I have a dual cpu motherboard (LGA 2011) that's been in my storage for awhile and I've been itching to build a new machine. My question is should I upgrade to skylake or go with the dual xeon setup. What would be a better option? Here are is what I am thinking.

Intel Xeon E5-2660 @ 2.20GHz [dual cpu]

TDP = 95W, x2 = 190W

# cores 16 (2x8)

# thread 32 (2x16)

MAX Memory Size = 384 GB DDR3 1600

Max memory bandwidth per cpu = 51.2 GB/s (102.4GB/s)

PCI Express lanes = 40

Passmark score = 17,325

COST = $333.20

Intel Core i7-6700K @ 4.00GHz

TDP = 91W

# cores 4

# thread 8

MAX Memory Size = 64 GB DDR4-1866/2133, DDR3L-1333/1600 @ 1.35V

Max memory bandwidth per cpu = 34.1 GB/s (102.4GB/s)

PCI Express lanes = 16

Passmark score = 11,001

COST = $350

The dual cpu setup scored almost same as the newer Intel Core i7-6900K @ 3.20GHz (priced at $1100) and for much cheaper. You don't get built in gpu, older architecture, less instruction sets, doesn't support DDR4, and higher TDP when running dual cpu. But if plan don't plan on upgrading for awhile and would like to run SLI + great multitasking performance the Xeon seems like a no brainer when it comes to effective cost/performance unless I am missing something?

what do you plan to do with the machine? Game, Video Editing, General stuff?

You may have answered your own question but I didn't see a model number of the motherboard you found to see whether it requires anything special like ECC memory or a special power supply. Also there seems to be multiple versions of the E5-2660

Intel Xeon E5-2660 v2 - Ivy Bridge

Intel Xeon E5-2660 v3 - Haswell-EP

Clock speed is lower on the Xeon I would suspect single core applications would be slower but some apps that use more cores it could be faster. Not sure where it falls with gaming.

You might consider selling the mobo it being a more specialty mobo it might command a price that will get you more on the i7 consumer line.

Here is the motherboard. I want to do 4k gaming, video editing, multi-tasking, and a enjoy overclocking and pushing for high benchmarks. So as far as I can tell this is the mother of all dual socket LGA 2011 motherboards and you can overclock with it too. Beats the 6700k is most benchmarks that I've compared.

Intel Core i7-6700K @ 4.00GHz

Passmark 11,001

Cinebench 931

wPrime 188

POV-RAY 1974

X264 76

LinX 149

Intel Xeon E5-2660 @ 2.20GHz

Passmark 11535 Single

Passmark 17325 Dual CPU

Cinebench 2190

wPrime 59

POV-RAY 653 (Single-threaded higher clock speeds will generate higher scores with this benchmark, so a dual CPU system does not help this benchmark much.)

X264 123

LinX 115

As far as gaming goes this can do 4x SLI and I'm wondering if 4x GTX 1080 would even cause a bottleneck for this dual xeon setup. I'm not exactly willing to spend that much on graphics cards, but maybe 2 GTX 1070's, RX 480's, or GTX 1060's when they come out.

I'd say just go with the 6700K, solely for better support 😛

I'd go with the i7 over the Xeon unless you do tons of HD Video editing

Unless all your doing is video editing and conversion even then I cant see you being dissapointed with the i7. I'm with Blackhawk and Der Meister on this and I would just go with the i7 for simplicity but thats me.

The i7 is also more recent, so it'll have newer better features 😛

you may get nearly identical scores in passmark but do remember it is a synthetic benchmark.

dont expect to get good mileage gaming on a xeon as it is made for servers and workstations.

with any game 4cores that are faster tend to do better having as many cores as you can throw at it. if you plan to do 4 way sli with 1080s expect little support from nvidia.

i would almost recommend 2 systems one for gaming the other for encoding as you can see the xeon scores better with x264 encoding but the i7 has far better single threaded performance and can be easily overclocked

I think after doing some more research and from what you guys are saying I will go with the i7-6700k. Hands down best single core performance and I will mostly be using the machine for gaming anyway. This will be pretty nice coming from this Dell OptiPlex 780 SFF I've been using. It's pretty awesome for it's time though (= Unfortunately my ssd drives are much slower due to the sata2 interface.

UserBenchmarks: Game 27%, Desk 41%, Work 29% 

CPU: Intel Core2 Quad Q9650  - 41.8%

GPU: Nvidia GTX 750 Ti  - 26.6%

SSD: Intel Raid 0 Volume 240GB  - 68.4%

HDD: Toshiba P300 2TB  - 95.3%

RAM: Unknown 4x4GB  - 23.2%

MBD: Dell OptiPlex 780 

Beats my A6-5400k

UserBenchmarks: Game 21%, Desk 38%, Work 19% 

CPU: AMD A6-5400K APU  - 32.1%

GPU: Nvidia GTX 560  - 24.7%

HDD: Amd-raid Array 1 499GB  - 89.8%

RAM: Unknown IM34GU48C16-999HB 2x4GB  - 29.9%

MBD: Asrock FM2A88X-ITX+ 

Thanks for the update and quick reply. I'll be sure to keep an eye on this thread.