Eli5 What’s the main difference between processors used for servers and those used for gaming?

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Why can’t I use a processor made for heavy servers in a home pc ?

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4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

You can. They cost a bunch more, though, and the things that make them (and the chipsets they sit in) valuable as server CPU’s – high core counts, thermals that allow than to run for years, support for stuff like ECC RAM – aren’t helpful for gaming. They typically have fairly low clock speeds, because they’re expected to run all day and all night without ever turning off – the opposite to what you want for gaming. The motherboards they sit in have features (like dual CPU slots) that don’t benefit gaming.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Server grade CPU’s are generally made to be run at lower clocks(in order to preserve temperatures and power usage whci matter on a system that might have uptimes on the months or years) and are equipped to work with Memory with ECC(Error correcting code) modules.

These CPU’s might also skip on certain instruction sets that arent relevant for their use cases and often have their own dedicated chipsets(meanig specific motherboards) that may be setup in a manner where you have multiple Physical CPU packages on one board.(this is also to indirectly sdiscourage letting these units slip into the consumer market).

Anonymous 0 Comments

Server CPU’s generally have very many cores running at slower clocks to be nore efficient and produce less heat, so they can do **lot’s** of calculations at the same time, called multi threading, this is particularly useful for server applications as well as productivity work (video/photo editing, CAD software, simulations, animation etc.).

However games are largely single or low multithreaded, meaning the calculations needed for a game have to (mostly) be done one after the other anyway, so there’s not that much benefit to having many CPU cores, and instead gaming CPUs tend to focus more on single threaded performance and higher CPU clocks as well as better overclocking (making the CPU run faster than it’s native speed at the cost of thermal and power overhead and efficiency).

Ultimately both are interchangeable, it’s just that they’ll not perform particularly well if they’re not used in their intended roles, because that’s not what they were optimised for.

Also, because companies have deep pockets, server CPUs tend to be absurdly expensive, easily costing in the 5 digits.

Anonymous 0 Comments

A home PC built using server equipment is usually called a workstation. You can get one. The parts are more specialized, don’t let you pick-and-choose as much as a normal PC.