Kaby Lake Xeons vs Pentiums

[Jon Smark]

I'm wondering whether to get a Kaby Lake Pentium, Core i3, or Xeon. All of these product lines have models with ECC RAM support. Is there a particular feature of Xeons that makes them a good choice for FreeNAS? Or are people choosing them solely for performance reasons?

 

[Jailer]

It depends entirely upon the intended workload. There are a lot of users here that run jails and VM's and rely on the performance of a Xeon. If you just plan on a basic file server a Pentium will serve you just fine.

 

[Kevin Horton]

You don't necessarily need a powerful CPU even if you are running a few jails, unless those jails will be heavily used. My first server used a Pentium G3258, and the performance was more than acceptable. It had jails running Plex and OwnCloud, but both those jails only had one occasional user.

 

[Jon Smark]

Thanks for your replies. Just to be clear: my question is whether the Xeons support some advanced instruction set features (AVX, virtualization stuff) that the Pentiums don't, but which are pretty darn convenient for a FreeNAS server.

 

[melloa]

You don't necessarily need a powerful CPU even if you are running a few jails, unless those jails will be heavily used. My first server used a Pentium G3258, and the performance was more than acceptable. It had jails running Plex and OwnCloud, but both those jails only had one occasional user.

Ditto.

 

[Linkman]

Check Intel's ARK for the details.
The Xeons do support a few advance features that the Pentiums and i3s don't but none that would make a difference to a FreeNAS user, as I understand it. They all support the virtualization features and AES-NI. Pretty sure the Xeons are picked for performance reasons, not CPU feature reasons.

 

[Geoff Mifflin]

Does anyone know of a socket 771/775 cpu that will support virtualisation properly on FreeNAS 10?, I've tried a core 2 quad q6600 and xeon quad core x3353, which although they support vt-x and EPT (according to Intel arc data), FreeNAS 10 is saying vm support none. Virtualisation is configured in the motherboard bios.

 

[Dice]

I'll add another point of reference on CPU's..
A year ago I decided between pentium, i3, or Xenon. I got myself a i3-6100. It is has been stupidly overpowered for filesharing & ESXi hosting. The only thing I note it is that it lacks a bit of juice when punishing workloads on windows VM's running on the same machine.
I say - don't overestimate what FreeNAS can require.

After all, if it REALLY is waay to slow, upgrades are not far around the corner.

 

[Evi Vanoost]

Also be careful, some motherboards will not support ECC without a Xeon. They may take the ECC modules but won't actually do the ECC work. The Kaby Lake Pentiums do not have ECC (http://techreport.com/news/31267/kaby-lake-pentiums-gain-hyper-threading-and-lose-ecc-support) nor AVX or AES and only a couple of the i3's have ECC support. The entire lineup seems to be limited to 2 memory channels and 64GB RAM right now making it a bit of a poor choice for servers.

 

[Jailer]

Does anyone know of a socket 771/775 cpu that will support virtualisation properly on FreeNAS 10?

Do yourself a favor and get better hardware to run FreeNAS on.

 

[demon]

Also be careful, some motherboards will not support ECC without a Xeon. They may take the ECC modules but won't actually do the ECC work. The Kaby Lake Pentiums do not have ECC (http://techreport.com/news/31267/kaby-lake-pentiums-gain-hyper-threading-and-lose-ecc-support) nor AVX or AES and only a couple of the i3's have ECC support. The entire lineup seems to be limited to 2 memory channels and 64GB RAM right now making it a bit of a poor choice for servers.

Ugh, seriously? Are there any i3s that actually live up to what Intel Ark says about supporting ECC?

 

[Linkman]

Skylake. Core i3-6100 for example.
http://ark.intel.com/products/90729/Intel-Core-i3-6100-Processor-3M-Cache-3_70-GHz

 

[Dice]

That article seems pretty bogus. It simply asserts, without substantiation, that the Pentiums don't have ECC support, but if you actually follow the links it gives, all the linked pages state that the Pentiums *do* have ECC support. Where's the evidence?.

ARK may have been updated.
I too find them to be listed as supporting ECC :
https://ark.intel.com/Search/Featur...um® Processor&ECCMemory=true&BornOnDate=Q1'17

 

[religiouslyconfused]

I dont think you can find E3 v6 Xeon right?

 

[Jon Smark]

I did order a Kaby Lake Pentium, so in a few days I should be to confirm whether or not it does use ECC RAM like Ark states. Speaking of which, how can I tell whether a system is actually using the ECC RAM properly?

 

[Dice]

Speaking of which, how can I tell whether a system is actually using the ECC RAM properly?

that has proven to be more of a jeopardy than it should be...

 

[Geoff Mifflin]

Do yourself a favor and get better hardware to run FreeNAS on.

Difficult to justify at the moment for a test system.... ho hum. Have to put that on the back burner.

 

[Apo]

What motherboard are you using? Do current-gen Supermicro boards support Kaby Lake processors?

I did order a Kaby Lake Pentium, so in a few days I should be to confirm whether or not it does use ECC RAM like Ark states. Speaking of which, how can I tell whether a system is actually using the ECC RAM properly?

 

[Jailer]

Difficult to justify at the moment for a test system.... ho hum. Have to put that on the back burner.

For a test system then yeah go for it. But I wouldn't trust any data that I value to that system. As long as you understand the risk it's all good.

 

[Jon Smark]

What motherboard are you using? Do current-gen Supermicro boards support Kaby Lake processors?

It's a Supermicro X11SSM-F. Any particular reason why it shouldn't be supported? It's the same socket, and I expect Supermicro to be responsive when it comes to BIOS updates, etc. (I haven't received the board nor the CPU yet, so it may be a few days before I can test.)

Edit: On Supermicro's site they do mention that Kaby Lake is supported with the 2.0 BIOS.