Dual Opterons or dual overclocked Athlon XP mobiles

[coolred]

I am still looking for benchmarks comparing the two. Say AXP-M's at 2.4Ghz, compared to Opteron 240, 242, 244's at stock speed. The closest I have found is this at gamepc , it compares 242/244 opterons to stock 2.13Ghz 2800+MP's.

Okay from this point on, is just some info and bable I provided to clue you in on my situation and thinking, feel free to read it if you like, if not skip ahead to the next set of bold words.

Obviously in the Sandra memory bandwidth test the opterons win out easily, so memory bandwidth is a big advantage for the opterons, what type of usage or programs benefit greatly from more memory bandwidth?

In the rest of the benches, the opteron takes 6 of them while the MP's take 5, and with the exception of the photoshop filter test, the MP's generally only lose by 15% or less. Given a few hundred Mhz speed bump should close that gap a bit. Gaming they switch over to single XP's, so no comparisons to the MP's. But I am currently gaming on a 2100+stock with an 8500DV(which is probably the slower of the 2 components)I will likely upgrade to a 9600 or 9800 of some type, but will also have 2 processors with about an extra 600Mhz then I do now. Granted I know there is a bit of a slowdown gaming with 2 CPU opposed to 1, but gaming shouldn't be a problem. I am not a huge gamer anyway, and mainly only RTS's on the computer, so gaming isn't my biggest concern.

I don't really like the old tech associated with the few dual socket 462 boards still floating around, would prefer the newer stuff with the opterons, but with nForce 4 coming out eventually, as well as PCI express and dual cored chips, I think I may be better served spending quite a bit less now on an MP rig and maybe upgrading in several years to opterons or whatever, rather then getting the opterons now. If I do go opterons I would likely start off with just 1 and add another later, likely 244's, maybe splurge for the 246. I am definitely waiting I think for the DK8N as well as the 90nm opterons to start shipping, to see what happens, just trying to get things figured out now.

For all that didn't want to read my whole post, shame on you. LOL, just kidding, here?s the end, and the big question.

So back to my original question. What does the opteron offer to entice me now, over the MP's? Obviously more memory bandwidth, what does this gain me? 64bit support, but MS64 I have heard will not ship retail, only preloaded on machines, so unless I am bad, I won't see a 64bit OS till Longhorn, right? What other benefits is there to getting an Opteron, thanks?

 

[coolred]

Nobody have an opinion on this? I just wish i could find some numbers comparing dual 2.4GHz XP mobiles to dual opterons 246 and below. The closest I have found is this review at gamePC, comparing 246, 244, 242 opterons to just standard clocked(2.13GHz) Athlon MP 2800+'s.

According to that review the MP's take almost half the benches from the opterons, maybe more if they were overclocked. So that makes the overclocked XP's look really really good, especially since they are half the price. But obviously the opterons are the future, and have 64bit support for when that becomes mroe mainstream. I just wish I could see the numbers to see if the opterons justify thier price.

 

[CraigRT]

I'd truly go with the MP's or XP's for now, because you can get them cheap, and upgrade instead of 2-3 years from now, a year from now (thats how I work anyways)
my MP1800's are too slow for gaming, (I have to turn down settings to make the games run smooth) but the faster XP-M's you can run, will make that a nil issue. the Opterons are just too much money for me anyways.. there are a lot of people out there who can afford whenever they want to upgrade, but for me, they are just TOO expensive. If price isnt such a huge deal, just go ahead and get the Opterons.... the difference will not be mind numbing.. that's why I think the XP's or MP's are better for now, at like 1/4 the price.

 

[coolred]

Yeah the cost is an issue, I mean if its really worth it, I will do what I can to stretch the budget to afford the opterons, but I agree, I think the overclock XP-m's are by far the best price/performance ratio setup. But I do know, they are dead or at least dying, since th liklyhood of sempron being MP capable is not very high. But really I don't think I am a power user, or shoudl I say a heavy gamer, so I don't need the fastest processor or the greatest video card. I am looking mor efor the responsiveness of a dual rig, rather then the gaming power. And really at least for now, and with just the benches from gamePC, the overclocked XP's should stand up to at least the 3 lowest speed opterons. I just feel so odd buying such old stuff for an upgrade.


But yeah it seems price wise, if I spend say 350.00 on the dual XP rig, compared to a bit over 1000.00 for the dual opterons, I save 650. And I bet in a year or at least 2 years, that 650 should buy me a better setup then what I could buy now, speaking just about the CPU's and motherboard. Now I just have to wait about 20 more hours, I have a bid on a 246 Opteron, right now at 255.00 with my maximum being not too much more. I highly doubt it will hold up, but if it does I may just use the opterons.

