Ok - A little background. I've built 50 or more PCs, but never done any mods other than building a cage for a second hard drive in a minitower and replacing loud fans in a couple of PSUs. I'm getting ready to build my new box and I am down to my only hard decision - I can get dual 2.4 Xeons for $236 each ($472 total) or a single 3.4 ghz p4 for $425 I do a little gaming, but not much - although I will absolutely be buying tribes vengeance when it comes out. Since this mostly relies on the video card AND the game industry is beginning to move towards supporting multiple threads, I don't see this as much of an issue. I also will be running MSSQL server most of the time and the application server for the software that I develop in. Which brings me to my last point - I am a software developer who develops for a 3 tier gui front end which requires a DB server, an Application server, and a client. I often work from home. I am also thinking about water cooling and case modding (when this gets going, I will do a project log) - __________________ So - give me some opinions - single 3.4 or dual 2.4 - Thanks.
single P4 imo not only will the single P4 outperform the xeons in *most* desktop apps and games, but P4 chipsets also offer many little things (like overclocking abilities etc) that many xeon chipsets dont go for a 3.2 though as that is loads less than a 3.4 and it is unlikely that you will notice a real-world difference
Research the software. If you the MySQL stuff and the other DB stuff will work multi-threaded (ie. 2x cpu) get a couple of Opterons, otherwise go for a 3.2 p4 and i875P board.
Dual Xeon 2.4 + Asus PC-DL motherboard, then overclocked to 3-3.1 Ghz The 3 GHz on individual CPUs will be good enough for gaming performance. And you get the benefit of dual hyperthreaded CPUs.
*if* they overclock that much if not, applications which dont take advantage of multithreading will like it better on a single faster cpu as said above really, you need to find out what the software likes
but if you have two things going at once and set 1 of the progs to CPU0 and the other the CPU1 you can get better performance
The PROBLEM with Xeons is they suffer from a shared memory bus. Also, HT tech, although good for normal win useage isnt that great when looking at benchmarks for multithreaded apps because the HT engine shares a lot of the same cpu so in effect it slows it down when the pipeline is full. Opterons have their own Hypertransport bus' and their own memory controllers allowing full speed mem access and much better fpu/alu.
a good heatsink becomes with 2 good heatsinks and could possibly add another $100 onto the cost of the system and if you are running something which doesnt take advantage of multiple threads then you are stuck chugging along at 2.4GHz just depends how the software you use takes advantage of multi-threading really personally if i were going for a dual-cpu system, imo opterons would be the way to go. although i'd prefer a much faster single CPU rather than 2 slower dual cpus as well, but that is just my preference for my uses, i nice fanct single processor can cope with things like games beautifully and still have enough raw speed to cope well with more workstation oriented applications
Indeed. If you want to go dual CPU, definitely go Opteron-Even Dell computers is giving up on the Xeon, and are offering new Opteron servers over Xeon servers since they cost less and perform better! My personal reccomendation for single processor would have to be the Athlon 64 3400+; with the budget you are working with, the 3400+ slaughters the P4 in virtually all performance benchmarks. Then again, with a lot of memory intensive applications that you appear to be pllanning on running, the single processor solution of the P4 3.4 ghz sounds like it could be a good solution. I do however reccomend that you take a gander at the Athlon 64s as well, and see if with what you are doing that would be the better option or not.
say you have 2 programs which only support 1 cpu. and they both run on cpu0, then you'll get crap performance. but if you run the same 2 programs, and shunt one of them over to cpu1 in task manager (should do it automatically, but sometimes it doesn't) you'll get alot better performance. yes your right both will chug along at 2.4ghz, but if you playing games on one CPU, and servering on the other cpu, you are gonna get better performance then if you were servering and playing games on a single cpu system, even if it was faster... it all depends how much strain the programs were doing, if you were hosting a massive network, and playing games on the same machine.. you'd go for the dual cpus
Compilation on dual CPU's is always really quick. First time I saw Linux 2.4 compile on dual P3's I was amazed - Way faster than a single CPU of twice the speed.
imo your best bet would be dual opterons as AMDs preformance to price ratio is far greater then that any intel
If you are multitasking or if your applications are multi threaded, either or both are true for you then dual CPUs are the preffered option. Lets be honest here the chances are you are not going to notice the .3fps difference in games, but you will most definitely notice the fluidity of a dual CPU system if you are working in a demanding multi tasking environment. As for dual Opterons, well yeah they are a bit quicker, but the platforms are extremely thin on the ground. There have been numerous comments about the poor reliability of KT800 running dual processors (part of the reason why Dell still does not sell dual Opterons) and AMD's chipset doesn't support USB 2.0 so you will need an external card. Dual Intel platforms are known to be reliable and you wouldn't lose any nice features like USB 2.0 going with the Asus PC-DL Deluxe.
on the opteron boards? no way?? i thought it was just the MP chipsets that lacked usb at the time, then that was solved by the time the MPXs hit the market.
They still can't get USB 2.0 to work in their chipsets. Go have a look at the Tyan Thunder K8W, all the trimmings except USB 2.0.
Aggggghhh!!!! I'm planning on buying a dual setup for my project which i'm starting in a few weeks and now youv'e got me wondering, which one shall i get Xeon or Opteron? There's not really a limit i'm going for the best and most powerful setup so any idas\suggestions would be appreciated, thanx Death Power Overwhelming
