I'm now on Patreon! Working on putting together projects, merch, rewards and content for Patreon backers. https://patreon.com/CraftComputing?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=creatorshare2 About 18 months ago, I built an x99 workstation with a 12-Core Xeon Engineering Sample rather than the more mainstream 6-Core 5820k. Today, we’re going to find out if that was a good decision for both gaming and content creation. But first... What am I drinking??? Ninkasi (Eugene, OR) returns to the channel, this time with the Tricerahops Double IPA (they really should have saved the awesome name for a triple... but what do I know?). Clocking in at 8.0%... it's... just really freaking good. Have some shopping to do for the holidays, but hate lines (and retail)? Use my Amazon Affiliate link to avoid the headache, and help me out at the same time! http://amzn.to/2gFRgxS Thanks to Threadripper and Core-i9, enthusiasts now have 8-Core and higher CPUs within reach, but that wasn’t the case when I originally built this x99 Xeon-based system. I wanted something faster than just another overclockable 5820k, and with DirectX 12 and Vulkan beginning to utilize multi-core chips more effectively, I thought the time was right to spring for something outside of the mainstream. What I found was this Engineering Sample of a Xeon E5-2680 v3. It's a 12-Core/24-Thread monster, base clock of 2.4GHz and a turbo of 3.2GHz. It's going up against the tried and true i7-5820k 6-Core/12-Thread. I've got this on OC'd to 4.0Ghz, which is not aggressive, but easily attainable with little considerations for cooling or voltage. So, we know single threaded performance wins in games at 1080p. But I game at 1440p. Surely this is going to be a landslide victory for the 5820k… right?!? Well... no. After being dominated in Cinebench in multicore, the 5820k managed to beat the Xeon by 30% in FireStrike! Then only had a 4.1% margin in Superposition, and 5.4% in Time Spy. It tied in Fire Strike Ultra! (Which was expected...) And then only lead by an average of 4.3% in games tested. That average did not include Just Cause 3... where it actually lost by 5.2% to the Xeon. Given the multithreaded prowess of the Xeon E5-2680v3, I would call that a win, especially at the same pricepoint. It just goes to show, not every CPU wins at every task, especially when you take your exact workload into consideration. I would never recommend the 2680 v3 to a high refresh rate 1080p gamer. But at 1440p or 4k, and with some content creation as a primary focus, the Xeon is a clear winner over the 5820k. I bet you didn't call that at the beginning of the video, huh? Music: On the Ground Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/