They said it couldn’t be done. Well, actually, they said it shouldn’t be done, because it’s a stupid idea. But that’s loser talk. When we get a bad idea around here, we double down. It’s too power hungry for a server build, they whine. There’s modern low power chips that perform better, they bleat. Shut up, losers. We’re winners, and we’re doing this.
Welcome to Esk Computers, I’m Scott and today on the desk of Esk, let’s see what this dual Xeon workstation can do, shall we?
Today we’re building up this Machinist “X99” MD8, which contains two of the E5-2680 V4 processors we’ve looked at in a previous build. That’s a total of 28 cores, 56 threads, with a base frequency of 2.40 GHz, turboing up to 3.3GHz, each with 35 MB of cache.
I say building up, it arrived from eBay with the CPUs and 32GB of Machinist DDR4 ram already installed, for the princely sum of £107. So let’s attach some coolers and see if it works. These are TEUCER AF-120 water coolers, an AliExpress deal at £17.56 each. Will they hold up to the theoretical 120W power draw of the CPUs? I suppose we’ll find out. Their manual says to remove the CPU retention bracket, but if you do that there’s no backplane to screw into, so I’m going to put them back in and hope it’s making proper contact.
This 1TB Crucial P310 NVME SSD cost me £43.18, although this was back in the beforetimes when anything with NAND chips was merely expensive, rather than unobtainable for mortal men.
This 1000W PSU from the madlads at T.F.SKYWINDINTL should be suitable for this setup, if its output numbers are to be believed. It cost £30.26, again from AliExpress. We’re plugging in this MSI 1080Ti which cost £160 from eBay, although if I had more patience I’m sure I could shave some cost off that figure.
The original idea for this build was to plug in this second MSI 1080Ti, which also cost £160 from eBay, just to stupidmaxx this idea to the fullest. I’ve always wanted to run an SLI rig, even if it is pointless these days. However I just can’t get a video signal out of this machine when two GPUs are installed, either the second 1080Ti or any other graphics card. Which is annoying, I was going to run an Intel Arc 310 for media transcoding when this server reaches its final form. If anyone’s got any tips, I’m all ears. There’s got to be a BIOS setting I’m missing or something.
Anyway, it’s working with one GPU at least, so let’s wrangle this inside a case as it’s taking up way too much space on this desk to comfortably work with. Large motherboards require large cases, hence this Phanteks Enthoo Pro, which at £107 new is a decent percentage of the overall build cost, but I need it for the number of hard drives that I intend on stuffing in there in due course.
Even with one of the largest consumer cases available, the motherboard barely fits in, and covers a good few of the cable management cutouts, so this is going to be a bit messy. The case exhaust fan will need to temporarily come out to crane this in, and some motherboard standoffs need to be moved.
There’s only two PWM fan headers on this motherboard, so I have picked up a splitter so that one can run the CPU radiatior fans, the other can be plugged into the case’s own fan hub to run the exahust fan and this big ol’ intake fan. The CPU pumps are plugged into the three pin headers so they’re going full tilt all the time. Probably not the best idea, but that’s sorta the theme of this build.
For once I followed the case manual’s order of installation and put the motherboard in before the power supply. This was a mistake, it would have been much easier to get these power cables plugged in if they were routed beforehand, and the same with the usb and front panel headers. But the benefit of a honking great case is there’s still enough room to work around issues like this.
There’s plenty of tie down points for cabling, although given the lengths the cable have to stretch for this monster motherboard there’s not really much choice in where to route them. I’m not immediately sure the best place to hide the radiator fan cabling, and it’s late and I’m tired so they’re getting stuffed into the optical drive bays to deal with later.
A quick power on test to see that I’ve not broken anything, and all is good, seemingly. I’ve got my usual Windows 11 IoT Enterprise install running just to run some tests and compare to the other hardware on the channel. It’ll be getting some flavour of Linux inflicted upon it in due course, but let’s give it a bit of a run out with some benchmarks and whatnot.
To make sure that the PSU and the cooling setup is adequate, I’ve set Prime95 crunching numbers and Furmark rendering furry doughnuts as a stress test, and after 10 minutes it’s both not crashing and levelling out at 74 °C on the GPU, which isn’t bad given that I plum forgot to repaste it before installation.
It’s pulling about 750 Watts from the wall, and the CPUs are getting up to between 55 and 59°C. Which is pretty good for 120mm AIO coolers I think, and of course in normal use we’re not going to hammer the CPUs at 100% load for extended periods so this is very much a worst case.
We’ve established in previous builds that one Xeon E5-2680 V4 can still handle the vast bulk of my, or indeed anyone’s, computing needs, so it’s no surprise that two of them make short work of office tasks and web browsing and the like. Let’s skip straight to the video production testing in Davinci Resolve.
I ran the same test project that I used to benchmark my HP Envy laptop, amongst others, and it took 3 minutes 59 seconds to render the roughly 10 minute project, compared to the 1 and a half minutes my desktop 9800X3D / 7800XT took, or 24 minutes 11 seconds that the HP Envy took, or the 12 minutes 27 seconds my 2013 Mac Pro took. Not too shabby.
