Intel Xeon E5-2697 v2 “Ivy Bridge-EP” Processor Review

Introduction When it comes to x86 processors of pure unadulterated power Intel's high-end Xeon platforms are the only way to go. Intel's "EP" (Efficient Performance) SKUs are often some of the most impressive processors that come to market sitting between the high-end consumer and small business segments. Over the years we've seen the EP series processors grow in core count as Intel's CPU architectures have become more efficient in terms of power consumption, thermal specifications and their general design. For example, Westmere-EP had up to 6 cores, Sandy Bridge-EP had up to 8 cores and this current Ivy Bridge-EP series has up to 12 cores. Today we are reviewing the flagship processor of the Ivy Bridge-EP series, the Intel Xeon E5-2697 v2 processor. Thanks to Intel's generosity we have the opportunity to test a pair of these monstrous CPUs. On paper these are the most powerful CPUs available on the market within that top-end consumer bracket: these CPUs will work with all consumer hardware such as "normal" graphics cards, unbuffered non-ECC RAM, consumer operating systems like Windows 7 and so on. Yet with 12 cores, 24 threads and a 130W TDP its a heck of a lot of performance for any consumer so Intel's main target is working professionals, small and medium size businesses and anyone who needs a serious amount of x86 computing power. However, the term reasonable cannot be used for the pricing as Intel expects consumers or businesses using these Xeon chips to pay a pretty penny - $2618 to be exact. That said you get what you pay for: with 12 cores and 24 threads in an efficient 130W package Intel's Xeon E5-2697 v2 is unmatched by any other current generation hardware. Of course Intel's Haswell-EP is just around the corner and with that we should expect the core limit to be increased again to a staggering 16 cores (if rumours are to be believed) within similar thermal envelopes, we will also see the jump to DDR4 memory made so Ivy Bridge-EP will be the last DDR3 EP platform from Intel. Below you can find Intel's key specifications of the E5-2697 v2 processor, you can get more detailed specifications on the product page here if you so desire. In today's review we will be testing this CPU in single and dual configurations and putting it up against the Sandy Bridge-EP flagship the Xeon E5-2670. Sadly, we only have one of these for testing since one of them passed away (RIP!), please consider that before commenting on why dual E5-2670 CPUs were not included in the results - we wanted them to be but it simply wasn't possible. Given the prosumer/business orientation of these products we've tried to use more productivity related benchmarks. If there are any relevant benchmarks readers think are missing then please feel free to inform us your thoughts in the comments so we can improve future Xeon processor reviews. In a pre-emptive statement I would also like to clarify that the gaming benchmarks are there not because I see these CPUs as being relevant for gaming, but because we ALWAYS get LOTS of questions about how these CPUs perform in games. Anyway...enough rambling let's proceed to look at some testing results! Test System and Methods Before we delve into any testing we would like to take this opportunity to review our test system and thank those sponsors who kindly provided us with test equipment to make our work possible. We offer our thanks to: Intel for supplying us with two Xeon E5-2697V2 processors, which we are reviewing here, and a Xeon E5-2670 processor which we reviewed here. ASUS for supplying us with a Z9PE-D8 WS dual socket LGA 2011 C602 chipset motherboard, which we reviewed here. Kingston for supplying us with a HyperX 3K 240GB SSD, which we reviewed here, and 64GB of their KVR18E13/8 RAM. Corsair for supplying us with two Hydro Series H100i liquid CPU coolers, which we reviewed here. Be Quiet for supplying us with a PowerZone 1000W modular power supply. Nvidia for supplying us with a GTX Titan graphics card, which we reviewed here. Lian Li for supplying us with a PC-T60A test bench. Noctua for supplying us with NT-H1 thermal compound. Test System Motherboard: ASUS Z9PE-D8 WS Socket LGA 2011 C602 chipset CPU: 2 x Intel Xeon E5 2697 V2 and 1 x Intel Xeon E5 2670 GPU: Nvidia GTX Titan 6GB graphics card RAM: 8 x 8 GB of Kingston KVR18E13/8 1866MHz Cooling: Corsair H100i with Noctua NT-H1 Thermal Compound Case: Lian Li PC-T60A test bench Storage Drives: Kingston 240GB Hyper X 3K SSD PSU: Be Quiet Power Zone 1000W Modular Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit SP1 Test Software 3DMark - available here. 7-Zip - available here. AIDA 64 Engineer - available here. Bioshock Infinite - available here. Cinebench - available here. CPUID HWMonitor - available here. Handbrake - available here. Metro Last Light - available here. POV-Ray - available here. SiSoft Sandra Tech Support - available here. WinRAR - available here. WPrime - available here. Cinebench, Handbrake and WPrime Cinebench R15 Cinebench is a widely respected benchmark for testing the performance of x86 CPUs. The program allows you to test single and multi-threaded performance as well as GPU performance by rendering with Open GL. Download here. Handbrake HandBrake is a tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs. Download here. WPrime wPrime is a leading multithreaded benchmark for x86 processors that tests your processor performance by calculating square roots with a recursive call of Newton's method for estimating functions. wPrime is a free utility that is available for download here. AIDA64 Memory Suite AIDA64 Engineer AIDA64 Engineer is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for engineers. