dual opterons

[footbal07]

lately i have been looking at getting a dual opteron setup but i am really trying to find out what programs in specific benefit from smp. right now i do a lot of encoding and i know that it is very processor dependent but is it multithreaded? also how much of a difference is there between the lower end 24x series and the 248 and 250. i know there are a few of you out there that have nice dually setups and i would just like to hear what the concensius is.

 

[Mik3y]

you'll wanna talk to markfw900 about this. he has a killer dually opteron 248 setup and knows all about them.

 

[uOpt]

If you mainly do encoding, then I would recommend a dual Xeon at this time.

Don't get me wrong, I really like the AMD64 by now, but for some things Intels are very competitive. If you have a look at the prices you'll see that you can get the 2.8 GHz 90nm Xeons pretty cheap, and the mainboards are less expensive, too, at least if you want PCI-X (not PCIe). Plus the Athlon requires registered RAM. Not only is registered RAM more expensive, it is harder to sell later and harder to reuse in other computers of yours.

Whether your encoder is multithreaded is had to answer as long as you don't tell us which program you use

At work I just got a dual Opteron and have two dual Xeons (130nm, though). The Opteron blow the P4s away for many things, but encoding and floating point is not one of them. Plus it was mighty expensive.

This is the mainboard I was eyeing for a Xeon system, $335. Newegg also carries refurbished one for $80 less.
http://www.newegg.com/app/View...=13-129-131&depa=0

This is the 2.8 GHz Nocona Xeon, it only costs $239 which is a snap IMHO.
http://www.newegg.com/app/View...=19-117-025&depa=0

If your encoding software is multithreaded and uses SSE3, then two of these hyperthreaded will blow anything else in the same price range away.

 

[footbal07]

thanks for the info that was what i was looking for. right now i have a 3000+ newcastle and its pretty decent but i hate loading down my main computer when im trying use it. of coarse i have also considered selling it and having just a dual setup which would give me a little more to work with. as far as programs lately i have been just using gordian knot for my dvds since its rather simple to use but as far as that goes i dont have any preferences i just want something that can encode to divx. about pci-x i plan to get a scsi setup but does a decent 2-4disk scsi raid array saturate the pci bus? from what i have seen it looks like a good idea to get a board with pcix but is it really worth the extra cost. one last thing i am not any a real rush to get this so would it be worth waiting for dual core this coming year (if not for performance, maybe cheaper single core chips)?

 

[uOpt]

My office machine gets 160 MB/sec out of the filesystem with 3 fast SCSI HDs. So that is more than PCI, but not much. If you actually use that data somehow you probably drop below 132 MB/sec easily. It would only affect copying, but not encoding.

My point was that with the board I liked to you get PCI-X at a very reasonable price, and the 2.8GHz Nocoma is "cheap", too. The 3.6 GHz Nocoma is not, so it really depends on what kind of money you want to spend. In the lower price regions that Intel setup looks very good and you can plug in faster CPUs later. In the higher price regions things are more equal. The whole thing is also influenced by the amount of RAM you want to put it. The more, the better Intel looks because you can get a mainboard not requiring registered RAM.

I can't tell you whether that encoding software is threaded. Something you definitely need to research before buying.