and 3960, yes.