Choose between Intel Xeon and Ryzen 5 based on your needs.
Choose between Intel Xeon and Ryzen 5 based on your needs.
Hello, I own an Intel Xeon 2650-v3 with 10 cores and 20 threads, plus a spare 2400g CPU with 4 cores and 8 threads. I'm considering adding another machine to my lab setup. Both motherboards (2011-3/x99 and AM4) are similar in price (~60$), support DDR4 RAM, and use NVME and PCIe Gen 3. The main differences are power consumption and performance—based on Geekbench tests, the 2400g is roughly 65% slower across most tasks. My current setup runs well for applications like Home Assistant, language models, Opnsense, and virtual machines. I need to weigh multithreading benefits against potential stability issues, especially with non-ECC memory. Alternatively, I could opt for a more efficient CPU with a steadier environment. Task requirements are varied, so I'm unsure which path best fits my needs. I already have a compute GPU available.
Honestly, it seems you'd be wiser to sell them and purchase a 12100F or 12400F along with an inexpensive H610 DDR4 board.
The power figure refers to TDP, which doesn't always match a real load. If you run them continuously at full capacity, actual consumption will be significantly lower. Ryzen 65W CPUs usually cap around 88W. Intel CPUs vary based on motherboard configuration, but server boards tend to approach TDP more than enthusiast builds. Without knowing the exact board, I'd assume it's similar. If you didn't have to choose between a Chinese X99 and others, you'd pick the latter. They performed poorly for FPU tasks, with Cinebench R15 being their only decent result.
I generally use PassMark for comparing older CPUs, pretty rough, but eh. (CPU, single thread, multithread) E5-2650 v3: 1640, 11747 Ryzen 5 2400G: 2145, 8737 i3-12100 (F would be the same): 3272, 12743 i5-12400F: 3485, 19468 Soo, basically, it suggests the 12100F would have the same multithread as the Xeon, but almost double the single thread, while the 12400F would pretty much double both. Usually there's a good spread of single and multi threaded apps on a server, but it depends. If need to assign individual cores to a VM and there's little workload, the Xeon obviously has more of them.