Intel Haswell-EP Xeon 14 Core Review: E5-2695 V3 and E5-2697 V3
by Ian Cutress on November 20, 2014 10:00 AM ESTCPU Benchmarks
The dynamics of CPU Turbo modes, both Intel and AMD, can cause concern during environments with a variable threaded workload. There is also an added issue of the motherboard remaining consistent, depending on how the motherboard manufacturer wants to add in their own boosting technologies over the ones that Intel would prefer they used. In order to remain consistent, we implement an OS-level unique high performance mode on all the CPUs we test which should override any motherboard manufacturer performance mode.
HandBrake v0.9.9: link
For HandBrake, we take two videos (a 2h20 640x266 DVD rip and a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short) and convert them to x264 format in an MP4 container. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
Dolphin Benchmark: link
Many emulators are often bound by single thread CPU performance, and general reports tended to suggest that Haswell provided a significant boost to emulator performance. This benchmark runs a Wii program that raytraces a complex 3D scene inside the Dolphin Wii emulator. Performance on this benchmark is a good proxy of the speed of Dolphin CPU emulation, which is an intensive single core task using most aspects of a CPU. Results are given in minutes, where the Wii itself scores 17.53 minutes.
WinRAR 5.0.1: link
PCMark8 v2 OpenCL
A new addition to our CPU testing suite is PCMark8 v2, where we test the Work 2.0 and Creative 3.0 suites in OpenCL mode.
Hybrid x265
Hybrid is a new benchmark, where we take a 4K 1500 frame video and convert it into an x265 format without audio. Results are given in frames per second.
3D Particle Movement
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores.
FastStone Image Viewer 4.9
FastStone is the program I use to perform quick or bulk actions on images, such as resizing, adjusting for color and cropping. In our test we take a series of 170 images in various sizes and formats and convert them all into 640x480 .gif files, maintaining the aspect ratio. FastStone does not use multithreading for this test, and results are given in seconds.
Web Benchmarks
On the lower end processors, general usability is a big factor of experience, especially as we move into the HTML5 era of web browsing. For our web benchmarks, we take four well known tests with Chrome 35 as a consistent browser.
Sunspider 1.0.2
Mozilla Kraken 1.1
WebXPRT
Google Octane v2
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mapesdhs - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
Small point for C-ray: the benchmark home page URL is at my sgidepot site, not
on the Blinkenlights site, because the latter is just a mirror (and it's down atm,
hence why it should not be used as the home URL for any of my pages, ie. I have
no control over the Blinkenlights site).
Ian.
cynic783 - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
What is going on at Anand. Why are they doing desktop tests on a server?What happened to the server benchmarks, e.g. SQL, VM, etc.
WGAF about browser and gaming benchmarks on a datacenter server? Seriously.
romrunning - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
I agree. No database benchmarks and especially no VM benchmarks make this a sad review.This is especially egregious when you add in useless web browsing tests. No one who is looking at this class of processor is really worried about web browsing on it.
deontologist - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
Looks like when Anand left he took half the intellect away from the team ... This is a piss poor review ... Where are my separate idle/load power usage data? Why are you guys benching games? Ffs this site has gone done the tubes with slow reviews and on top of that useless reviews. Anand must be so proud of you kids.androticus - Saturday, November 22, 2014 - link
Don't you people have editors? I understand not all authors are native English speakers, but sheesh at least get someone to edit before publication.linuxnizer - Saturday, November 22, 2014 - link
Sever class CPU but many many gaming and video benchmarks!!!! Seriously ?!!No enterprise class tests!
Like DB tests / VM tests / Java EE tests / web tests with thousands of hits per second.
HollyDOL - Saturday, November 22, 2014 - link
I have to agree... as a server cpu review those benchmarks are kind of useless.Anybody here who would buy $4000 cpu to play games (...most of which epically suck at utilizing 4 cores properly)? For gaming that cpu has to suck anyway since it's not it's purpose.
It's seriously missing server usage tests... web hosting, heavy db and vm, ldap, sap, encryption etc. etc. - it was said here many times over.
Jurgen_modeling - Sunday, November 23, 2014 - link
Dear Ian,Thank you very much for posting this 14-core review. Could you please confirm that the 2697 v3 even under full (100%), continuous load (e.g. over >6 h) has a steady-state frequency of 3.1 GHz and does not clock down to 2.6 GHz as suggested by the base frequency of the processor?
I noticed that in your 12-core review, the same thing happened with base frequencies being below the steady-state frequencies.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8679/intel-haswellep...
The same thing seems to have happened here for the 10-core CPUs.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8584/intel-xeon-e5-2...
Even the 18-core model seems to have a base clock frequency of around 2.6 GHz and not 2.3 as suggested by the processor label.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8730/intel-haswellep...
If possible, I would love to see a 2-D version of the two frequency response profiles which you published on the last site of this 14-core review. 3D is much harder to read out data.
Thank you & Kind regards
Juergen
Jurgen_modeling - Sunday, November 23, 2014 - link
Another comment re gaming benchmarks and Xeon v3: These just hurt my heart. The 2P and 4P Xeon server market is already only relevant for a very specific market of people. If anyone buys a Xeon v3 server and plans to game on this CPU, I don't think any review can save such a high-end Xeon-gaming enthusiast. (-:Cheers, Juergen
daxomni - Monday, November 24, 2014 - link
Why isn't anyone from the staff responding to the glaring omissions and repeated complaints? What's the point of having a comments section if the staff couldn't care less what the readers are actually looking for in a server review? This article reads like something you'd do during garbage time on a Friday afternoon for a weekend release, not as a core review of expensive hardware on a strict schedule.