Forum deal: Intel Xeon L5630 for under $60 each

Recently a nice deal for older LGA1366 servers was spotted in the forums. A member Biren78 saw Intel Xeon L5630 quad core Westmere-EP chips for under $60. See the forum post here. When our Intel Xeon L5530 and L5630 comparison was completed in 2013 we saw some interesting results. This is when the Intel Xeon L5630 chips were $200 each (again this is in May 2013) and priced at a premium for server recycling parts. Since then, we have seen the hex core sub- $90 Intel Xeon L5639 come around which brought more chip for a low price point. The Intel Xeon L5630 chips are lower power (40w TDP) which make them great options for extra server nodes.

In our comparison piece we used a HP DL180 G6 server and saw that there was a significant bump in performance as compared to the older generation Intel Xeon L5520 and L5530 processors. Here is a quick UnixBench 5.1.3 run from that piece:

As one can see, the Xeon L5630 performs well compared to many of the current cloud offerings, as well as the previous generation chips. Certainly check out the review linked above for a more comprehensive set of results.

There are auctions for $59.99 for singles and $119.95 for pairs of these processors. That is fairly solid pricing as it seems like a number of low cost Dell and HP servers have been flooding the market recently with these chips. There are numerous benefits with the L5600 generation over the L5500 generation such as AES-NI algorithm acceleration, lower power consumption at idle and load, larger cache (12MB L3 v. 8MB) and the ability to run larger DDR3 RDIMM modules and run those modules faster.

Since that post was made, we are already seeing BIN prices fall to $59 each. The two auctions listed above do have best offer features enabled so it may be possible to get them for less. If you do want a more up-to-date inventory, here is an ebay search for the Intel Xeon L5630. These may make an excellent, low-cost upgrade to older servers that were previously using the L5520 chips as they offer many new features and cost very little. In fact, one can easily build a full dual socket server with 12 DIMM slots using these chips that will cost less than a new Haswell Intel Xeon E3-1200 V3 chip plus motherboard.