Opteron 1356 vs. Phenom ][ X4 910 / 925

[nenforcer]

I've purchased a "server" motherboard which supports both AM2 Opterons and surprisingly a few 95W AM2+/AM3 Phenom 2 CPU's 805 / 810 / 910. (besides the original phenom 1's as well)

My original intention was to build my first Opteron machine but don't know if the performance of an AM2 Opteron 1356 @ 2.3 GHz is competitive with a newer Phenom II X4 810 / 910 95W.

Looking at the Anandtech benchmarks comparing the Phenom 2 X4 810 / 910, both at 2.6GHz, there is little to no difference in performance in almost all of the benchmarks. Unfortunately AT's benchmarks don't include server CPU's yet.

Makes me wonder if that additional 2MB L3 Cache is even worth the huge price difference between the 820 / 840 and 910e. (it appears to all be the wattage difference 95W vs. 65W)

My concern is the Opteron 1356 is too old and overpriced for the newer Phenom ]['s so I should just skip it altogether. I can also get a used Opteron 1212 for like $40 shipped and pass on the quad cores for now.

 

[veri745]

I think the only advantage of the Opterons is that they support ECC memory.

If you don't care about that, I would definitely get one of the newer and faster Ph II CPUs.

 

[Cerb]

I think the only advantage of the Opterons is that they support ECC memory.

If you don't care about that, I would definitely get one of the newer and faster Ph II CPUs.

Nope, even better: you only need the Opteron to run more DIMMs. Phenom II and Athlon II CPUs support unbuffered (AKA unregistered) ECC RAM. The limitation for actual use comes from most desktop board makers not supporting this feature.

The Phenom II 2.6 would be faster, either of them, provided you skip on registered ECC RAM (if you already have such RAM, you may as well get an Opteron).