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives. AIDA64 is compatible with all current 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows operating systems, including Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. Memory and cache benchmarks are available to analyze system RAM bandwidth and latency. Download here. 7-Zip, POV-Ray and WinRAR 7-Zip 7-Zip is a open source file archiver with a high compression ratio. GUI and command line options. GNU LGPL license. Download here. POV-Ray The Persistence of Vision Raytracer, or POV-Ray, is a ray tracing program which generates images from a text-based scene description, and is available for a variety of computer platforms. Download here. WinRAR WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. Download here. 3DMark, Bioshock Infinite and Metro Last Light 3DMark 3DMark Firestrike is Futuremark's latest creation for testing the GPU performance of high end gaming PCs using Direct X 11 graphics. You can download a free basic version of 3DMark here. Bioshock Infinite Bioshock Infinite is a first person shooter developed by Irrational Games that is the third instalment of the Bioshock series. The game is the last to be produced by Irrational Games before they announced their closure in February 2014. The game has sold over 4 million copies since its 2013 release. Metro: Last Light Metro: Last Light is a single-player first-person shooter video game with survival horror and stealth elements, developed by Ukrainian studio 4A Games and published by Deep Silver for Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in May 2013. Business, Commerical and Industrial Applications AIDA64 Engineer AIDA64 Engineer is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for engineers. AIDA64 Engineer provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives. AIDA64 is compatible with all current 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows operating systems, including Windows 8.1 Update 1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 Update 1. Download here. SiSoft Sandra SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what's really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc. Download here. Power Consumption and Temperatures Power Consumption To measure power consumption we use a killawatt meter and measure the total system power draw at the wall. We run two different scenarios for 5 minutes and take the average reading, these are Windows desktop idle and AIDA64's system stability test. Temperatures To measure temperatures we run two different scenarios for 5 minutes: Windows desktop idle and AIDA64 Engineer system stability test. We take the average maximum core temperature for AIDA64 and take the average minimum core temperature for desktop idle in CPU-ID HWMonitor. Final Thoughts Pricing Intel's Xeon E5-2697 v2 processors costs $2579.99 at Newegg and $2588.27 at Amazon, both in North America. In the UK we are seeing pricing of £1858 at Scan Computers, £1999.99 at Overclockers and £1789.75 at Amazon. This Intel CPU comes with a 3 year manufacturer warranty. Overview Having put the Intel Xeon E5-2697 v2 CPUs through a range of tests I think it is fair to say they offer a staggering level of performance. From a generational perspective the jump from Sandy Bridge to Ivy Bridge architecture, and the addition of 4 more cores, means the E5-2697 v2 is a significant amount better than the previous generation flagship the E5-2670. That's even more impressive given that power consumption is pretty much identical between the two CPUs - Intel have made staggering progress in power efficiency and the Xeon E5-2697 v2 certainly deserves the EP (Efficient Performance) moniker. The gains in performance cover a wide range of applications such as rendering, image processing, hashing, encryption, compression, decompression and financial calculations. The scaling from one to two CPUs isn't perfect (applications like WPrime and Handbrake did not scale at all) but for most applications that business users are likely to be using they will be able to scale to use those 48 threads and 24 cores across two CPUs. The Xeon E5-2697 v2 also scales better than its predecessor thanks to its improved native memory controller which has been boosted from DDR3-1600 to DDR3-1866. This enables applications that take advantage of higher memory throughput to scale performance even more with those 4 extra cores and much more memory bandwidth. The Ivy Bridge-EP platform benefits from being the only platform where you can have ludicrous amounts of RAM: up to 8 DIMMS per CPU and up to 768GB of RAM per CPU! Of course all of that performance comes at a cost. Intel's Ivy Bridge-EP platform is staggeringly expensive. To get a dual E5-2697 v2 system up and running you will need $5200 for the CPUs alone, the ASUS motherboard we use is also at the cheaper end of the spectrum but that still costs a mammoth $600. Furthermore, you'll probably be needing RAM in abundance and 64GB of RAM is going to set you back another $650-750 depending on the brand and speed. You'll also need a meaty power supply that can support dual 8 pin EPS connectors and you'll need some serious cooling because these CPUs produce a LOT of heat. In terms of how they run, they actually operate very cool with load temperatures being in the 50-60s depending on room temperature and fan speeds on our H100i AIOs. Of course it is important to note temperature is not heat, running cool does not mean low heat. This is important because any system you build with these CPUs needs to be well ventilated, if not your motherboard and RAM will start to operate at very high temperatures leading to longevity problems in the future. This is something Intel will work on with its next generation Haswell-EP platform but until then it isn't really surprising that there are heat issues because Intel have essentially packed a pair of downclocked Core i7 4960X CPUs onto a single die. There are going to be two types of people reading this review, those who were just interested in seeing the performance and the pricing of Intel's fastest CPU. Then there are going to be that fraction of people who are genuinely in-need of something like this. I am not one of those people, however, having tested these CPUs it is easy to see who would benefit. Even if you're an owner of Sandy Bridge-EP CPUs already the gains to be made from this upgrade are huge. In a world where time is money having that extra x86 grunt on your side that the E5 2697 v2 offers could save you hours in terms of rendering, calculations and file conversion time which would easily pay for itself. This is certainly a very niche type of product but nonetheless if you have the need for it then it certainly will not let you down. Pros Mind-blowing x86 performance Highly efficient Improved memory controller Temperatures are fairly low Cons Produce lots of heat Demands a huge premium and an expensive system to operate Some applications do not scale very well "With a staggering amount of performance and surprisingly high power efficiency Intel's Ivy Bridge-EP Xeon E5-2697 v2 processor is a smart choice for prosumers and small business users who need lots of x86 performance but without the excessive power draw of rival products. It may not be cheap but it is not merely a CPU: it is an investment in productivity." Thank you to Intel for providing these review samples.