ASUS and ASRock Prep Gaming Motherboards for Intel Xeon E3 v5 Processors

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• ognacy - Tuesday, December 29, 2015 - link

  I created an account just to comment on this article.
  
  AT is becoming a joke. How is this article not a PR copy paste?
  
  "better position their products for personal and professional usage"? What does this mean, in English? "Better milk the enthusiast crowd"?
  
  Compare the Xenos to X5 so they actually show some sort of an advantage? Really? Where is the price and performance comparison? Because i7 is hard to find? Really? A 10sec google shows me a dozen places where it is available immediately.
  
  Write about "enthusiasts" and then proceed to briefly acknowledge that the badly crippled C232 chipset, more in line with i3/i5 levels of performance, has serious shortcomings? That this chipset does not belong in one sentence with anything enthusiast-worthy?
  
  Seriously, one more article like this and I am out of here. It's the worst kind of internet advertising, both inefficient and damaging to quality content that actually still appears here every now and then.

• acrobatbat - Tuesday, December 29, 2015 - link

  Just a correction for you
  
  Skylake core i7's are hard to find and when you do find them they are overpriced. The corresponding xenon processors are much cheaper at present and since most enthusiasts don't need/want integrated graphics it would actually make more sense to buy one.
  
  But Intel decided to mess with us and force a new chipset for the xenons unlike the previous generation.
  
  I actually considered getting a xenon but I wanted a mATX board so that was a no go

• Ryan Smith - Tuesday, December 29, 2015 - link

  I must admit I find some of this feedback to be a surprise.
  
  To be clear, nothing here is advertising. ASRock and ASUS are making Xeon gaming motherboards. To us, this is interesting, and certainly newsworthy, which is why I had Anton create this article. We haven't had Xeon gaming boards before, as until now it has never been necessary.
  
  That said, I do appreciate the feedback. And to that end let me throw out this question to you: how would you prefer to see this information written up as a Pipeline article? What would you like done differently?

• drzzz - Tuesday, December 29, 2015 - link

  Ryan,
  
  You asked so I will give some feedback on how this could have been better and seem less like PR/Advertising/Marketing.
  
  First - Ditch the image of the Intel Xeon Processor. That is a PR/Marketing image and frankly not needed in anyway to make the article good. Really gives the article the PR/Marketing feel right away.
  
  Second - Be truthful about the Xeon E3 v5 processors. Quoting Anton "Moreover, unlike Intel Core i5, all quad-core Xeon chips for uniprocessor systems feature 8MB cache and Hyper-Threading technology, which means slightly higher performance in single-threaded and multi-threaded applications." Ian has already posted a chart after a reader stated that the ARK site indicated E3-1220 V5 not being listed at having Hyper-Threading. As it stands not all E3 v5 Xeon processors support Hyper-Threading and that makes Anton statement false. This as I said elsewhere smacks of poor fact checking and proof reading. Making something out to be more than it is generally is the job of PR/Marketing. AT once stood for solid factual articles even in the pipeline. Pipeline is really starting to look and read like a pig trough.
  
  Three - What shortage of i7-6700K processors is being referenced. I can get them locally and several sites on the internet. Even Amazon has them in stock. Now if by shortage Anton was meaning to reference the current situation that the prices tend vary greatly vendor to vendor then he should have said that. However I think most of your readers will tend to agree that by shortage we expect to find them out of stock or back ordered at most if not all vendors. This is simply not the case as Google gives you 5 vendors with in stock supplies in the first 6 listings when I did a search today.
  
  Those are just 3 points that could be handled better. It really is a sloppy piece, poorly proof read and poorly fact checked. Given that AT specifically has an article up about the E3 v5 processors that is correct in their capabilities makes statements in this article even more troubling.
  
  You have gotten a lot of feedback in comments lately that pipeline articles are sounding more and more like PR/Marketing efforts or just poor writing that is re-using the PR/Marketing material with little or no original content. If your writers can't create compelling articles that are not drawing this type of criticism then perhaps they are not the writers AT needs or perhaps your leadership in the area of what is acceptable or tolerated is lacking. Either way AT pipeline articles have become a joke.

• Ryan Smith - Wednesday, December 30, 2015 - link

  drzzz, thank you very much for the feedback. Just to respond to everything on a point-by-point basis.
  
  1) I disagree to some extent. But I can see why you'd feel that way. So it's something we'll try to keep in mind.
  
  2) Completely agreed. That is our fault for missing the non-HT processors and the article has been corrected. Thank you for pointing that out.
  
  3) We'll have more on this later today in a separate article. But there is definitely a shortage of 6700Ks right now with the major US online retailers. Many are out of stock, others such as Newegg or the Amazon marketplace sellers are charging well over MSRP (which is what they typically do when they know supplies are tight).