 

[DrMrLordX]

A few thoughts:

1). If budget is a concern, do not consider Opterons under any circumstance.

2). If you REALLY just want an MP config for "responsiveness", you're getting an MP config for all the wrong reasons. You can improve system responsiveness by increasing clock speed and getting more/faster RAM and a faster harddrive. You'll save yourself a lot of headaches that way. If you aren't dead-set on getting an AMD system, pick up a HT-capable P4 system instead. A 3.2 ghz Northwood at stock speeds will do just fine and will be plenty snappy when task-switching. It's one of the things for which HT is consitantly useful. I myself would rather go with an Athlon64 or an OCed XP-m 2500+ or something(single cpu). Any rig like that with enough RAM and a fast enough hdd should also be nice and responsive.

 

[coolred]

I'm not so sure what your saying is true, while I do admit faster processors, RAM and hard drives will make a computer respond quicker. From what everyone with a dually rig says, the duals are just more snappy then a single system when doing more then one thing, or when using an SMP aware app. I have no idea, I am just going on what I have heard, and most if not all dual users keep telling me the same thing, once you go dual you never go back. So theres gotta be something to it.

I was talking to one guy who had a dual MP setup, I think 1800+MP's, but I coudl be wrong. He wanted an upgrade, but didn't want the cost of opteron, so he picked up a single A64(not sure what speed it was something fromt he 3xxx+ range. And he said it just seemed quite a bit slower then his dual rig he used to use.


Budget is a bit of a concern, obviously I want to get a good performing system, if I can get that in an MP system then thats great cause thier cheap. If it would require going with opterons thats okay, since they should perform better. Granted they cost a bit more, but they are staring to come down and may come down even more when the 90nm opterons hit the shelves. Plus theres always ebay and the likes, may be getting a good deal on a optty 246 as we speak.

 

[coolred]

Dang, suprised the heck out of me, but my ebay auction just closed, and I actually won. I was surprised my bid held up. 255.00 shipped for an opteron 246, seem like a good deal to me, now should I keep it an start with a single opteron and look for another cheap 246 in the future, ot shoudl i resell/trade it for the dual XP system. I honestly never thought hat price would hold up, I actually put in a maximum bid of 265.00 on it.

 

[Mloot]

Wow, that's a great price on a 246! My advice would be to keep the 246 for now and build on it. The 246 is no slouch, that's for sure. Will your budget allow for the cost of the other components you'll need to get a system up and running?

Also, if you build a system off the 246, and when your budget allows to start looking for another CPU, make sure you get one of the same stepping as the 1st. That will be particularly important if you look on E-bay for a matching CPU (btw, that's where I snagged my 246's as well, but not nearly as cheaply).

 

[coolred]

Well I actually wasn't yet prepared to start buying parts fro the system. I didn't plan to start till at least august, but just went ahead and bid on the 246, again never actually thinking I would get it for that price.

 

[777php]

So I've been out of system building for over a year now and I'm totally out of the loop.

I'm looking at upgrading an old XP1800 system to a 64 bit system and was thinking about doing something similar to what coolred is doing.
I want to have to most futureproof system there is availabe today.

How much longer is the 940 socket going to be used? Is the 754 socket already being phased out with the FX series of chips?

 

[coolred]

Well lets ee what I can help you with.

Socket 940 in my opinion will likely live on longer then any other current AMD socket, sinc eit carries thier server line of chips, which tend to live on one socket for long periods of time, I believe they have even said that future dual core opterons will work on current socket 940 boards.

Socket 754 will supposedly become the value socket, it will play host to sempron, AMD's new budget chip, as well as a few more speeds of A64. How long it will hang around isn't yet know. I don't recall how long it is listed on AMD's roadmap, would have to look to find out.

I don't think the FX series is being phased out at all. They did get a socket change from socket 940 to socket 939, and should live on as long as socket 939 is supported, which should be for quite some time.


By saying you wanted to do something similar to me, do you mean you want to get a dual CPU rig? If that is the case and you want it futureproof, then the only option from an AMD standpoint is the opterons. AMD Athlon MP's(or modded XP's)may be able to hold thier own for a while longer, but they are quickly being discontinued. And the MP based boards are all like 2 years old or more, I think.


I am actually still on the fence abotu what I am doing, dual opterons are gonna be crazy fast, and I just don't know if all that speed is worth the cost for me. I just don't think I will put it to good enough use. But eventually I will, so the question in my head is, how long with dual 2.0Ghz opterons feed my needs???? Considering I could build a dual XP rig for probablly less then half the cost of the dual opterons, that saves a lot of cash which could be put away for a future upgrade. But I guess if I put some decent memory and video card in a dual opteron system, I will be set for at least 2 years, plus as I said before the AMD MP's are getting old, and I got a great deal on that opteron, so will likely end up using it.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Shiver me timbers, that's a cheap Opteron.

