Intel Xeon for Games

[Accessless]

What do people think an Intel Xeon E5-2699 v3 would be like for game use?

Socket: LGA2011-v3
Clock Speed: 2.3 GHz
Turbo Speed: 3.6 GHz
No of Cores: 18 (2 logical cores per physical)
Max TDP: 145 W

(Not that I'm planning on doing this)

This thing is going to have been built with large servers in mind so it will be optimized for such. But what if? What if you had a Minecraft server with one of these babies & 256GB of RAM?

[BC_Programmer]

A Game Server and a Game are two different things.

[Geek-9pm]

The question has been asked by some. Many. Everybody.
First, one would think that if it is so great, why has Intel never  recommended it for home and office users? Because it is not for them.
There is a lot, a lot, pf bad reports. Here is a video that wants  to clear your head.

Intel Core i7 vs Xeon
The answer will not overwhelm you! 

[camerongray]

What makes you think you would need it.  For running a game the GPU is way more important than the CPU.  You would be wasting your money and I doubt you'll notice any difference in games over an i7 or similar..  Besides, most Xeons have an equivalent i7 or i5 variant, there are very little difference in the average user's use.

For a single minecraft server (or any other game server) that it also a total waste of money, you can do that on even a basic PC.

Xeons are designed for running in high end servers where you would have ECC memory so it can remain stable for years on end without needing rebooted and so that you can have multiple, physical CPUs in one system so you can either perform massive computations or divide the system up into several powerful virtual machines, they are not designed for regular use and are priced as such.

The only time a Xeon would be appropriate is if you were planning on having a machine running loads of different servers inside virtual machines at the same time.  But then the question is why you would be building it yourself instead of buying a proper server system from the likes of Dell or HP and why you wouldn't be either colocating it or renting it from a proper datacenter.

[BC_Programmer]

Intel doesn't recommend/market Xeons towards everyday users because it is not a consumer chip. it is demonstrably more powerful than their equivalent i7 chip, but at the cost of having a server-oriented feature set (no graphics capability and added Virtualization, support for ECC RAM, larger L1 caches, far more cores, etc). The chips are also typically far more expensive than their consumer counterpart which is why they are aimed at companies that can afford it.

For a standard consumer purpose- such as playing a game- a Xeon's capabilities will not tend to lead to it performing much better than a similar i7. However in the context of, say, game servers, the added cores and L1 cache would certainly lead to better performance of the server, in particular when running numerous such servers. The entire point of the processor is for running server software, after all.

[DaveLembke]

I also agree that it would be a waste of money to get one of these for a minecraft server. The CPU would have like 99.9% CPU utilization idle time serving the game up to the small group of players. Its so overkill for that application.

If you plan on thousands of people connecting to minecraft to your hosted world then it might not be overkill. As for max player count can be an integer value of  (0-2147483647) according to http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Server.properties
 
However if your plan is to have thousands connecting to your world, I'd start small with a regular computer and get people connected to it and if you start to see hardware vs network lag then look towards upgrading to better hardware.

[Geek-9pm]

For most people, price has to be a consideration.
$99.99
Intel G3470 3MB Haswell Dual-Core 3.6GHz
$131.21
Intel Core I3-4170 3.70GHz

Go up to the i7 and you go above $300.

Top of the heap consumer computers use some kind of Intel CPU.
Less often an AMD.
Only Apple would build a computer with a Xeon CPU.

[camerongray]

Only Apple would build a computer with a Xeon CPU.

And Dell, Lenovo, HP... The list goes on...

[Accessless]

Awesome, a video explanation and a new Youtube subscription.

Also quoting from myself earlier:

(Not that I'm planning on doing this)

Ever