Dual CPU motherboard upgrade, good or bad?

kebabaluba

kebabaluba

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Oct 17, 2019
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It came to my attention that there are motherboards that support dual cpu on the marked, X99 motherboards. So i curious how well dual cpu actually work say when used in gaming and if dual cpu mobo is a good upgrade? So i would love to hear opinions and feedback (if you have such setup) about dual cpu setup.
Reason why i`m curious about X99 dual cpu mobo is because i have single cpu X99 and it shows signs of fatigue when i overclock the cpu, CMOS battery drains fast and the pc won`t boot up. X99 mobos have LGA 2011-3 cpu socket and that means i could reuse my current cpu ( i7-5820k) and all of my 8 ram chips. That way i just would need another identical cpu, new mobo and new cooling fan. RAM prices is what keeping me from just buying new modern mobo and cpu chip as i would need new ram sticks as well...
 
I recently retired (recycled) one such machine. Sold all the RAM on eBay. Back in the day it was awesome for running Hyper-v and multiple guest operating systems. For a daily driver machine, it was nothing special as it was limited by single threaded performance and it sucked the juice right out of the wall. Most development work has shifted to hosted environments on Docker instances and such, so I would rather have a new NUC mini PC with a fast modern processor than a giant tower.
 
Bottom_Feeder said:
Don't spend another dime on an 11+ year old system. Use whatever money you were thinking of spending on upgrades and roll it into a modern computer. Sanitize and sell your old one.
Click to expand...
I`d love to buy a modern mobo and cpu but then i would need new mobo, new cpu and new ram chips. RAM chips are so expensive nowadays.
 
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Not really when you already have six cores and 12 threads. The age of the architecture is what's holding you back at this point.

How much memory are you using? What video card? And an SSD I hope?
 
Escape08 said:
Dual CPUs = spike on your electric bills
Click to expand...

We're talking about 100w, or thereabouts, if it's fully utilized.

It's a non LED lightbulb. I would not notice that I left the attic light on, last time I was up there, on my electric bill.
 
The problem with gaming and dual CPUs is that the heavy lifting is all done by the GPU; very little compute power from the CPU is used unless you’re running very low resolution graphics.

For $200-250, you’d be much better off buying an NVIDIA RTX 5050-based card. That’s going to give you the best visuals and fastest FPS for your budget. A dual CPU setup with your current video card will likely show absolutely no benefit for the money you spend.
 
X99 is an ancient platform. There are very very very few workloads where a massive number of lousy cores is better than a reasonable amount of moderate cores.

Compare the best CPU available for X99 and the random modern CPU that's in my Lenovo desktop: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/2753vs6526/Intel-Xeon-E5-2699-v4-vs-Intel-Ultra-5-235

Even if you double the scores for the E5 given that you can have two of them... you still have half the single-core performance and approximately the same multi-core performance... while using 5x the electricity. The newer system doing the same workloads will pay for itself rather quickly once you account for the fact that not only are you using more electricity you're also vastly increasing the heat load so now you have to turn on the AC. See the problem?

Also other things get faster too. Ignore the CPU performance for a moment. Our example E5-2699 v4 on an X99 board is limited to PCI-E 3.0. Each gen of PCI-E doubles the bandwidth of the previous version. This matters for storage, GPU performance, etc. For gaming at 1080P 60Hz, you'll never notice the difference, but tech moves on. Oh and I hope you don't need resizable BAR which some GPUs use (Intel Arc especially)... older boards don't support that.

The only benefit to older platforms at this point and why I still do have one X299 based system around here is RAM pricing. DDR5 is much more expensive than DDR4 on the used market. So if you need oodles of RAM it's cheaper to use a DDR4 platform. But no way in heck I'd buy an X99 board today - it's practically e-waste.
 
dogememe said:
X99 is an ancient platform. There are very very very few workloads where a massive number of lousy cores is better than a reasonable amount of moderate cores.

Compare the best CPU available for X99 and the random modern CPU that's in my Lenovo desktop: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/2753vs6526/Intel-Xeon-E5-2699-v4-vs-Intel-Ultra-5-235

Even if you double the scores for the E5 given that you can have two of them... you still have half the single-core performance and approximately the same multi-core performance... while using 5x the electricity. The newer system doing the same workloads will pay for itself rather quickly once you account for the fact that not only are you using more electricity you're also vastly increasing the heat load so now you have to turn on the AC. See the problem?

Also other things get faster too. Ignore the CPU performance for a moment. Our example E5-2699 v4 on an X99 board is limited to PCI-E 3.0. Each gen of PCI-E doubles the bandwidth of the previous version. This matters for storage, GPU performance, etc. For gaming at 1080P 60Hz, you'll never notice the difference, but tech moves on. Oh and I hope you don't need resizable BAR which some GPUs use (Intel Arc especially)... older boards don't support that.

The only benefit to older platforms at this point and why I still do have one X299 based system around here is RAM pricing. DDR5 is much more expensive than DDR4 on the used market. So if you need oodles of RAM it's cheaper to use a DDR4 platform. But no way in heck I'd buy an X99 board today - it's practically e-waste.
Click to expand...
RAM prices is what holds me down at this point. Newer mobo`s have only 4 slots of RAM and i have 8 of them, if i reuse my current RAM chips i end up with only 16 gb of RAM and that is a no no. Modern mobo and cpu aren`t that expensive, but RAM cost a leg and an arm...
 
ram from that ancient system likely isnt compatible with most modern cpu/mobo.

But if its ddr4 without ECC might be possible.

you would be 10x farther ahead with a budget amd build and new mobo.

The speed of your current processor (roughly)
Multithread Rating 9830

Single Thread Rating 1991

amd ryzen 5 7500x3d
Multithread Rating 25143

Single Thread Rating 3500

ryzen 9850x3d
Multithread Rating 41383

Single Thread Rating 4711

https://www.microcenter.com/site/content/bundle-and-save.aspx
1779124670081.webp


or bigger budget
1779124699506.webp
 
Last edited:
Rand said:
ram from that ancient system likely isnt compatible with most modern cpu/mobo.

But if its ddr4 with ECC might be possible.

you would be 10x farther ahead with a budget amd build and new mobo.
Click to expand...
My ram is DDR4, at least what it says on the product description. HyperX Fury DDR4 2400MHz, 8 in total. Also they sell brand new mobo`s that still support DDR4, which is great because DDR5 is so expensive.
 
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