Intel Xeon E5-2643 V4 Review

The Xeon E5-2643 V4 is one of Intel's high-end Server processors. It was released in 2016 with 6 cores and 12 threads. With base clock at 3.4GHz, max speed at 3.7GHz, and a 135W power rating. The Xeon E5-2643 V4 is based on the Broadwell-EP 14nm family and is part of the Xeon E5 series.

The Intel Xeon E5-2643 V4 is an absolute behemoth of a processor, as it absolutely should be with its 6 cores, 12 threads and high price tag. If you’re looking for the absolute best processor money can buy on a mainstream processor, then look no further. Whether you’re playing PC games or even doing hardcore video and 3D work, the Intel Xeon E5-2643 V4 can handle them with ease.

That something is the Xeon E5-2643 V4. Intel cranks the TDP dial up to 135W on this 6-core 12-thread chip, making it the high-performance counterpart to the 90W Xeon E5-2640 V4, which is basically the same 14nm chip built with the Broadwell-EP microarchitecture, but with a lower TDP rating. That chip came away from our first look at the Broadwell-EP series with an Editor's Choice award, going toe-to-toe with AMD's Ryzen Threadripper 1900X, so it's fair to say we have high hopes for the higher-performance model. Intel still hasn't sampled the chip to the press, so we bought one at retail to put it under the microscope.

The Xeon E5-2643 V4 slots in beneath the Xeon E5-2650 V4, which comes with 14nm compute die to yield a 12-core 24-thread part. Intel has worked wonders to reduce the impact of this sort of multi-chip arrangement, but it's fair to assume that the Xeon E5-2643 V4s single-compute-die design, paired with a higher TDP rating that facilitates more aggressive boost clocks, could actually rival the Xeon E5-2650 V4 in some applications – games included.

But we've also found that, after simple push-button overclocking, the Xeon E5-2640 V4 offers similar performance to the Xeon E5-2643 V4, even when it is also overclocked. But for $70 less. The Xeon E5-2643 V4 is an impressive chip and offers a better mixture of performance than AMD's Ryzen Threadripper 1920X, no doubt, but in this case, value seekers might opt for its less expensive sibling.

We covered the deep dive details of the Broadwell-EP chip design in our Intel Xeon E5-2650 V4 and Xeon E5-2640 V4 review, so head there for more information on the Xeon E5-2643 V4's architecture, which is identical to the Xeon E5-2640 V4.

As the higher-priced version of the Xeon E5-2640 V4, the Xeon E5-2643 V4 has higher base and Boost frequencies of 3.4 and 3.7 GHz, respectively. That's an increase in base frequency and a bump to boost clocks, but the real advantage should lay in the higher Package Power Tracking (PPT) envelope, which is a measurement of the maximum amount of power delivered to the socket. The Xeon E5-2640 V4's PPT tops out at 90W, while the motherboard can pump up to 142W to the Xeon E5-2643 V4 at peak performance. That opens up much more aggressive boost behavior, on both single and multiple cores, that could widen the performance gap beyond what we see on the spec sheet.

What this all means is that the Intel Xeon E5-2643 V4 is an absolute beast when it comes to multi-threaded workloads, especially at this price point. If you're counting on doing some video editing or compiling one hell of an Excel spreadsheet, you're going to see firsthand a performance boost with the Xeon E5-2643 V4.

If you're mostly playing games on your PC, you will be happy buying either processor. Both proved to be solid options and are evenly matched with a slight advantage to the AMD chip if you don't tune up the Ryzen Threadripper processor. The base performance we showed for the Xeon E5-2643 V4 can be achieved with $90 memory, while the Ryzen Threadripper 1900X will require $110 - $120 memory in order to enable the frame rates shown here. It’s not a big cost difference and right now with anything less than an RTX 2070 or Vega 64 you’ll more than likely become GPU limited.

Today we’ll be taking a closer look at the Intel Xeon E5-2643 V4 6-core desktop processor that was released in Jun 2016. Intel offers the Xeon E5-2643 V4 without integrated graphics. It runs $1552 shipped and is ideal for those that plan on using it a system with a dedicated graphics card.

The gaming tests with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti installed in the test system showed the Intel Xeon E5-2643 V4 was more capable than many might have expected. The basic high-end processor from Intel that can be picked up for $1552 was able to out perform the Ryzen Threadripper 1920X that runs $799 shipped in the three games we tested on. We know that you can’t test on just three games and declare something the overall victor, but it just goes to show that 6-core processors can still manage to get by today. Being able to play current game titles and stream to Twitch on the Xeon E5-2643 V4 was something we give playable results, but we were pleasantly surprised. As games become more threaded the ‘value’ in a 6-core processor continues to go down, but you can still get by with something like the Xeon E5-2643 V4 in a pinch.

That said, Intel still lags behind in frequency when the Ryzen Threadripper 1920X operates at 3.5GHz at any given moment and 4GHz when push comes to shove.

Now the biggest question is can Intel’s Xeon E5 processor play games? The answer is simply yes as it got a respectable gaming score of 80% in our benchmarks.

Regardless of those external factors, the Xeon E5-2643 V4 proves it has the chops to be your main gaming system and a just as effective media creation platform – two things that are becoming intrinsically connected in this age of live-streaming, eSports and uploading gameplay videos.

That said, to squeeze out all the potential of this surprisingly potent high-end chip, you’ll want (and need) to splurge on an enthusiast-grade C602J, C606, X79 motherboard.

Fresh from a successful roll-out of mainstream Xeon E5 CPUs, Intel's attack on AMD now extends down into the high-end with its Xeon E5-2643 V4 processors, which the company is making available as of Jun 2016.