Intel Xeon E5-2670 (V1) prices still plummeting

Approximately three weeks ago we published a quick note that Intel Xeon E5-2670 V1 processors were rapidly falling in price. We also predicted that the fall would continue for the foreseeable future. Three weeks later and we have seen the $199/ CPU pricing fall yet again.

As a quick recap, the alleged reason for the steep decline is that many thousands of these processors hit the market as previous generation Facebook servers were decommissioned by used equipment recyclers.

Here is the official Intel E5-2670 V1 deal tracking thread that is active in the STH forums. Pricing seems to have fallen to $130 by 2 November and is down as low as $120-130 per chip now. Here is a look at what has happened since our original deal post on STH:

Here is a link to the latest ebay Intel Xeon E5-2670 pricing: ebay Intel Xeon E5-2670 search results (sorted by lowest price first).

We last benchmarked the chips in 2013 which you can see here: Intel Xeon E5-2670 benchmarks. They are certainly capable processors.

Check the Great Deals Forum for more deals including those on systems (and post systems deals there if you find them!)

Finding platforms to accept these chips has been challenging. Two ideas are to check the STH Great Deals forum as several have come up recently. Alternatively, the STH For Sale/ For Trade forum is usually a good place to look for deals on rackmount gear that has been previously used by STH forum members.

The Intel Xeon E5-2670 V1 is an 8 core 16 thread chip that supports up to 1600MHz DDR3 RDIMMs and dual socket configurations. There are two major stepping versions to look for:

• SR0H8 is C1 stepping. VT-x is supported but VT-d is supposedly not supported
• SR0KX is the C2 stepping with the VT-d fix which may be important for virtualization pass-through

Generally the SR0KX carry a slight premium due to the later stepping.