Who needs 12-Cores? What's in my personal rig?

2017 Workstation Tour

But first... What am I drinking?

This time we're heading to Eugene (OR) for a Falling Sky Dreadnut Stout. (I said porter at the end of the video... it was 11pm). A lightweight when it comes to craft dark beers at only 6.2%. It makes up for the lack of ABV with a rich and deep flavor. I could drink this all year.

I built this machine in May of 2016. X99 had matured to a point I was happy with, and my x58 system was getting a little long in the tooth. It was time for a new build.

On the CPU side, I was ready to take the plunge into high core and thread count CPUs. I ran a 6-Core Xeon in my x58 system, and wasn’t really happy with the 6 or 8-core offerings on x99. That’s when I found an Intel engineering sample on eBay. This is a late sample of the E5-2680 V3 CPU, which has 12-cores, 24-threads, a base clock of 2.4GHz with Turbo up to 3.2GHz. It sports 30MB of L3 cache and a 120W TDP.

Here are the full specs as the workstation sits today. I’ll also provide a list of parts in the video description. Again, this is not a recommended build guide. These Intel ES CPUs are fairly hard to get, may not work in your system, and are completely unsupported by Intel. They’re usually given out to hardware manufacturers or reviewers. I took a gamble and won. Your results may vary.

By the way, I have not named this system. If you have any suggestions, leave them in the comments down below. I might pick one.


MSI X99A Raider ATX Motherboard
Intel Xeon E5-2680 v3 (ES) 2.4GHz 12C/24T
32GB (8x 4GB) Kingston HyperX 2,133MHz DDR4
EVGA GTX 1080 FTW 8GB (OC to 2,113MHz)
Samsung 840 Evo 1TB SSD
EVGA 850 GQ 80+ Gold
420mm + 280mm Radiators
XSPC D5 Photon 170 Res + D5 Vario Pump
Alphacool NexXxos XP3 CPU Block
Alphacool NexXxos GPX-N 1080 Block
Alphacool Fittings
¾” Flex Tubing

The thought on everyone’s mind is probably “I’m sure that 2.4GHz clock is a total bottleneck.” Putting it bluntly… you’re wrong.

This isn’t a gaming system. I call it a workstation for a reason. I expect it to do my professional tasks first, while still having some gaming chops. Is a 7700k faster in gaming? Definitely. Do I care? Not in the least, and neither should you. There’s always something better out there. But if your computer does what you want it to do, that’s the only result you should care about. And I think this performs quite well.

Multi-core workload enables systems to do much more than just a single task at a time. Do you want to stream and play games at the same time? Done. Want to virtualize a few systems while not losing power on your workstation? Done. Want to game while rendering a video? Done.

GTA 5 had some recorded stutters down into the 20s, but I was not seeing that while playing. I tested again with AA disabled, and got far different result. 96FPS on average, 1% of 68FPS and a 0.1% of 62FPS. I doubt AA was causing drops that severe, but didn't have time to retest after shooting. I might investigate this again.

Taking a risk on a sketchy Chinese reseller of an Intel ES chip on eBay allowed me to experience what this number of threads can do on a gaming system as well as a workstation nearly 18 months before Threadripper or i9 CPUs were released. And most features that exist on high end enthusiast hardware eventually trickles their way down to consumer systems. Especially when competition is as fierce as it is right now. What with Coffee Lake and Zen 2 CPUs on the horizon, expect the GHz race we saw in the 90s and first half of the 0ts, to evolve into core count and software optimization wars in the years to come.

3rd Party Benchmarks:

i7-5960x + i7-5820k Cinebench Scores: https://www.kitguru.net/components/cp...

E5-2680v3 Cinebench: http://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-inte...

Music by:

Lobby Time Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
On the Ground Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...