Our dedicated line has two families: older Intel Xeon E5 servers that are cheap per core and arrive in about 45 minutes, and current AMD EPYC servers that are much faster per core and have a delivery estimate of 14 days. Both are good machines. They are good at different things, and choosing the wrong one means either paying for speed you never use or waiting on hardware that cannot keep up.
This guide explains what actually differs between the two, and gives a simple way to decide.
The two families side by side
| Server | Cores / threads | Base clock | Memory | Storage included | Monthly from | Per thread |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dual Xeon E5 2630 v3 | 16 / 32 | 2.4 GHz | 128 GB DDR4 | 240 GB SSD | €209 | €6.53 |
| Dual Xeon E5 2690 v4 | 28 / 56 | 2.6 GHz | 128 GB DDR4 | 240 GB SSD | €229 | €4.09 |
| Dual Xeon E5 2699 v4 | 44 / 88 | 2.2 GHz | 256 GB DDR4 | 240 GB SSD | €299 | €3.40 |
| Single EPYC 9254 | 24 / 48 | 2.9 GHz | 128 GB DDR5 | 2 × 1 TB NVMe | €449 | €9.35 |
| Dual EPYC 9254 | 48 / 96 | 2.9 GHz | 256 GB DDR5 | 2 × 1 TB NVMe | €679 | €7.07 |
| Dual EPYC 9554 | 128 / 256 | 3.1 GHz | 512 GB DDR5 | 2 × 1 TB NVMe | €959 | €3.75 |
| Dual EPYC 9754 | 256 / 512 | 2.3 GHz | 1 TB DDR5 | 2 × 1 TB NVMe | €1,519 | €2.97 |
Monthly prices include a 1 Gbps unmetered port. Per thread is simply the monthly price divided by the thread count.
What really changes between generations
Work done per core
The Xeon E5 v3 and v4 chips come from the Haswell and Broadwell generations of the mid 2010s. The EPYC 9004 series uses AMD's Zen 4 design. Clock for clock, a modern core gets far more done, and it boosts higher on top. In everyday terms: a request that takes a Xeon core 10 ms will finish noticeably sooner on an EPYC core. Anything that runs on one thread at a time feels this directly. That includes many game servers, PHP requests, single threaded build steps and a single heavy database query.
Memory bandwidth
The EPYC servers use DDR5 across twelve memory channels per socket. The Xeon E5 servers use DDR4 across four channels per socket. For workloads that stream through memory, such as analytics, in memory databases, large compiles and CPU based AI inference, bandwidth is often the real limit, and EPYC has several times more of it.
Storage
The EPYC servers ship with two 1 TB NVMe drives and take up to 24 NVMe drives. The Xeon servers ship with one 240 GB SSD and take up to six SSDs. NVMe has far lower latency and far higher throughput than SATA SSD, which matters for busy databases and anything that reads and writes many small files.
Instruction sets
Zen 4 supports AVX 512, which some media encoders, compression libraries and machine learning runtimes use to process more data per instruction. The Xeon E5 chips top out at AVX2. Most web software does not care, but if you run video encoding or local inference it can make a real difference.
Delivery time
This is the practical one. Xeon servers are delivered in about 45 minutes. EPYC servers have a delivery estimate of 14 days. If you need capacity this week, the Xeon wins regardless of anything else in this article.
When the Xeon is the smarter buy
- Lots of parallel work that is not latency sensitive. Batch jobs, crawlers, CI runners, rendering queues and many small containers spread nicely over 88 threads, and the Dual Xeon E5 2699 v4 delivers them at about €3.40 per thread.
- Lots of memory on a budget. 256 GB for €299 a month is hard to beat for caches, virtualisation hosts and large but quiet databases.
- Virtualisation for labs and staging. Test guests rarely need the fastest cores. They need memory and enough threads to share.
- You need it today. About 45 minutes from order to root login.
When EPYC pays for itself
- Single threaded speed matters. Game servers with many players, busy PHP or Ruby applications, and databases where one slow query holds everything up.
- Storage heavy production databases. NVMe plus DDR5 is a different class of machine for PostgreSQL or MySQL with a large, busy working set.
- Memory bandwidth bound jobs. Analytics, large compiles, CPU inference on local language models.
- Huge thread counts. The Dual EPYC 9754 is our cheapest thread of all at about €2.97, with 1 TB of memory, and takes ports up to 200 Gbps.
- A long life ahead. If the server will run the same workload for years, a current generation chip ages better.
A simple way to decide
- Do you need the server within days rather than weeks? Choose a Xeon.
- Is the workload limited by one slow thread, by storage latency or by memory bandwidth? Choose an EPYC.
- Is it many independent jobs or guests that each need modest power? Choose the Dual Xeon E5 2699 v4, or the Dual EPYC 9754 if you need hundreds of threads.
- Still unsure? Start on a Xeon now, measure for a few weeks, and move to EPYC if the numbers say so. Our guide on moving without downtime covers the switch.
For more detail on the EPYC models, see our AMD EPYC page. For the full price list including faster ports, read our dedicated price guide.
How Noded Can Help
Every server on the dedicated page is single tenant, unmetered on its port, free of setup fees and priced the same in all 11 countries. Tell us in a ticket what the box will run and roughly how busy it gets, and we will recommend the generation we would choose ourselves. If you need a Xeon today and an EPYC later, we can help you plan both.
FAQ
Is an older Xeon still good enough for production?
For many workloads, yes. Parallel jobs, virtualisation hosts and memory heavy but quiet services run well on them. Workloads that depend on single thread speed or fast storage do better on EPYC.
Why do EPYC servers take 14 days?
EPYC servers have a delivery estimate of 14 days, while Intel Xeon servers are delivered in about 45 minutes. If you need to start sooner, a Xeon or an hourly VPS can carry the work in the meantime.
Which server has the cheapest cores?
The Dual EPYC 9754, at about €2.97 per thread per month, followed by the Dual Xeon E5 2699 v4 at about €3.40.
Do EPYC servers come with NVMe?
Yes. Every EPYC configuration includes two 1 TB NVMe drives and takes up to 24.