Intel Xeon E5-1680 v3 & E5-2687W v3 Compared To The Core i7 5960X On Linux

In looking at the temperatures for the three LGA-2011 v3 CPUs across all of the benchmarks ran, the temperatures weren't too far off between them which is largely expected given their close TDPs. Under load they were averaging about 50C with the Noctua i3 HSF while they peaked at 61~65C.

To no surprise given the Xeon E5-2687W v3 had a 160 Watt TDP rather than 140 Watt, it had the highest power use but obviously not by much. For this MSI X99S SLI PLUS + Intel SSD + NVIDIA GT 740 workstation, the AC power use as measured by a USB-based WattsUp Pro was below 200 Watts.

Well, there you have it, for those curious about using Intel Xeon v3 CPUs with supported X99 motherboards like the MSI X99S SLI PLUS. While in some tests these Xeon CPUs didn't offer much more over the Core i7 5960X, it's also important to remember that the Xeon models support ECC memory, vPro, Demand Based Switching, Intel Secure Key, OS Guard, and Trusted Execution Technology.

The MSI X99S SLI PLUS motherboard was using the latest public BIOS (v1.3) at the time of testing and I ran into no issues with running these Xeon CPUs on this low-cost X99 motherboard. This X99 motherboard can be found for about $220 USD at Amazon.com.

In the days ahead on Phoronix will be more Intel Xeon E5-2687W v3 / E5-1680 v3 Linux benchmarks thanks to these samples provided by MSI. Among the other areas to be further investigated are some new Linux virtualization benchmarks using this hardware, more compiler benchmarks, a large Linux distribution comparison, etc. If you have any other requests for Linux tests you'd like to see with this hardware, let us know via twitter or in our forums. Thanks again to MSI for providing these review samples as the company begins further engaging with the Linux community.

As one of the significant benefits to benchmarking with the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org, if you wish to see how your own Linux system compares performance wise to the hardware tested in this article, it's as easy as installing our open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software on your distribution of choice and then running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1411098-LI-INTELX99X79. It's that easy to conduct fully-automated and fully-standardized open-source benchmarks.