eVGA Classified SR-2 Motherboard

[Sajuuk]

Has anyone actually gamed on server class CPUs before? I realise they are made from the same cores as the consumer chips, but I thought they had a different instruction set which limited their useability for tasks such as gaming?

No, no, no, no and NO!

[Khemikal]

My daily/gaming rig is a server class processor (Intel E3110 overclocked to 4.2GHz). It runs everything perfectly fine. The general changes the server chips have are lower power consumption, requiring ECC memory, and of course price/GHz. Are there other changes yes, but if you are looking at those chips, you probably know what they have that the others dont, and why you would or wouldn't need those features (talking Itanium class chips).

[MiRai]

Has anyone actually gamed on server class CPUs before? I realise they are made from the same cores as the consumer chips, but I thought they had a different instruction set which limited their useability for tasks such as gaming?

Lax runs an older [by today's standards] dual processor Xeon system with 8 physical cores and his performance is pretty damn good.

[Oswyn]

Just installed a gaming partition on my dual Istanbul Opteron system with 12 total physical cores. Only have 8GB of RDDR2 at the moment.. The board does have dual x16 PCIe - I've got one 4870X2 in it for now..

[Noids]

Lax runs an older [by today's standards] dual processor Xeon system with 8 physical cores and his performance is pretty damn good.

Good to know

No, no, no, no and NO!

ummm... so I take it that's a no then

[Khemikal]

Good to know



ummm... so I take it that's a no then

There is NOTHING wrong with gaming on a server processor. I have been doing it for a little over a year. Just do research and make sure you are getting the proper chip. Some of them run at lower cpu speeds and don't have the multipliers to overclock them as high as normal desktop chips. They do this to lower the power the chip requires to run, thus helping them label the chips as 'low power/eco friendly/green'.

http://hwbot.org/community/submissio...40_5104.33_mhz 940 i7 normal desktop
http://hwbot.org/community/submissio...40_5667.02_mhz W3540 (server equivalent to the 940)

And, as I have just shown one instance, sometimes the server chips ARE better for overclocking. Just as my E3110 is the exact same thing as an E8400, there are i7 counterparts too (W3520 vs 920, W3540 vs 940, X3460 vs 860, etc) . You can use these just like you could use any normal desktop version. You are going to pay more to get a server chip, but that really is the only difference.

As noted though, make sure you do the research and get the proper chip. Some will run the same clock speed but are designed for multiple cpu configurations and those generally require ECC ram which is once again more expensive and not all normal desktop motherboards support ECC.

With that said. Unless you are doing serious overclocking (dry ice, liquid nitrogen, liquid helium) I would stick with the normal desktop chips to save you money. You will not see any difference between the server and the desktop versions of these chips at daily speeds.