Xeon vs. i7

[bluedogok]

I run Revit on a dual-Xeon at work (Nvidia Quadro 4000, 32GB, SSD) Core i7's at home. Max works better on Xeons because it addresses multiple cores and the Xeon has more, Revit 2014 doesn't (yet).

In Austin we moved from Dell to Boxx Technologies systems (they were about a half mile from our office at the time) and they seemed to run much better because they were made for the higher end work and cheaper than the higher end Dell computers with much less crap software loaded on them. You can get either Core i7 or Xeon with Boxx.

[Kim-n-Dean]

I run Revit on a dual-Xeon at work (Nvidia Quadro 4000, 32GB, SSD) Core i7's at home. Max works better on Xeons because it addresses multiple cores and the Xeon has more, Revit 2014 doesn't (yet).

In Austin we moved from Dell to Boxx Technologies systems (they were about a half mile from our office at the time) and they seemed to run much better because they were made for the higher end work and cheaper than the higher end Dell computers with much less crap software loaded on them. You can get either Core i7 or Xeon with Boxx.

I agree! I hate all the extra crap Dell sends installed. The first thing I do when I buy a Dell is reformat and install only the stuff I want. Then, I make an image and that's my "recovery" to how it was delivered.

Damn! I got excite about Boxx, checked them out and they have not even half the machine Dell does for $500 more. One of Boxx's machines is $19,000. You can get the same from Dell for $8,500. Oh well...

[Kim-n-Dean]

Got my new machine the other day and shit, it freakin' hauls ass!!!

Xeon E5-2630 v2 - 6 Core
32 Gigs of DDR3 ECC 1866MHz RAM
Nvidia Quadro K4000 w/ 3Gigs of RAM Video Card

...and to answer my own question, the reason Xeons are so expensive is they are server CPU's. The QA is considerably higher than on regular CPU's, they are designed to run at 100% load 24/7 and they support ECC RAM.

I can run six instances of AutoCAD, four instances of Design Review, open ten .PDF's and run Solid Works all at the same time and it doesn't even phase this box! It is amazing!

[birchyboy]

Got my new machine the other day and shit, it freakin' hauls ass!!!

Xeon E5-2630 v2 - 6 Core
32 Gigs of DDR3 ECC 1866MHz RAM
Nvidia Quadro K4000 w/ 3Gigs of RAM Video Card

...and to answer my own question, the reason Xeons are so expensive is they are server CPU's. The QA is considerably higher than on regular CPU's, they are designed to run at 100% load 24/7 and they support ECC RAM.

I can run six instances of AutoCAD, four instances of Design Review, open ten .PDF's and run Solid Works all at the same time and it doesn't even phase this box! It is amazing!

That's quite the machine. Now throw some porn at it and see how it does.

[birchyboy]

As an update to this topic, I'm in the midst of testing machines for the same actuary. The baseline machine is a 3 year old Dell Optiplex 990 with an i7-2600 (3.4ghz) processor, 16gb of ram and 1TB drive. The other machine is a Dell Precision T5600 with dual Xeon E5-2620 procs (2ghz), 8gb ram and a 500gb drive.

The damned i7 machine is kicking the Xeon's ass as far as Excel is concerned. A simple test, using macros, is to open and save an Excel workbook that is 124mb in size. The times are recorded during the test. The old i7 can do it in 11 seconds, the dual Xeon is 22 seconds. I've expanded my test to other, new i7 machines as well as other dual Xeon machines, and the results are nearly identical. The i7's are vastly superior from a file I/O standpoint for Excel. I'm quite surprised that the results are that repeatable across similar hardware of different ages. Some of the Xeon machines have 48gb of ram and some have 32gb. No change, almost twice as slow as an i7.

Xeon's might make good servers or CAD stations, but they aren't great for Excel :-(

[Kim-n-Dean]

As an update to this topic, I'm in the midst of testing machines for the same actuary. The baseline machine is a 3 year old Dell Optiplex 990 with an i7-2600 (3.4ghz) processor, 16gb of ram and 1TB drive. The other machine is a Dell Precision T5600 with dual Xeon E5-2620 procs (2ghz), 8gb ram and a 500gb drive.

The damned i7 machine is kicking the Xeon's ass as far as Excel is concerned. A simple test, using macros, is to open and save an Excel workbook that is 124mb in size. The times are recorded during the test. The old i7 can do it in 11 seconds, the dual Xeon is 22 seconds. I've expanded my test to other, new i7 machines as well as other dual Xeon machines, and the results are nearly identical. The i7's are vastly superior from a file I/O standpoint for Excel. I'm quite surprised that the results are that repeatable across similar hardware of different ages. Some of the Xeon machines have 48gb of ram and some have 32gb. No change, almost twice as slow as an i7.