If you wanted to know the true benefits of a dual rig, now you can find out for yourself. Hope you like ECC RAM *P

Seriously, though, a dual rig will be largely under-utilized unless you use multi-threaded apps. If you want some examples of multi-threaded apps, just look at any decent Opteron vs Xeon benchmark. Web and file servers, 3d rendering programs, Photoshop, certain media encoding suites, etc will cobble up CPU time on both CPUs.

Most apps won't, so the only way to take advantage of a dual rig is to be constantly running multiple apps(or frequently anyway) and have the tasks assigned to different cpus(if your OS isn't nice enough to do it for you automatically . . . not sure how well-behaved XP is in this department). I can't claim I do that often enough to enjoy the benefits of multipe CPUs. If you can, hey, more power to you. I hope your second Opteron is just as cheap *) I don't think you should go with the Athlon MPs at all after getting an Opteron for such a low price.

 

[coolred]

LordX, I do multitask quite abit. SO even though my apps are not multithreaded they shoudl get split pretty evenly over the 2 processors. So if I were running enough to apps to put a single CPU at 100% utilization, a dual rig should only be at like maybe 60% utilized. Thus I could be doing even more. And one of the main things that I liked about it is the ability to run 2 100% utilization tasks at 1 time. So say I need to encode a couple of recorded TV shows(sageTV rocks btw). Normally say this would take a single rig 2 hours to do, by runnign 2 instances of the encoding app, I could get it done in roughly half the time. Or I could just use one encoding app and still be able to game without it dropping frames.

I mean if I get the rig all thogether and notice no differance, then I will sell off the parts and rethink my strategy, but from everyone I have talked to that has actually used a dual CPU rig, they say the duals are far superior and more snappy then a single CPU. Unless of course your after the almighty frames per second in your games, then the duals are actually slower. But I don't game too heavily, although I may start after I get this rig together. But even if I do, I would think that dual 2.0Ghz opterons should still stomp on my 1.73Ghz Tbred, especially with a newer video card.

BTW have you ever actually used a dual system? I am just wondering if you had and didn't really like it, or if you are just basing your input on what you know about how they work, like me.

 

[DrMrLordX]

I've used a dual Xeon system under BeOS before, but . . . that doesn't really count. All I did was manually deactivate both CPUs(which you could do under one of the BeOS builds, I forget which) and lock the system. That was amusing the first three or four times I did it.

I've known a few people who've used them, but mostly under NT4 and on older Intel setups(PPros and such). MP rigs, and MP OSes, have both changed for the better since then. The CPU overhead from running an MP rig should be much lower nowadays, or so I would hope.

 

[coolred]

Yeah I am still trying to decide what OS to run on it. I will likely dual boot windows/linux. I want to learn how to use linux, but will likely keep windows as my main OS until then. I have both a copy of Win XP Pro and Windows Small Business Server 2003 Premium edition. The later being a NFR copy, I know it has a lot of extra stuff that I probablly don't need, but I have heard it is a little quicker and handles processors better, so it may be a good choice.

 

[DrMrLordX]

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=28&threadid=1352583&enterthread=y

btw, check this thread in case you haven't. Look at the comments in regards to Quake III and Doom III

Also, I think Opterons run faster under a NUMA-aware OS, or something like that. You might want to do some research on the subject.

 

[coolred]

Thanks for the link, nothing I didn't already know in there though. Still hate seeing the fact that a 400 dollar dual overclocked XP rig performs seriously closely to a 1000.00 rig I am probablly gonna build.


As for the NUMA stuff, I have heard of that, but haven't paid too much attention to it. As I understand it, not many OS's are NUMA OS's. I will look into it again, but not to worried about it.



I guess I shouldn't be complaining since I just got a 450 dollar processor for 255, but I just got the chip today and its the older CO stepping. Would have preferred CG, more for the fact that it would be easier to find that same stepping in 6 months or so, then it would the older stepping, that and the CG overclocks better, although I doubt my rig will see much overclocking time.

 

[Mloot]

The only problem is, that if you get the MSI dual Opty. board, you will not see the added memory (bandwidth) performance that a NUMA-aware OS will give you. Only the larger boards. like the the Tyan board, will see added benefits due to its seperate memory banks/CPU.

 

[coolred]

Yeah thanks Mloot, I was pretty sure of that and almost posted it, but wasn't totally sure and didn't want to post something stupid, but apparently I was right.