This is Cinebench R15, a comparitively ancient version that I just wanted to run because it shows off the stupid number of CPU threads this setup has. It lights up my brain’s pleasure centres like a Christmas tree. It gets 3847 points, which I have absolutely no personal basis of comparison for, so lets move on to a more recent version.
The single core test in Cinebench 2024 gets 48, as expected in line with the single Xeon CPU builds seen previously. The multi core result is an impressive 1157, almost as fast as my 9800X3D results. So for the right sort of workload, this still screams.
Let’s see if we’re getting proper performance from the 1080Ti. 3DMark’s Fire Strike benchmark gives us a result of 19351, which is right in line with some old numbers I have from a single CPU / 1080Ti build I made a year or so ago, about 3% higher in fact.
Here’s the Superposition benchmark at 1080p High, where it’s getting 14017. The previous build scored 14240, so that’s checking out.
Moving to Time Spy, and we get a score of 7541. That’s actually a good bit lower than my old data, like, 20% lower, which doesn’t really make sense. Unfortunately that build’s not around to re-test against, so let’s instead move on to some games.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider’s benchmark at 1080p High settings gives us 132 average fps, compared to the suspiciously low single CPU’s build of 88fps. And that’s all the data I from that I have on file, so I suppose I’ll have to run these tests again with one CPU disabled in a future video to properly ascertain if there’s any differences.
I know Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has just resurfaced, and I prefer that to Counter-Strike 2, but 2 is where all my test data came from so let’s stick with that for now. At 1080p very high settings, we’re seeing the FPS Heaven benchmark get 125 fps, and if we drop to Competitive settings, we’re actually seeing a drop to 109 fps. I have no explanation for this bonkers result, but clearly something is playing up. We’ll investigate this further in the future.
Back to the mean streets of Night City, where the inbuilt Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark at 1080p Ultra is giving us a solid 74 average fps. For some actual gaming performance at the same settings, we’re taking our usual run around Kubuki and aggroing these gonks, where we’re getting a still respectable 49fps.
Unreal Engine 5 next, and the Black Myth Wukong benchmark tool gives us 38 average fps at 1080p High settings, with no framegen, no upscaling and of course no raytracing.
More UE5 action, with Marvel Rivals’ benchmark at 1080p Medium, Native Resolution giving us 57 average fps, which for this game and this age of card is pretty good.
My only complaint with Forza Horizon 5 is that it takes forever to compile shaders on a first run, but at least the CPU horsepower helps on that here. At 1080p High settings, it’s giving 93 average fps.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage at 1080p High settings next, which gives us 90 average fps, so no issues here.
Red Dead Redemption 2’s benchmark at 1080p with the settings slider just into favour quality territory gives us 65 average fps.
Horizon Zero Dawn at the 1080p favour quality settings next, where we see 104 average fps.
Let’s take a run through the Lower City of Baldur’s Gate 3 at 1080p Ultra settings now, which gives us a slightly disappointing 39 fps.
We’ll round off with a few more CPU leaning benchmarks, where Civilisation 6’s Gathering Storm AI Benchmark at 1080p Highest settings gives an average turn time of 46 seconds.
Finally, Total War: Warhammer III’s Mirrors of Madness benchmark at 1080P Ultra settings gives us a 32 fps average.
So, all in all, if for some bizarre reason you do want to game on a machine like this, it’s certainly got the chops to do it. However, I’m going to test if that second CPU is helping or hurting in next weeks vid, as there’s a few unusually low results in this mix for a 1080Ti and reasonably powerful processor.
Should you build a machine like this? Well, it’s pretty sick. Just look at it. Okay, your mileage may vary. Certainly I’ve built more compact machines that are much more powerful, but quantity has a quality all of its own.
If you want to be all boring and realistic about it, just as there’s not much need for a dual GPU setup in 2026 for most normal person computing needs, there’s not much need for a dual CPU setup. It’s just another setup I wanted to build for decades, back from when two CPUs was the only way to get two cores in a system. Even when I get this set up as a home server running all the stuff I want it to, it’s not going to need more than one of these Xeons, and would probably be better with a modern low powered CPU that’s just as performant. Certainly there’s more practical, cost-efficient ways to build either a gaming machine, or a home server.
So, yes, if you are a dull, grey, boring person, someone whose soul has had all of the joy of life battered out of it between the anvil of conformance and the hammer of conventional opinion, by all means, go buy a Macbook. But you’re not like that, otherwise you wouldn’t be watching this. You’re a maverick. A wildcard. You zig where others zag. When people judge you, it’s you that finds them wanting. So you are going to build something like this, because it’s in your very nature. I believe in you. So get to it, and let me know how you get on.
Until then, If you have any questions or want further details please leave a comment down below, and if you enjoyed this videotronic missive then consider subscribing. Until next time, take care of yourself, and each other.