Hi Hopefully someone could give me a bit of advice I have the chance to get one of 2 machines for my personal use I Game, Browse and pretty much most things Anyhow the specs of the 2 machines are 1. HP XW8400 Dual quad core Xeon 2.66Ghz (8 cores in total) 8GB Ram Nvidia GTX275 800w HP Psu (Cannot change this) 2. HP XW4600 Core 2 Duo 3Ghz 4GB Ram Nvidia GTX275 475w HP PSU (Cannot change this) The hard drives will be the same on both machines and i run 2 monitors 24" Screens at 1920x1200 And i will be running Windows 7 64Bit these are both HP Workstations but i cant test them out before i decide which one any suggestions as to which i should choose I'm not bothered about the price as they are very close Thanks I thought i had already posted this but i cant see the thread so i hope it's not repeated sorry if it is
What type of Xeons are they? BTW, your post didn't appear at first because new forum members require their first posts to be manually approved by a mod (just like I did) to cut down on forum spam.
Thanks I didn't realise The xeons are x5355 Before I posted here I searched and searched for some kind of answers but here are my main reasons for asking. A: The 8 core xeons obviously sound better but what really takes advantage of more than dual core apart from heavy cad stuff which I don't use, that coupled along with the fact that the xeons run at 2.66 and the core 2 duo is 3Ghz I wondered which would give the best performance in games for instance and would there be much difference between the 2. B: The Xeons use Socket LGA771 while the C2D use LGA775 which I would assume will limit my upgrade path at a later date. C: I have read that xeons are more suited for servers and that they may be slower in normal usage such as games. So with these points in mind I really don't think it's as clear cut as it first looks. Thanks
if you do much encoding videos, or large imaging / 3d work then the xeons would be an obvious choice. some games are using 4 cores now, so it might be an advantage there as well. with 8 cores you could run things in the background and play a game and still have some headroom on cpu power, plus the xeon machine has twice the ram, a bigger power supply which would be useful when upgrading as you'll likely do the graphics card before anything else as long as the psu has enough (2) pci-e power connectors. since you say they cost almost the same, i really don't see any reason not to go with the xeon system. since you have access to test them out, perhaps load up a usb stick with some benchmarks and give them a run on each system. xeons are not bad for gaming. the highest end gaming boards like the evga sr-2 is made for xeons. as for your upgrade path both of those systems are dead sockets, so there will only be old stock / used market in either case.
I agree. If it was my money, I would go for the first machine assuming that they cost the same. The extra cores and larger PSU can only be a good thing. The only bad point i can think of is that mamory may cost you a bit to upgrade. WHich model is it?
Those two machines look like the specs for a couple of servers. With just the information you gave us it seems like the first machine has superior components (assuming both machines are approximately the same price). Assuming I found the right two CPUs, compare the Core2 Duo benchmarks with the Xeon benchmarks. There's a pretty significant difference in that site's scores. I would be hesitant though if both machines are around the same price but one has a much stronger CPU configuration and a much larger amount of memory. On the surface it appears that machine number 1 is a much better configuration yet they're both near the same cost. That sets off suspicion alarms in my head. There's probably something in there that you've overlooked which justifies the price of the first machine. You should try and find it and make sure that whatever they did to lower the price won't affect what you want to do with it.
