Brian1965,
The Xeon E5 v2's were one of the best series ever as the core counts were gnerally the same as the first version, but the clock speeds were increased. going to v3's generally added 2 cores and simultaneously the clock speeds dropped so there were few v3's with decent single-thread performance excpe the very expensive top ones. the situation is somewhat better with v4 bit there are also performance gaps in the 6 and 8 cores, where the clock speed - and price- jumps with a large increment. The E5-1600's though have kept the sequence vonsisitent and both E5-1600 v3 and v4 are good balances of cores and speeds.
The Wikipedia page is convenient for Xeon E5 2600 v2 shopping:
8-core:
Xeon E5-2667 v2 - 3.3 / 4.0HGhz
10 Core:
Xeon E5-2680 v2 - 2.8 / 3.6ghz
My favorite E5 of all is probably the E5-2687w v2 as it changed from the first verison 8-core @ 3.2 /3.8 to 8-core at 3.4 /4.0GHz:
E5-2687w: Passmark average CPU rating: 14439 / Single Thread: 1872
E5-2687w v2: 16666 / 2059
For Comparison:
E5-2670: 12440 / 1575
-The v2 being one of the great all-rounders. As those are still quite expensive used, I settled for the in effect, the 6-core version- the E5-1660 v2 6-core @ 3.7 /4.0Ghz: 13767 / 2082
In terms of priority of perfomance, in my uses- mostly 3D modeling, the priority is single-threaded. I got along for a long while with an E5-1620 4-core @ 3.6 / 3.8GHz as the single thread mark was 1930 was quite good in modeling, but 4-cores is not exciting in CPU rendering.
The problem is the cost of used v2's are still quite high (8.2016). By the numbers, a very good choice might be the E5 2667 v2 but at £1200-1500 it's a bit expensive. The E5-2680 v2 is £650-750 and E5-2650 v2 at about £400-600 are not too painf The 2650 v2 clock speed is quite similar to your E5-2670 but the single-thread rating is much improved::
E5-2670: 12440 / 1575
E5-2650 v2: 13026 / 1861
However for £129-140:
E5-2690: 14438 / 1873
That would be a definite advantage in SW modeling, but in balance, changing to a Quadro M4000 or especially an M5000 would be more noticeable . That's a difficult equation as the E5-2650 v2 is going to improve rendering speed as well.
A for memory use, I wonder if the 1600 to 1866 difference is very noticable. there is a counter-intuitive sequence: as the clock speed increases so does the latency: DDR3 1333 has a CAS latency of 9 and DDR2666 has a latency of 18- there a mathematical relationship there.- 2X speed= 2X CAS latency
But the true l;atency depcreases as there a more clock cycles completed int he same time.
And I think the true latency is the experiential component- the higher RAM clock speed will improve rendering speeds, but it's difficult to differentiate experientially the CPU , disk, RAM, and GPU.
I've added RAM to systems but never changed RAM speeds in the same system, so it would be interesting to see how that change alone affects the performance.
Many z-series users will appreicate a report on adding a Telsa GPU coprocessor as those who can use their capabilities can have such important benefits at a low cost.
Cheers,
BambiBoomZ, now apparently