Gigabyte X79S-UP5-WIFI (with Intel Xeon E5 2660) Review

The Intel Xeon E5 2660 sample arrived in a plain black box. No air cooler for us today anyway – it has to be liquid cooling, to keep temperatures and noise levels to a minimum.

The Xeon E5 is one of the most complex processors that Intel have designed to date. There are 8 physical cores, each of which have hyperthreading support to give a total of 16 threads. The E5 2660 has a massive 20MB Level 3 cache onboard, even more than the Core i7 3960K Extreme Edition. Officially it has support for memory rated to 1,600mhz in a Quad Channel configuration. There are 40 PCIe plus 4 V2 lanes and two high speed QPI links.

The Xeon E7 range of processors are designed for use in 4 socket and higher servers, so the E5 has to cover a wider gamut of deployment situations.

The E5 2660 slots into the middle of the E5 range – clocked at 2.2ghz and with a TDP rating of 95W. The Xeon E5 2600 is the first CPU to truly integrate the IOH functionality for 40 lanes of PCIe Gen3. The E5-2687W is the fastest clocked E5 – an 8 core 16 thread design running at 3.1ghz with a power consumption rating of 150W.

The Quad channel IMC in the Xeon E5 also supports DDR3 LRDIMM to allow for densities up to 768GB – 24 x 32GB modules.. Intel Turbo Boost 2.0 is incorporated which helps improve performance while maintaining a dynamic, efficient power curve.

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