Xeon's might make good servers or CAD stations, but they aren't great for Excel :-(

Is that Excel file something you can send me or is it linked to a bunch of stuff on your end? I would like to see the times on my machine.

I have friends running i7s for things like MicroStation, SolidWorks, 3D Max and my machine smokes theirs. Never tried any "heavy" Excel files. Since I never use Excel, I don't care, but I am extremely curious as to what is the difference on why you see the results you are seeing.

I wonder if the dual proc. is causing the slow down. I've seen it before with other programs. I've seen machines speed up when hyper threading is turned off or a separate processor disabled. Curious...

[laspariahs]

Excel isn't multi threaded, so ghz wins of course, 3.4vs 2. Dual Xeons will excel at stability ECC ram and other things of course will help in this regard. In multi threaded applications the xeons will do better.

[birchyboy]

Is that Excel file something you can send me or is it linked to a bunch of stuff on your end? I would like to see the times on my machine.

I have friends running i7s for things like MicroStation, SolidWorks, 3D Max and my machine smokes theirs. Never tried any "heavy" Excel files. Since I never use Excel, I don't care, but I am extremely curious as to what is the difference on why you see the results you are seeing.

I wonder if the dual proc. is causing the slow down. I've seen it before with other programs. I've seen machines speed up when hyper threading is turned off or a separate processor disabled. Curious...

I'll look at the file and see how proprietary the data is. It isn't the calc that is slow, it's the opening of the file. It's a very odd issue, but it's reproducible on every dual Xeon machine I have access to.

[Kim-n-Dean]

I'll look at the file and see how proprietary the data is. It isn't the calc that is slow, it's the opening of the file. It's a very odd issue, but it's reproducible on every dual Xeon machine I have access to.

I understand it's the opening, that's what I want to try it. I have a drawing file that when you double click on it to open the file at the same time AutoCAD starts, it takes 68 seconds to open on a Pentium 4, 3.4GHz. It takes 9 seconds on my 2.6 Xeon. In that example it's not so much the file as it is AutoCAD starting. Either way, a huge difference!

[birchyboy]

I understand it's the opening, that's what I want to try it. I have a drawing file that when you double click on it to open the file at the same time AutoCAD starts, it takes 68 seconds to open on a Pentium 4, 3.4GHz. It takes 9 seconds on my 2.6 Xeon. In that example it's not so much the file as it is AutoCAD starting. Either way, a huge difference!

I took a look and it has too much information that I would have to scrub. Thanks for offering to test it though.

[Kim-n-Dean]

I took a look and it has too much information that I would have to scrub. Thanks for offering to test it though.

If you're close buy, come over for a beer (and some slot cars) and we'll try it. We can open it from your thumb drive, if that would be an accurate test. Not sure if it needs to be on a hard drive.

What version of Excel are you using? Are you opening Excel first, then open the file? Or, are you double clicking the file and the file loads as Excel starts?

[Generic]

Just an FYI the opening and processing is probably much more closely tied to the subsystems of the associated systems than the CPU itself. The i7 is likely going to have a faster bus and be able to pull the pull the data off of storage faster than the older Xeon. I'm curious if you know if the machines are are comparing are running the same chip-set and storage type. E.g. Intel X79 Express and SATA 2 or something else.

And as mentioned above, as Excel isn't multi-thread aware a Xenon isn't the best choice for it either.

[birchyboy]

Just an FYI the opening and processing is probably much more closely tied to the subsystems of the associated systems than the CPU itself. The i7 is likely going to have a faster bus and be able to pull the pull the data off of storage faster than the older Xeon. I'm curious if you know if the machines are are comparing are running the same chip-set and storage type. E.g. Intel X79 Express and SATA 2 or something else.

And as mentioned above, as Excel isn't multi-thread aware a Xenon isn't the best choice for it either.

The primary Xeon I'm dealing with is a month old Dell T5600 that came with the PERC adapter. I moved the hard drives to the onboard SATA thinking that the PERC might be an issue but that didn't help. The drive is a 7200 rpm SATA drive, same speed as the 3 year old i7. All of the Xeon's are equally slow opening the file; the time is consistent whether it's a single 7200 disk or a RAID 50 array of 15k disks. I'm chalking it up to a Xeon issue and we're trying to get new i7 workstation for the actuaries to use.

Up until 7 months ago, when I worked for a company of 20, I could call Dell and get a machine ordered immediately. Since we've been gobbled up into a company of 60k, it takes much longer to do anything.

[birchyboy]

If you're close buy, come over for a beer (and some slot cars) and we'll try it. We can open it from your thumb drive, if that would be an accurate test. Not sure if it needs to be on a hard drive.

What version of Excel are you using? Are you opening Excel first, then open the file? Or, are you double clicking the file and the file loads as Excel starts?

Yeah, we could do that but not until next week most likely. Thanks for the offer.