I want to create Server based Gaming Rig

[Vineet Reddy]

I want to create server based gaming rig. Will the following configuration be possible.
Motherboard: SUPERMICRO X10QBL-CT
CPU: 4 x INTEL XEON E7-8867 v3
GPU: 4WAY-SLI NVIDIA TITAN X 12GB
RAM: 32 x CRUCIAL TECHNOLOGY DDR3 32GB

 

[Disparia]

The slot placement on the X10QBL-CT won't allow for four dual-slot cards to be installed directly, but with PCIe extension cables it's possible. Search Google for "bitcoin case" to get an idea of what would be involved. Also note that you'll need to secure a Rev 2.x board to use v3 Xeons.

The X10QBi on the otherhand might fit four Titan X video cards naturally. It has the correct slot spacing, but other clearances would need to be checked before a definite answer could be given.

 

[[Ion]]

This is definitely the stupidest idea I've seen in a while. I have a system with 2x Xeon E5 4667V3 and even that is a...questionable choice. You'd do much better with a gaming-oriented system, and, if necessary, a separate server.

 

[newtekie1]

Those processors are going to hold back 4 Titans so much in most games...

 

[cdawall]

I have thought about doing this with AMD 16 core chips and a modded for overclocking board. It is expensive, a waste of time and money.

If you are just burning money wait until 6th gen hits socket 2011 and just buy an enthusiast chip/board and move on.

 

[Vineet Reddy]

The slot placement on the X10QBL-CT won't allow for four dual-slot cards to be installed directly, but with PCIe extension cables it's possible. Search Google for "bitcoin case" to get an idea of what would be involved. Also note that you'll need to secure a Rev 2.x board to use v3 Xeons.

The X10QBi on the otherhand might fit four Titan X video cards naturally. It has the correct slot spacing, but other clearances would need to be checked before a definite answer could be given.

Got your point and yes v3 family is supported by it. I have sources where I can get custom-made led closed case with liquid cooling instead of bitcoin. The only problem is regarding GPUs can they be assembled as SLI

 

[Disparia]

I completely forgot that those Titans would need to be to be bridged for SLI operation. The X10QBi has two slots on one side of the board and two slots on the other. Would have to custom make a very long bridge and I don't know if it would work at that length. I take back my suggestion

Now, if you have a custom case made for a X10QBL-CT which fits your four Titans, then yes, you would use a standard 4-way SLI bridge to connect them to each other. Can see others running 4-way Titans on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=4-way+titan

 

[Aquinus]

More cores doesn't mean more performance. There are performance hinderences if you consider CPUs having to access other CPU's memory or the QPI bandwidth and latency incurred when a CPU needs to access a GPU on the PCI-E hub of another CPU. Needless to say, multi-CPU platforms don't tend to be conducive to gaming performance because more often than not, game logic needs to execute quickly and there is a limit to much any given game can utilize, even everything a quad core i7 has to offer.

Simply put, more cores doesn't always get you more performance. You can't make up for clocks just by throwing more CPUs and cores at the matter. Computers become a bit more complicated when you talk about that level of compute because it's not a matter of "running an application," it's a matter of coordination between all of those cores and there comes a point when that coordination becomes less beneficial than the performance to be had. Consider the phrase, "diminishing returns."

This is definitely the stupidest idea I've seen in a while. I have a system with 2x Xeon E5 4667V3 and even that is a...questionable choice. You'd do much better with a gaming-oriented system, and, if necessary, a separate server.

^ This.

 

[R-T-B]

While I agree there are far better solutions, I will simply answer your question:

You WILL need PCI-E risers with that mobo. Plain and simple. Then, yes, it is possible, albeit a silly and rather big waste of money. I'm talking more than a new car easily from what you are asking.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

If i had that money to spend i think i could come up with some more sensible options.

I wonder how long before the OP returns...( on his phone)

 

[mouacyk]

This is definitely the stupidest idea I've seen in a while. I have a system with 2x Xeon E5 4667V3 and even that is a...questionable choice. You'd do much better with a gaming-oriented system, and, if necessary, a separate server.

