[foxmitten2]

hi everyone,

I'm looking to upgrade my home workstation and I'm trying to figure out which way to go: dual xenon e5-2630 v4 or a single i7 5960x.

I'm leaning towards the dual xenon setup because of the extra cores but wanted to see if any of you have some advice for me? I'm limited to a budget of $4000-5000 for this.

quick dumb question to add to the mix: if I go with the xenon processors, they have 4 memory channels each, max memory bandwith of 68GB. Will it make a difference if I get 8x8GB RAM or 8x16GB RAM?
Does the Ram of my 2 processor add up to 128GB or do they not and amount to only the max of a single processor (so 68GB)?

thank you so much for your help!!

[flotus1]

quick dumb question to add to the mix: if I go with the xenon processors, they have 4 memory channels each, max memory bandwith of 68GB. Will it make a difference if I get 8x8GB RAM or 8x16GB RAM?
Does the Ram of my 2 processor add up to 128GB or do they not and amount to only the max of a single processor (so 68GB)?

8x8GB or 8x16GB won't make any difference. Apart from twice the amount of memory of course
The total amount of memory available to the operating system is whatever you put on the motherboard. So 128GB in the case of 8x16GB and 64GB for 8x8GB.

Which setup is the best for you depends on your budget, workload, software and licenses.
The I7-6900k (successor to the I7-5960x) is a good choice for a lower budget and software that requires high single-core performance.
A dual-Xeon setup is better if you software and applications scale well on a large amount of slower cores. And of course it offers more cache and a higher memory bandwidth.