Athlon 64 X2 vs. Opteron

[Philippart]

Hello,
what's the main differnence between an X2 and an opteron dual core?
And can I run both onmy windows xp home edition? Or do I need the professional version because of it's multi cpu support?

 

[RallyMaster]

some X2s only have 2x512KB L2 cache while all the Opterons have 2x1MB L2 cache. the amount of cache, however, seems to impact performance very little. the other difference is that the Opterons are almost guaranteed to overclock well (better silicon). And I doubt you'll need Pro because you've a dual core. I could be wrong on this aspect though.

 

[The Borg]

All NT based Windows OS support 2 cpu's out of the box - NT 4, Win 2k, Win XP, Win 2003. You will need different licencing if you want to fo for more cores - but for now that is really not an issuse since there are very few quad or more systems and if you had one, you would know about it. Only the P4 D Extreme editon would fit in here - dual core with HT = 4 virtual cores.