Intel Xeon E5-2695 v4 18-core LGA 2011-3

The Xeon E5-2695 v4 is an 18-core server chip with strong multi-threaded performance and weak single-thread speed. It's a solid budget option for homelabs and workstations if you can find a motherboard. Skip it for gaming or everyday desktop use.

Multi-threaded grunt is where this Xeon earns its keep. A PassMark score of 19,026 puts it well above average for productivity and server tasks, and our database backs that up with a 77th percentile AI score and 73rd percentile multi-thread ranking. Rendering, virtualization, compiling, that kind of stuff will chew through all 36 threads without breaking a sweat. But the single-thread score of 1,815 is mediocre at best. The 3.3GHz boost clock helps a little, but this is a 2.1GHz base chip from the 14nm era. Anything that leans on one fast core will feel sluggish compared to even a budget modern desktop CPU. Power efficiency is decent at the 70th percentile, which is nice for a 120W part with this many cores.

Stacked against something like the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, this Xeon looks ancient. The Ryzen will absolutely destroy it in single-threaded tasks and gaming while sipping power. But that's not really a fair fight, the Ryzen is a modern gaming chip and this is a retired server workhorse. Against other used Xeons and older server parts, the E5-2695 v4 holds up well. It's one of the better Broadwell-EP options with this core count. The real competition isn't other CPUs, it's the total cost of building around this socket versus just buying a newer platform.

At around $340 USD on the used market, this chip is a weird value proposition. If you need lots of cores and ECC memory on a budget, it's hard to beat. You're getting 18 cores for less than the price of a mid-range modern CPU. But you're also buying into a dead platform. LGA 2011-3 boards aren't getting any cheaper or easier to find, and DDR4 ECC RAM adds to the total cost. The affordability percentile sits at 23rd, which tells you this isn't the bargain it might look like once you factor in the full platform cost.

The Intel Xeon E5-2695 v4 is an 18-core, 36-thread Broadwell-EP chip from 2016 that still shows up on the used market for surprisingly reasonable money. It's built for servers and workstations, not your gaming rig, and it acts like it. You get 45MB of L3 cache, quad-channel DDR4 with ECC support, and a 120W TDP that's honestly pretty tame for this many cores.

We pulled the numbers and this thing lands around the 73rd percentile for multi-threaded work. That's solid for a chip this old. Single-thread performance is a different story, sitting right at the middle of the pack. If your workload scales across cores, you'll be happy. If it doesn't, you'll feel every one of those 2.1GHz base clocks.

Skip this if you're building a gaming PC or a general-purpose desktop. The single-thread performance will frustrate you daily, and the gaming score of 24.8 out of 100 speaks for itself. Also skip it if you don't want to hunt down a used LGA 2011-3 motherboard and ECC RAM. The platform is old enough that finding compatible parts takes patience and luck.

This chip is for homelabbers, tinkerers, and anyone running a small server on a tight budget. If you're virtualizing a bunch of services, running a NAS with heavy workloads, or doing rendering jobs that scale across cores, the E5-2695 v4 is a legitimate option. It's not for gamers, it's not for anyone who needs snappy single-threaded performance, and it's not for people who want a plug-and-play experience.