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Any interest in the new Skylake E3 (V5) based servers?
randvegeta
Member, Host Rep
Hello all.
Just ordered a batch of 16 servers running on the new Skylake Xeon E3-1200v5 series CPUs and DDR4 ECC RAM.
I was curious if people would generally prefer the V5 over the V3 and V4 models more commonly available.
The like for like models seem pretty evenly matched. The E3-1230v3 and v5 models for example have the same TDP, cache, number of cores, and both are hyperthreaded. All v5 models seem to be 0.1Ghz 'faster' than their v3 counterparts which so far suggests that performance should only be marginally better between these 2 generations. The big difference however is that the v5 support DDR4 and upto 64GB RAM.
So what would be your preference? The v3 or v5 or don't care? I see this being more popular among VPS providers. The E3 gives the E5 a run for its money with typically better performance per dollar. With support for 64GB RAM, it literally doubles the number of VPS a node can run. But for not VPS providers, does anyone care?
Interested to see hear your thoughts!
Comments
Personally I'd prefer the v3 for the reason that it allows only 32gb of ram. If ram isn't oversold that means more cpu cycles for me.
yeah!
Yep just set up 2 of these for VPS offers, 64gb ram limit really is good
Yup, but very expensive. Most DCs I've seen charges $30 per 16Gb upgrade on the new v5.
They are proving to be quite popular.
Yup, hugely popular with us.
Fantastic devices!
Really? I have not found the new v5s to be significantly more expensive. The CPU and motherboards are only a fraction more than the v3 models.
DDR3 prices are falling like a stone, so they are cheaper than DDR4 now.. but when you can load up 64GB in a single server, you save not having to buy 2 servers of 32GB RAM. And if you only have 16GB - 32GB DDR4, the overall increase in price over the v3 is really not that high.
Well if you add more RAM, there is even less chance the RAM will be oversold....
We've been running free VPS for a while, and we cram a lot of clients in a single node (60+). And these are Xen VMs, not OpenVZ containers, so the overhead is much larger. 60 x VMs and the CPU is idle most of the time. Rarely see the CPU usage go over 20%. So the CPU is severally under utilized.
Our paid nodes all have VPS with much more RAM so we normally don't have more than 20 VMs running. And again, CPU usage is almost nil. So the limiting factor is really the RAM. In the past, if you wanted more than 32GB RAM, you basically had to go for E5s. But E5s cost more than an equivalent E3, and so does the motherboard. So to build a single E5 server with 64 or even 128 GB RAM would actually cost more than building 3 smaller E3 servers with 32GB RAM each. So it still made sense to build E3 nodes.
So I think for VPS providers, the new v5 CPUs should be quite popular and with little increase in price compared to v3.
after seeing the benchmarks it's not worth it over the v3's
or X
You mean like the X5600 series? Why would you go for those? They use a ton of power, don't have great performance and are already 6+ years old. It's not really a long term viable option.
The E3 v2 and v3 servers typically uses about 0.2amps at idle and about 0.3 - 0.4 at full load depending on the number of disks and particular CPU model installed.
I have not seen any X5600 series CPU use less than 0.5amps at idle and can easily push 1amp+ if fully utilized and loaded with the same amount of RAM and disks.
I can't see any situation (other than being able to handle more RAM) where an X5677 for example would ever be better than an E3-1230v3.
And in Hong Kong, where we are based, the additional power consumption would cost at least US$18 /month more. So over the year, it would be $216 more... But HK electricity isn't exactly cheap, and we have to worry about cooling more than in say.. Northern Europe. So maybe it's economical in other places. But I don't see it working very well in HK...