I like the bluntness, lol. The low single-core clocks will surely bottleneck the chosen GPUs when the action gets intense. Latency and responsiveness in general will not compare at all to a stand-alone overclocked i5 or i7 with tuned non-ECC RAM. Your better option would be two separate 5930K's each with their own motherboard, so you can utilize 16x/16x SLI and still oc the CPUs. That's around $2K for the same total number of cores and threads, less than half the cost of the XEON cpu you listed. Plus, the CPUs run on their motherboard, not interrupting each other.

Whenever someone thinks of a crazy idea like this, I'd like to remind people that even a 4.8GHz 4790K with 16GB of 2133MHz CAS9 DDR3 and a 1.5GHz 980 TI still stutters at the alley door of BF4 metro when you get like 10vs10 duking it out, frags flying and what not. Get those single-core clocks up people. It makes for good teammates.

 

[Kanan]

Not only the CPU is a bad choice, because anything more than 6 Core's is useless in gaming. So you'd want a high clocked 4 / 6 or 8 Core (i7 6700K/i7 5930K/i7 5960X), everything else is, as already stated, stupid.

Also the GPUs aren't the best choice. 4 Titan X aren't anything faster than 3 Titan X, because SLI doesn't really work with 4 cards, unless you only want to use 3DMark, that is.

Just watch this:

TL : DW: he says, he could've done 4 Titan X setup, but it was slower and didn't work as good as triple Titan X. Also notice, that he uses a 5960X (it's basically a stupidly expensive gaming setup, like that you are planning).

PS. The 5960X is a relabeled Xeon with open multiplier. So if you just want a server CPU it's close enough.

 

[cdawall]

I just ordered this with the plan to run dual 16 core chips at some point, not really for gaming just shits and giggles especially with the chance an overclocking enabled BIOS through a third party.

 

[xvi]

A lot of people are going to say it's inefficient and all those cores won't be utilized when gaming, so there will be no point to having server/workstation hardware over a standard setup. I am going to be one of those people too.

With that said, I think as long as you know the general consensus is it won't be much at all faster than a normal rig (possibly slower, depending on a few factors), if you want to do it just because you can, you definitely should.

Just because I think it's not ideal doesn't mean I haven't been tempted to do it regardless.
(If I had more motivation, I'd definitely have one of my own right now. Just for giggles.)

 

[MIRTAZAPINE]

This is gonna be one very very expensive rig. I would recommend you to think twice or thrice about dropping that much money on something like that. It better be making you money if it is that expensive. It would be at least 30k for everything for that server computer. If you have money to burn ok go ahead. Just reading about your specification about your server build give me a huge high, I always wanted to do something like this just this is way way beyond my means. Woah 32x32GB RAM = 1024GB That is even more than my ssd space! 64 cores in total? 48GB of vram!? Such a crazy build.

It would serve you better to just buy a regular skylake i7 or 5820k it would be alot cheaper and the games would be able to utilise them. Beyond that many cores for gaming it would be a waste unless you happen to have some background stuff to run. This might be feasible if you are doing workstation related stuff and you them as fast as possible. If you do build this rig Techpowerup crunching team would really really want you.

 

[Vineet Reddy]

The slot placement on the X10QBL-CT won't allow for four dual-slot cards to be installed directly, but with PCIe extension cables it's possible. Search Google for "bitcoin case" to get an idea of what would be involved. Also note that you'll need to secure a Rev 2.x board to use v3 Xeons.

The X10QBi on the otherhand might fit four Titan X video cards naturally. It has the correct slot spacing, but other clearances would need to be checked before a definite answer could be given.

On X10QBL-CT all PCIe's are on same side together.

I like the bluntness, lol. The low single-core clocks will surely bottleneck the chosen GPUs when the action gets intense. Latency and responsiveness in general will not compare at all to a stand-alone overclocked i5 or i7 with tuned non-ECC RAM. Your better option would be two separate 5930K's each with their own motherboard, so you can utilize 16x/16x SLI and still oc the CPUs. That's around $2K for the same total number of cores and threads, less than half the cost of the XEON cpu you listed. Plus, the CPUs run on their motherboard, not interrupting each other.

Whenever someone thinks of a crazy idea like this, I'd like to remind people that even a 4.8GHz 4790K with 16GB of 2133MHz CAS9 DDR3 and a 1.5GHz 980 TI still stutters at the alley door of BF4 metro when you get like 10vs10 duking it out, frags flying and what not. Get those single-core clocks up people. It makes for good teammates.

