Hi everybody!
I want to move my selfhosted services from a VPS to a PC in my house.
I have an E5-2620 and a it-6700K, which one would you pick and why?
The E5 already has 2 PCI-X each with 4 NIC (that I need to use with OpnSense to share my Internet connection with my neighbor) that I would need to throw away and buy as PCIe for the i7.
Thanks!

  • @peregusOPEnglish
    1•2 days ago

    So what was the question? It sounds like you already decided.

    Why? No, I haven’t decided.

    The i7-6700k is faster but it has less cores. The E5-2620 has more cores but the clock speed and memory are much slower.

    So for a lot of containers that each do few things, it would be better to have more cores, correct?

    • poVoqEnglish
      5•2 days ago

      Really depends on the specific workload.

      Another thing to keep in mind is that the 6700k is significantly more power efficient, especially when it isn’t consistently under high load.

      Also if you do any sort of media processing the 6700k has a gpu and quicksync built in that can speed these things up significantly.

      • @peregusOPEnglish
        2•2 days ago

        Also if you do any sort of media processing the 6700k has a gpu and quicksync built in that can speed these things up significantly.

        This is a good point that probably will make the decision lean towards the i7, thanks!

      • Possibly linuxEnglish
        0•2 days ago

        Are you sure about the power usage part? They both have a TDP of about 60W.

        • poVoqEnglish
          4•2 days ago

          As usual it depends (and TDPs are highly misleading). First of all the 6700k is a 14nm chip, Vs. 32nm for the E5-2620. And the 6700k is a Skylake generation chip, compared to Sandy Bridge for the Xeon, which brings significantly better power-states. But on the other hand the 6700k is much higher clocked and has turbo-boost, with the latter being notoriously power hungry (can be disabled in the bios though).

          In my educated guess the 6700k will use significantly less power if it mostly idles or does only burst tasks, which is actually what most self-hosters have as as task-loads. But if you serve websites to thousands of users which results in a consistently high CPU load, the Xeon is probably overall the better chip, including power-consumption under load.

          Edit: I realized now that it is a E5-2620v2, which is Ivy Bridge and 22nm. So the difference is probably less, but overall the same considerations apply.