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Wondering if anyone's tried these for boxing? I ask, because while looking around on eBay I found a reputable dealer that I have experience with selling Intel Xeon E5-2630L v3, an 8 Core, 16 Thread part for $200 (normally over $600).
I don't have a lot of experience with Xeon's myself, so thought I'd ask. At that price, I could see the temptation, at least for someone looking to ten box.
Xeon's have been tried. The issue with them is that the GHz can be a bit low. Threads/Cores are great for applications that can take advantage of them, but games, even though they can take advantage of multiple threads, generally perform extremely well with the GHz increase over the core count.
You raise a very interesting point, I hadn't noticed the GHz on those. Interesting too looking at the 5820 vs 6700k as well 3.3 vs 4.0 GHz respectively. I really wish Intel would learn to count past 4.
Once you hit the 3GHz mark it seems to matter less, and that's where the core count comes in. No idea why, but this seems to be about the threshold for a single core to provide enough computational ability for a current game engine to run efficiently. So between the 5820/6700k, then the 5820 actually comes out quite good for multiboxing purposes, although the 4GHz of the 6700k does look mighty-mighty.
So going back to Xeons this means that the following are quite decent:
Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-4655 v3 (30M Cache, 2.90 GHz) 6 cores
Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2687W v3 (25M Cache, 3.10 GHz) 10 cores
Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2667 v3 (20M Cache, 3.20 GHz) 8 cores
Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2643 v3 (20M Cache, 3.40 GHz) 6 cores
Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2623 v3 (10M Cache, 3.00 GHz) 4 cores
Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-1630 v3 (10M Cache, 3.70 GHz) 4 cores
Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-1650 v3 (15M Cache, 3.50 GHz) 6 cores
Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-1660 v3 (20M Cache, 3.00 GHz) 8 cores
Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-1680 v3 (20M Cache, 3.20 GHz) 8 cores
Of those, The 4655 is interesting because you can have 4 of them. Other than that, it is borderline, especially because you're not that much better off than having dual 2687W's
The 26xx are all nice, but the 2623 is kind of pointless unless you can get two of them and the mobo/ram etc cheaper than a 5690x setup. T
The 16xx series are all competing with the cost of a 5690x/5820 or even a 6700/4790 setup. The only reason you'd go the Xeon route for these would be the platform provides you something else, like > 64GB RAM/ECC/vPro/Demand Based Switching. All of which seem unlikely for gaming purposes on max 8+8HT cores (although the 1680 is faster than a 5960x, so that 0.2GHz may be what does is for you, but if you're that close to the line that you need that extra 200MHz, then perhaps the extra $700 (rrp) could be better spent).
Mind you the cost of the platforms for some of these would be prohibitive too. A dual CPU setup is easier to get (than 4) as most "workstation" boards will be dual socket. I were to go down this path, I'd probably look at dual 2667's or 2687's, but then again, it may be cheaper to get two complete 5960x setups and just play multi-computer with ISBoxer.
As has been stated, Xeons are pretty useless unless you can somehow avoid all the cost that is actually involved,because in order to get a Xeon that can compete with the desktop counterpart in terms of speed, you'll be paying an arm and a leg (E5-1680v3 @ $1,700 vs 5960X @ $1,000). In addition to that, cannot overclock Xeons, so it's not as if you can grab a cheap one, pump a bunch of voltage into it, and add 1GHz to its stock clockspeed--It just no longer works that way. Something like the 5960X has a turbo frequency of 3.5GHz, which it's likely going to sit at with no problem unless it runs into some sort of thermal issue, but it's also likely that you can push the chip to 4GHz with little effort, making it even better (in the areas that we would need it) than the $1,700 E5-1680.