• Impulses - Wednesday, December 30, 2015 - link

  Newegg is definitely price gouging by like $60+, and it's been out at Amazon (not counting merchants) for a while... I'm kind of amazed this is still ongoing, rather glad I ended up buying a combo at Newegg during the early days frenzy (and using a Premier trial to return half of the combo at no extra expense).

• fluxtatic - Wednesday, December 30, 2015 - link

  "how would you prefer to see this information written up as a Pipeline article?"
  
  Well, having it not read like somebody copy-pasted an Intel press release to start. Might just be the way Anton writes, but I couldn't shake the feeling that most of this had been fed to AT by some PR flack verbatim.
  
  "This helps Intel and its partners to better position their products for personal and professional usage."
  
  It might be a bit of bias on my part, but really? Don't walk on eggshells here; follow that with, "Yes, Intel is once again subdividing the market hoping to squeeze a few more dollars out of their customers." At the very least, don't word it as if it's coming out of some Intel flunky's mouth.
  
  And a bit of a niggle, but the phrase "and so on" appears in two consecutive paragraphs, and again further down. Learn how to end sentences when you've run out of things to say.
  
  If the writers have something to say, even a paragraph or two, have at it. If it's going to go into the Cuisinart with whatever press release they just got...maybe have a second look. Maybe further section the site - companies want press releases regurgitated? Make a (clearly marked) section for that. The writers have a couple worthy paragraphs about whatever subject? Put it down and post it. The Pipeline turning into some Frankenstein's monster of actual writing mashed together with press releases kinda blows.

• mrdude - Wednesday, December 30, 2015 - link

  "We haven't had Xeon gaming boards before, as until now it has never been necessary."
  
  That might be true, but it doesn't make it any less of a dumb product. One of those boards explicitly states that it doesn't even support ECC. <Insert Scooby Doo 'Errr?'> Then there's the lack of IPMI, and we can go on and on. It's a server motherboard in name only.
  
  There are real stories here that led us to the point where we're being pushed gaming + server motherboards with marketing jargon that only Francois Piednoel would be proud of, and it's not the motherboards.
  
  -Intel's persistent issues with yields at the top end on their 14nm node causing increases in pricing and decrease in availability
  -AMD can't get a team of engineers to screw in a lightbulb correctly nevermind in a timely manner
  -It's more market segmentation than we saw with previous Xeons/Core-X processors as the slightly cheaper (and completely equivalent as in it's the same frickin' processor) Xeons were compatible with consumer chipsets. Now that we can't buy those attractive E3-1230vX processors, we get these "gaming/server motherboards."
  
  The tone of this article completely neglects the above points and provides ammunition to the notion that AT has lost sight of its readers' best interests -- at least with respect to this particular article. I don't personally feel that way, but this pipeline article certainly rubbed me the wrong way given the reality of the matter. I can completely understand that it's something of an interesting product, but what's far more interesting is how and why we've gotten to this point.
  
  "However, starting from the Skylake generation of microprocessors Intel decided to change its approach to workstation and desktop-class PCs. To that end Xeon E3-1200 v5 microprocessors are incompatible with Intel 100-series chipsets for desktops. For Intel this helps Intel and its partners to better position their products for personal and professional usage, though practically speaking it also serves to draw a much clearer line between the Core and Xeon families, for better or worse."
  
  That's the only place any of the points I mentioned are brought to light in the article, and the author declares that it's 'for better or worse.' I'll help you out here: it's worse. If you think it's better, you're losing sight of what AnandTech stands for.

• ognacy - Monday, January 4, 2016 - link

  Well, as others here have said - I'd skip the typical marketing talk. The "better position" thing sounds like it came straight from some marketing drone at Intel. I can't imagine a normal person saying something like this with a straight face.
  
  More importantly, I'd like to hear why should I bother with a Xeon CPU with the new chipset, as opposed to an i5 or i7. It would seem to me that the mix of the high end CPU with clearly not-enthusiast-grade chipset makes no sense whatsoever for an enthusiast, prosumer or someone with money to burn. If that's because of i7 shortage - call it out and compare prices and features. Is a top of the line i7 with it's current $50 markup over MSRP worse than a Xeon with one of those new motherboards? That's what I'd consider valuable information.
  
  Just my 2 cents.

• lagittaja - Tuesday, December 29, 2015 - link

  Ugh, that C232. Pretty much like a B150. But C232 doesn't have VT-d.
  Intel is being a major dick here. All the 100 series chipsets support VT-d.
  Previous C222 C224 C226 chipsets all supported VT-d.