After getting a Dell Poweredge R720 rack server, I had switched out its Xeon E5-2640 processors for Xeon E5-2670v2 (10 cores 20 threads, base clock 2.5 GHz, boost up to 3.3 GHz and all-core boost of 2.9 GHz). It also has a total of 160 GB of RAM, and the following graphics cards: GTX 1050Ti, Quadro P600, and Yeston RX550 (4GB VRAM).
With dual processors, this gave me 40 threads to play with, but I had found the lower clock speed to be somewhat of a bottleneck. Although multi-threaded parallel processing is supported, most applications still do not make full use of this. A faster clock speed is therefore going to give me better performance than more cores/threads in most cases.
So I looked around for alternatives. One is the E5-2690v2 with the same 10 cores 20 threads, though with a higher base clock of 3 GHz, boost up to 3.6 GHz, and all-core boost of 3.3 GHz. Sounds tempting, but also pricey. There is also the E5-2667v2 with 8 cores 16 threads, but a higher base clock of 3.3 GHz (which makes the base clock as fast as the E5-2690v2's all-core boost speed), boost up to 4 GHz, and all-core boost of 3.6 GHz. While it comes with less cores/threads, it can achieve much higher clock speeds. This might actually work out to be a better solution if I am not running many VMs on the server. And I managed to find two of them on Yahoo! Auctions for a reasonable price (aka much less than what they are retailing for on Aliexpress). So I promptly got two of them, and they are now happily residing inside the R720.
This also got me thinking... for the E5-2600v3 and E5-2600v4 families, the highest clock speed offered seem to be the E5-2643v3 and E5-2643v4. Both have 6 cores 12 threads, base clock 3.4 GHz and max boost 3.7 GHz (all-core boost not disclosed). Compared to them, the E5-2667v2 seems to be a better deal: it is cheaper, has more cores/threads, and a higher boosted clock speed. However, being one/two generations older, the E5-2667v2 seems to lack certain instruction sets (specifically, AVX2 and FMA3) and DDR4 support (so memory speed and bandwidth is lower). Since the R430 server I have is running on E5-2643v3, I thought maybe I should do a test to see which is better, using a VM with 8 CPUs running Windows 10 on both.
Geekbench 5 showed that for a VM with 8 CPUs running Windows 10 Pro, using the E5-2643v3 is better than the E5-2667v2.
When I ran Cinebench R23... the R430's fans starting spinning like crazy. Being is 1U server, the thermals weren't as good as the R720, but I did not see any thermal throttling, with max CPU temp on the R430 hitting only 71 deg Celsius. The R720 reached only around 61 deg Celsius.
I also used the benchmark in CPU-Z for good measure.
In all benchmarks, the E5-2643v3 came out above the E5-2667v2. I guess a newer generation processor performs better than an older one, even if the clock speed is lower.
Since I am using the R430 for VMs that have 20 CPUs allocated to them, I did the same benchmarks using a Windows 10 Pro VM with 20 CPUs allocated.
Maybe I should just allocate 16 CPUs to the VM from now on...
Additional notes (May 1, 2022): It took around 3 minutes for the R720 server to complete the initial boot process and start booting into Proxmox. Another 5 minutes for my 3 default VMs (TrueNAS, a service server, and a media server) to finish starting after that, because I place an interval between the starting of each VM. Total bootup time is around 8 minutes.
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