This is not for a gaming build, this is for my own personal 3ds max render farm, so the processor is going to be the bottleneck no matter how much power they have. The i7 and Xeon both use the LGA1366 socket, and the i7 990X is the same price as the Xeon L5640. The Xeon and the i7 have are both 6 cores, the i7 is 3.46Ghz and the Xeon is 2.26Ghz, the Xeon doesn't seem to have an L2 cache and it's 60W, the i7 is 130W, I already checked and the motherboard will support the i7.
So what I'm wondering is this - are the Xeon processors designed better for dual CPU configurations, and this is why the slower Xeon is the same price as the faster i7? Would 2 Xeons render faster or slower than 2 i7s?
I will be cooling the hell out of them and hopefully overclocking regardless of which processors I get.
Adam2011-03-23T03:25:21Z
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All LGA 1366 processors are the same technology. They will perform the same when they have the same specifications. So two 3.46GHz 6-core processors will vastly outperform two 2.26GHz 6-core processors. Forget all the "meant for this or that" stuff you read, it's about specifications. The Xeon processor you are looking at allows you to use them to make a 2.26GHz 12-core system with 384GB of memory. The Core i7s can only be used in a single socket. So you could have two 3.46GHz systems. You won't be overclocking two processors unless you buy an SR2 which is the only board that allows you to overclock two processors, and honestly while it has its place, that place is not in a render farm due to stability.
Performance wise / value you may be better going with two systems using single processors rather than a dual processor system. However you need to know how to set this network up and manage it.
I should also mention you picked a processor designed to run under low power (L), you can buy 2.66GHz 6-core Xeon X5650s for the same price, which would be much better.
The i7 is more centered around things like rendering, a home pc, gaming and whatnot. As far as I know xeons are more based for servers than anything else. Check with other sources, but I think you'll probably be better off going with the i7's. If you have good enough cooling, definitely go with the i7's as the new sandy bridge 990x's can be over clocked to over 5ghz with good enough cooling. I'm not sure on this so maybe do some more googling, sorry I this hasn't helped.
XEON is designed for Servers, where it comes to stability and flexibility, because you can put couple of them together and if one of the CPUs die, no data will be lost, and till you fix it the other one would take care of it; so I would say i7 is a better choice for 3dmax and home use.
If you don't mined I would recommend to consider an AMD based system as well. it's cheaper, and if you can cool it off properly, you can get better performance than i7. the only downside I can think of is cache, but I personally rather AMD phenom II X6 1100 which is 3.3Ghz.