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

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.