Browse dedicated servers and you'll see two families again and again: AMD Ryzen and Intel Xeon. They're built for different jobs, and picking the right one can matter more than any other part of the spec. Here's how they differ, using the machines in our own lineup as examples.
The short answer
- Choose Ryzen for speed per core: game servers, busy websites, and anything where one process does most of the work.
- Choose Xeon for capacity: lots of memory, lots of cores, virtual machines and many workloads running side by side.
Ryzen: fast cores
Modern Ryzen chips run at very high clock speeds. The Ryzen 9 7950X and 9950X both boost to 5.7 GHz across 16 cores, and they pair with fast DDR5 memory. Work that runs on a single thread finishes sooner, which is exactly what game servers like FiveM and Minecraft need. Pages render faster on busy websites too.
The limits are capacity. Ryzen platforms top out at a lower maximum memory than server-class Xeons, and they have a single processor socket.
Xeon: lots of cores and memory
Xeons are built for servers first. Many boards take two of them, so a dual Xeon E5-2650 v4 gives you 24 cores and a dual Xeon Gold 6142 gives you 32, with room for far more memory. That's ideal for running many virtual machines, containers or separate services on one box, or for keeping a very large database in memory.
Each core runs slower than a modern Ryzen core, typically around 3 to 4 GHz at most. Older generations such as the E5 v3 and v4 also cost much less, which makes them excellent value when you need cores and memory more than raw speed.
Which workloads suit each
- FiveM, Minecraft and other game servers: Ryzen.
- WordPress and busy web apps on one server: Ryzen, or a Xeon with plenty of RAM if you host many sites.
- Virtual machines and Proxmox: Xeon, especially dual-socket models.
- Large databases: Xeon if the data needs a lot of memory, Ryzen if the queries need speed.
- Backups and file storage: an affordable Xeon with plenty of disk.
Value for money
Price per core and price per gigabyte of RAM favour older Xeons. For example, our Xeon E5-2660 v4 offers 14 cores and 128 GB of RAM for $89.95 a month. Price per unit of speed favours Ryzen, and for workloads that live on one thread, that's the number that counts. Decide which kind of performance your project needs first, then compare prices within that group.
You can filter our dedicated servers by processor to compare both side by side, and our guide to choosing a dedicated server covers the rest of the spec.
Compare Ryzen and Xeon side by side
Filter our dedicated servers by processor, cores, memory and price in Salt Lake City and Dallas.