Not only the CPU is a bad choice, because anything more than 6 Core's is useless in gaming. So you'd want a high clocked 4 / 6 or 8 Core (i7 6700K/i7 5930K/i7 5960X), everything else is, as already stated, stupid.

Also the GPUs aren't the best choice. 4 Titan X aren't anything faster than 3 Titan X, because SLI doesn't really work with 4 cards, unless you only want to use 3DMark, that is.

Just watch this:

TL : DW: he says, he could've done 4 Titan X setup, but it was slower and didn't work as good as triple Titan X. Also notice, that he uses a 5960X (it's basically a stupidly expensive gaming setup, like that you are planning).

PS. The 5960X is a relabeled Xeon with open multiplier. So if you just want a server CPU it's close enough.

In my opinion XEON E7-8867 v3 is nearly as good as any i7 when over clocked and better in future because the games after 4-5 years will bee needing a lot more cores to run on ultra resolution. I have seen my friends upgrade their system every now and then and still not able to meet the ultra requirements of new games. I don't want to take the tension of changing the hardware from time to time. So trying to make the best possible gaming pc which could run for years(atleast 5-8).

I just ordered this with the plan to run dual 16 core chips at some point, not really for gaming just shits and giggles especially with the chance an overclocking enabled BIOS through a third party.

A lot of people are going to say it's inefficient and all those cores won't be utilized when gaming, so there will be no point to having server/workstation hardware over a standard setup. I am going to be one of those people too.

With that said, I think as long as you know the general consensus is it won't be much at all faster than a normal rig (possibly slower, depending on a few factors), if you want to do it just because you can, you definitely should.

Just because I think it's not ideal doesn't mean I haven't been tempted to do it regardless.
(If I had more motivation, I'd definitely have one of my own right now. Just for giggles.)

This is gonna be one very very expensive rig. I would recommend you to think twice or thrice about dropping that much money on something like that. It better be making you money if it is that expensive. It would be at least 30k for everything for that server computer. If you have money to burn ok go ahead. Just reading about your specification about your server build give me a huge high, I always wanted to do something like this just this is way way beyond my means. Woah 32x32GB RAM = 1024GB That is even more than my ssd space! 64 cores in total? 48GB of vram!? Such a crazy build.

It would serve you better to just buy a regular skylake i7 or 5820k it would be alot cheaper and the games would be able to utilise them. Beyond that many cores for gaming it would be a waste unless you happen to have some background stuff to run. This might be feasible if you are doing workstation related stuff and you them as fast as possible. If you do build this rig Techpowerup crunching team would really really want you.

Yes this is going to be expensive but will run for long, even if I throw any new game on it without need of up-gradation from time to time. I have seen many of my friends upgrade their hardware from time time as all of us like to play games on ultra resolution,3d and with high fps possible. Some of them have spend nearly as much as 10% of this build only for single time upgrade. And I don't want to have the tension of selling old hardware unit to buy new one. I want it to run any new at ultra resolution for at-least 5-8 years.

 

[Aquinus]

In my opinion XEON E7-8867 v3 is nearly as good as any i7 when over clocked and better in future because the games after 4-5 years will bee needing a lot more cores to run on ultra resolution.

You do realize that Xeons are no longer overclockable, not just that but, from a coding perspective it is very unrealistic to think that any amount of code changes to games will make the single-threaded bottleneck problem not an issue. Also testing has shown that higher resolution requires more GPU power and less compute which means that as resolution goes up, CPU usage goes down and that the difference between different CPUs starts diminishing at higher resolutions because the GPU becomes the bottleneck.

Simply put, you're making a lot of assumptions that aren't true. We're telling you it's a bad idea because it is a bad idea. If you really want to waste thousands of dollars on a platform that will perform worse than one that doesn't, go right ahead but, I hope you understand what you're doing because another user did the same thing with dual 16c Opterons and the performance was absolute garbage despite having 32 cores. Don't fool yourself that more money and more cores can simply result in the best of the best. Computers don't work that way and if you care about your money or the end result, you should listen to what people are telling you.

tl;dr: The lower clocks the E7 Xeons offer is what will kill your gaming experience. No amount of cores will make up for a bottleneck caused by a single thread because when coordination slows down, everything slows down which is why this idea of building a quad CPU machine for gaming is absurd and beyond wasteful.

