Is a Xeon build a good idea?


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I currently run unRAID with a Ryzen 1700 setup. It's stable (if I disable C-states) and for my day-to-day stuff, it works. 

However, I have recently started tinkering with the idea, of creating a server that's powerful enough to handle two simultaneous gaming sessions.

I am mainly using Docker containers (Sonarr, Radarr, Plex etc) and a few Windows VMs for learning purposes. So while not super resource heavy, I doubt that my single Ryzen CPU will handle two additional Windows 10 gaming machines. 

 

So I looked into my possibilities and I saw a guy selling 2 Intel Xeon E5-2680v2 (10 cores, 20 threads) for $400 in Europe. 

The Passmark score is higher than my current Ryzen CPU (for single core as well), but I am wondering if the lower clock speed is going to be a hinderance?

I plan to allocate 6 cores for each gaming VM. 

 

If it sounds like a decent idea, can you recommend a motherboard as well? 

I was hoping to get the following features: 

PWM connections for fans

WoL

IPMI/iDRAC/iLO/etc.

Maybe an extra PCI slot for a quad NIC.

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On 9/21/2019 at 6:43 PM, diskplace said:

I currently run unRAID with a Ryzen 1700 setup. It's stable (if I disable C-states) and for my day-to-day stuff, it works. 

However, I have recently started tinkering with the idea, of creating a server that's powerful enough to handle two simultaneous gaming sessions.

I am mainly using Docker containers (Sonarr, Radarr, Plex etc) and a few Windows VMs for learning purposes. So while not super resource heavy, I doubt that my single Ryzen CPU will handle two additional Windows 10 gaming machines. 

 

So I looked into my possibilities and I saw a guy selling 2 Intel Xeon E5-2680v2 (10 cores, 20 threads) for $400 in Europe. 

The Passmark score is higher than my current Ryzen CPU (for single core as well), but I am wondering if the lower clock speed is going to be a hinderance?

I plan to allocate 6 cores for each gaming VM. 

 

If it sounds like a decent idea, can you recommend a motherboard as well? 

I was hoping to get the following features: 

PWM connections for fans

WoL

IPMI/iDRAC/iLO/etc.

Maybe an extra PCI slot for a quad NIC.

would you be interested in a EP2C602-4L/D16, 2x E5-2690 , 64gb ECC memory ?

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