Hey guys, Jarrod here and today I’m going to show you how I upgraded the CPU in my desktop
to 6 cores for just $26!
For almost 7 years now I’ve been running a first generation Intel i7 950 quad core
CPU at 3GHz.
For the most part it’s been fine for me, I’ve only started to notice issues over
the last year or two while I’ve been creating videos, as rendering can take quite a long
time.
While I’m very keen to upgrade to a more up to date computer, I’m still playing the
waiting game, as Intel recently launched Skylake-X, but more interestingly AMD is about to launch
Threadripper, so until the new CPUs are available and I can decide what to get, I wanted to
see if I could upgrade what I have on the cheap.
My current 45nm CPU uses socket 1366, and after some investigation I found that the
socket also supported slightly newer 32nm Xeon CPUs with up to 6 cores.
So I hit up Ebay to see what other CPUs that use socket 1366 were available.
In the end I settled on the Intel Xeon X5650, which is a 6 core CPU at 2.66GHz that can
turbo up to 3.06GHz.
It’s clocked a little slower than my i7, but it has 50% more cores.
At just $26 delivered from China I just had to know how it performed.
A couple of weeks later my cheap Xeon arrived and I started running a ton of benchmarks,
let’s take a look at the results and find out how the $27 hex core CPU goes against
my quad core i7.
In Cinebench the i7 got a score of 487, while the Xeon got a higher result of 646 which
was expected as this test really favours more cores.
I’ve used Adobe Premiere to render my recent 970m vs 1050Ti video at 1080p which is just
under 5 minutes long.
The i7 CPU completed the task in 13 minutes and 33 seconds, while the Xeon chip completed
the same task a little quicker at 12 minutes and 12 seconds, so not much of an increase
but still nice to have.
I’ve used Handbrake to encode a 500mb MP4 video file that I recorded from 1080p to 720p.
The i7 completed the task at a rate of 22 frames per second, while the Xeon was ahead
at 29 frames per second, but again this test favours multicore cores.
Next I ran the 7-Zip benchmark with a 16mb dictionary, the i7 received a score of 17,006
while the Xeon performed a bit better with a score of 22,372, so we can see the extra
cores are improving overall compression and decompression speeds.
Geekbench 4 performs both single threaded and multicore tests, we can see here that
the i7 CPU performed slightly better in the single core test, which is to be expected
as it’s running at a higher clock speed than the Xeon.
In the multicore test however the Xeon pushes out in front as expected owing to those extra
cores.
In the Passmark CPU benchmark the Xeon CPU came out ahead again in all tests, except
of course the single threaded test as expected just like before.
In the Corona benchmark the full image was rendered in just under 7 minutes with the
i7, while the Xeon completed the same task in just over 5 minutes, so almost a 2 minute
difference there.
Next we’re going to take a look at some more graphically focussed benchmarks, as well
as some games.
For reference I’m using an AMD 6990 graphics card in the PC, so let’s see how much difference
the slower clocked Xeon makes im games.
In Heaven benchmark with the quality set to medium, tessellation on moderate, with anti
aliasing set to 2, the Xeon CPU performed almost 1 frame per second better.
In Valley benchmark with the quality set to medium and anti aliasing on 2, the Xeon CPU
actually performed 5 frames per second worse compared to the i7.
In the 3DMark Skydiver benchmark the Xeon CPU came out slightly ahead with just over
17,000 points while the i7 was around the 15,500 mark.
In Ashes of the Singularity the i7 CPU scored 16.5 frames per second while the Xeon was
only slightly behind at 15.6 frames per second, so hardly much difference, both aren’t really
playable in any case.
In the Witcher 3 with medium settings both CPUs performed at 45 frames per second, so
basically the same which was interesting.
Based on all of these benchmarks, on average the 6 core X5650 Xeon CPU performed 13% better
than the i7 950 quad core CPU.
I expected the better single core performance of the i7 to give it better gaming results,
however it seems that the slightly slower Xeon CPU is still a match for it.
My benchmarks were done with stock speeds, no overclocking has been done at this stage,
however I’m interested in testing this in the future, as from what I’ve read it should
be possible to overclock the Xeon chip above 4GHz, so that could change things quite a
bit.
There are slightly faster clocked versions of this CPU available, the X5670 and X5690
for instance, however they cost quite a lot more, more than double in some cases, so I
figured it’d be better price to performance to get this 2.6GHz one and overclock it later
instead.
In terms of temperatures the Xeon chip actually ran cooler, both at idle and under full load.
Both CPUs were cooled by my Coolermaster V10 cooler, which did a pretty good job, so I
think we’ve got enough cooling capacity to try overclocking and get even more value
in the future.
In general the Xeon CPU does a pretty good job at keeping up with the i7.
The Xeon obviously dominates in multicore workloads as it has 50% more CPU cores, however
even though it’s clocked slower than the i7 it still does quite well in single threaded
tests.
The small handful of games and graphical benchmarks even showed that it doesn’t make that much
practical difference, so I’m going to stick with the 6 core Xeon as it gives me a small
boost in various productivity use cases such as video rendering with Adobe Premiere.
So what do you guys think about my cheap upgrade to 6 CPU cores?
I think that low priced Xeon CPUs offer a cheap upgrade path, potentially allowing you
to get more life from an otherwise outdated computer.
Let me know if you’ve picked up any cheap Xeon CPUs for your PC and how they perform
down in the comments, and leave a like on the video if you found the information useful.
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one.