Another question about building a new computer

[daniel71]

I found a listing on E-Bay for an Intel Xeon E5-2698 v4 Broadwell-EP CPU 2.1GHz 20-Core ES Processor 50M 135W QK11 that I could get for about the same price as an Intel E5-2650 v4 retail box cpu but the E5-2698 is a engineered sample, does anybody have experience with ES cpus do they work well? They claim stepping is same as retail and speed is only 2.1 ghz instead of 2.2 as retail chip. Tempted to buy this cpu but concerned about reliability of ES cpu's. Thanks Daniel

[jdart]

E5s are the main line Xeon chips used in servers in workstations. I have a lot of experience with them .. they are high performance and reliable but the high-end ones are very expensive. The E5-2600 v4 series was just released for shipment, so this is why you are seeing an engineering sample for sale. It might be a good deal but there will be no warranty on it. The officially released chips are shipping now but may still be a bit scarce.

--Jon

[matthewlai]

I found a listing on E-Bay for an Intel Xeon E5-2698 v4 Broadwell-EP CPU 2.1GHz 20-Core ES Processor 50M 135W QK11 that I could get for about the same price as an Intel E5-2650 v4 retail box cpu but the E5-2698 is a engineered sample, does anybody have experience with ES cpus do they work well? They claim stepping is same as retail and speed is only 2.1 ghz instead of 2.2 as retail chip. Tempted to buy this cpu but concerned about reliability of ES cpu's. Thanks Daniel

I have not used an ES CPU, but from what I heard, they are basically a lottery.

If you are lucky, you can have an ES that's very close to the retail version with maybe just a bit lower clock speed.

If you are unlucky, you can have an early ES with significant problems like some instructions producing wrong results.

Or anywhere in-between.

When a company like Intel designs a new CPU, they will get the new sample chips in several iterations, making changes and tweaks between them, until they are happy with what they have, and start mass-producing that version.

An ES is just a sample chip that was stolen from Intel from somewhere along the pipeline. It could be from any iteration.

I personally wouldn't bother with them.

[JJJ]

Sorry to be off topic.

Matthew, just resume giraffe plz, thanks.