 

[64K]

Yes this is going to be expensive but will run for long, even if I throw any new game on it without need of up-gradation from time to time. I have seen many of my friends upgrade their hardware from time time as all of us like to play games on ultra resolution,3d and with high fps possible. Some of them have spend nearly as much as 10% of this build only for single time upgrade. And I don't want to have the tension of selling old hardware unit to buy new one. I want it to run any new at ultra resolution for at-least 5-8 years.

Here's why you are wasting money. SLI with two cards offers the best scaling. Adding a third card doesn't give you as much of a boost in performance as adding the second card did and adding a fourth card doesn't give you much more performance at all. You are looking at around $4,400 for those four Titan X and you are hoping they last at least 5 to 8 years. Spend $2,200 on two Titan X for now and if you don't want to sell them then give them away 4 years from now and buy two Flagships 4 years from now for $2,200. I would bet that those two cards will outperform 4 Titan X at that time. Remember that just because you have 4 Titan X it doesn't mean you have anything close to 4 times the performance of a single Titan X. You also will have problems with Quad SLI in some games. I have seen this posted by the people that try it. You also don't know what tech will be available 5 to 8 years from now with GPUs that may end up being very important for maximum performance in games. If you want proof of that go back and look at the GPUs that were released 5 to 8 years ago and compare them with a Titan X.

Trying to build a rig for gaming at ultra for at least 5 to 8 years is not a sound plan.

 

[cdawall]

4 Titan's is shown in benchmarks to perform worse, that is with highly clocked CPU's like a 5960x. Dropping to a pair of low clocked E7's would end up showing even less scaling...especially when you factor in the slower memory used on the server boards.

 

[mouacyk]

Op, you know what you want and that is what we all want. How to get there is currently not possible, due to the hardware not being able to do what we want. Ideally if we have 16cores of 1GHz each, we would expect 16GHz of performance even in single-threaded execution. I've got an extra kidney for that RIGHT now. However, typical game logic in general is not trivial to split across different cores to achieve any practical result near this. The way it's done is you typically have the main core/thread run the game loop and input, a core for physx, a core for audio, a core for network, and a number of cores/threads for video rendering. The problem is all of these cores need to do their work for the current frame, and therefore need to syncronize with the main loop to render the final image. Effectively, all the cores are only as fast as the slowest core -- this is why higher single-core speed across all cores is better.

Don't lose hope though, op. There is something coming yet that will do what we all want. VISC CPUs -- it will split instructions as much as possible from a single-thread across multiple cores (via virtualization) in order to process the thread faster. That means that in our game loop, which ever threads that are taking longer than another will have its remaining work offloaded to a now idle core. This will reduce the maximum time required to render that frame and thusly boost fps. However, because the cores will be loaded more efficiently than ever, expect your average power consumption under load to increase . More info on VISC CPUs here --> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...conceptual-breakthrough-weve-been-waiting-for

 

[Nokiron]

I had the opportunity to run two E5-2699 v3 as a "gaming" rig. (Dell server from work)

2/10 would do for fun. The performance was quite lacking in most if not all games. My 4960X blew them out of the water on that point.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

This is a five year old multi core hyper threaded xeon processor playing a title that was released in 2015

My GPU was operating at 99% with 12 gb of triple channel ddr3

i think it illustrates the point.

 

[Aquinus]

This is a five year old multi core hyper threaded xeon processor playing a title that was released in 2015

My GPU was operating at 99% with 12 gb of triple channel ddr3

i think it illustrates the point.

View attachment 69923

Now imagine how much that would suck if you couldn't overclock. Simply put, modern E7 Xeons are for servers and workstations. Leave them there.

Personally, I think the best option for the best of both worlds would be dual E5-2637 V3s. Two quads clocked high enough to do good at gaming but, with enough cores to do more intensive tasks.

 

[mouacyk]

I don't understand. For the price of the quad-core E5-2637 V3, you can get an octa-core 5960X and still overclock it. If you absolutely have to run dual-socket (and for what?), then the 5960x would not be feasable but is there really an advantage of dual-sockets over the 5960x besides more cache?

 

[OneMoar]

yes its possible
but it s a stupid idea ....