The original post: /r/homelab by /u/ABLPHA on 2025-02-03 10:40:12.

Hello!

I’ve been contemplating a homelab for a while now, most likely with TrueNAS Scale EE as the OS for containers, home surveillance, multiple-HDD storage, file/game/web hosting, and maybe even LLM inference if I can get myself to actually spend money on a used 3090 lol.

But I can’t quite land on what socket to use.

So far, I’ve figured - the more threads, the more containers I’ll be able to run. I’ve been running a Xeon E5 2667 v4 from AliExpress on my main PC for a few months now and it’s been quite good, so I’ve decided to take a look at other Xeons on LGA 2011-3, and I found a lot of 16, 20, even 22 core ones, all of which seem to have a reasonable 2.2-2.4 ghz base clock and boosts of up to 3.6 ghz. Most of these are easily obtainable on AliExpress (except for E5 2699A v4, this one’s ouch levels of expensive lol), and I could even find a few very cheap dual CPU config mobos, so I’m looking at a potential 64-88 threads build with this socket.

But does this even make sense? Does this many cores have any benefit over a good single core performance CPU? I’ve seen some benchmarks suggesting that a Ryzen 5 5600X would basically be twice the single core performance of an already hard-to-get 2699A v4, while being only slightly worse in multi-core, but that seems like an incredible difference for a 6 core CPU vs 22 cores one, which doesn’t sound right to me.

I’ve also taken a look at LGA 2066 Xeons, and it seems to be more or less the same story as with that Ryzen - way less cores, but a very good single core performance.