Hardware AMD Opteron 6174 vs Intel Xeon X5650 Review

So in including ram and mobo, how much would a quad socket settup cost? Would that displace GPU's for folding?

 

Quad socket (or MP) pricing is available, contact Boston Limited - www.boston.co.uk or sales@boston.co.uk for more information.

Ping me your number and I can call you to discuss if you would like.

I wouldn't say it would displace GPU's for folding, but that is a killer score from the Opteron's! - Fermi GPU's will be available soon in some pretty meaty flavours - one to watch out for!!

Potentially if you have an interesting project, we could invite you in to use the Boston Labs for your benchmarking

 

If you're really interested in quad-socket then I'd recommend waiting for our review of Intel's 4P Nehalem EX product in the next few days.

 

Magny-Cours that's a race circuit in France, is it not!!!

 

Before I start I do understand bit-tech's focus is the consumer market..

I find it very odd that virtualisation isn't even mentioned in the article? As you say in the piece, very few single applications can take advantage of cores. The ideal application for these chips and the application the majority of them will blt probaend up in is virtualisation, I would love to see some vm-ware or hyper-v benchmarks included when testing products like these!!

I'm sure I'm not unusual in being someone who works in IT yet also enjoys the journalism and content at bit-tech / custom-pc.

comdot

 

Thanks for your feedback comdot.

To be honest we've never been asked to do any virtualisation tests before so that's why there aren't any included in this article. However, I'm sure it's something we can look at including in future articles like this.

 

anandtech are good for stuff like that comdot - they did a really good set of benchmarks of these chips with virtualisation in mind.

 

I have been using the 6-core AMD Istanbul variants for several months now and they have been quite nippy (2.4Ghz). Those 12 cores look snazzy but alas, the motherboard would have to be swapped to support DDR3.

 

I wonder if the difference is in the BIOS, I have some idea where the Intel BIOS stands in terms of errata, but I have no idea about Supermicro.
Are you using the integrated graphics on your shady cove board or a GPU? Might that be affecting the score?

Are the benchmarks free? I have have a few of the other Intel boards at work and it might be interesting to run the benchmarks on those.

 

Most of them are yes, you can find the download links on the benchmark description pages within the article.

 

The AES support on the Intel chip doesn't mean that it's automatically encrypting data, it refers to a hardware accelerated AES implementation on the chip (it's usually done in software).

 

How about a review of a 64 socket Nehalem EX system? http://www.intel.com/performance/server/xeon_mp/summary.htm?iid=products_xeon7000+body_benchmarks

I know I know, it won't happen as a) it sucks enough power to cause a blackout in the entire uk and b) its not exactly the kind of system aimed at the average bit-tech reader., but I need my daily dose of geek pr0n.

 

No database tests?, sadly many of these poor chips, will spend their lives as slaves to SQL / Oracle.

 

No worries, wasn't really expecting one

 

We're trying to develop a test at the moment, but it wasn't ready for these CPUs. Thanks for the reminder though, we do listen to our readers and are always trying to improve our reviews.

 

I'll have to see about coming into work over the weekend and doing some unofficial testing.

 

can you post the frame times as well as the expected PPD for Folding@home

 

Sorry, missed that one.

I'm running a dual PCB GTX295 but i don't think that would effect a Cinebench R10 scores.

I have noticed quite a big fluctuation in score (as much as 2 to 3 K) though depending when the benchmark is run so that would account for the difference for sure. First run just after a restart yields much greater scores

 

Sure thing, you'll have to wait till Tuesday when I'm back in the office though, as it's the long Easter weekend now.