Hi everyone,

 

I've been discussing some computer building with a buddy of mine.  He's not very much into unraid building, but he's very knowledgeable on building computers.  I've been discussing hardware with him.  He keeps encouraging me to wait for the new haswell processors.  He's saying that the cost of the current ivy bridge processors won't decrease and it'll be approximately the same to buy the haswells.  I did see that we can expect the haswell xeon e3's in June and supermicro is working on motherboards for them.

 

I was planning on building an ESXI build and I was just going to by a Xeon E3 Ivy Bridge and a supermicro motherboard.

 

What do you guys think?  Is it worth the wait?  Will the cost really be comparable to what the current hardware costs?

If you're not in a rush then wait. Performance isn't increased significantly though, about a 10% improvement with Haswell. Keep in mind though Intel hasn't even announced a release time frame for them yet, they've simply announced they are coming. I haven't seen that June release you mentioned anywhere.

 

As for price unless Intel breaks with what it traditionally does they will be priced at the same level as current parts that are available. You might be able to find a small discount on the Ivy parts when Haswell parts are available but not much. For instance nearly a year after Ivy's release the Sandy Bridge i3-2120 is still only going for $5 less than the Ivy equivalent, the i3-3220, on Newegg.

The biggest improvement in the Haswell CPUs is in the graphics core -- which is not a factor for a server.

 

The CPU benchmarks available now show a 5-10% improvement ... probably not, in my view, worth waiting for.    If I was building an ESXi server in the next few months, I'd use a mature Ivy Bridge motherboard (e.g. SuperMicro X9SCM-iiF )  with an E3-1230v2

 

On the other hand, 5%-10% is indeed a bump => but if you're going to wait, I'd wait until ~ 90 days after the Haswell boards start shipping so any motherboard issues are fixed in a 2nd rev or newer BIOS.  [but I seriously doubt you'd notice the difference between this system and a 1230v2  ]