Recomendations for a dual CPU system

[Hephaestus64]

Greetings all,

I've been considering the move to a dual CPU system for some time but I would like to here everyones recomendations on the cpu and motherboard types. I know that we have really 3 to choose from.

1. Athlon MP

2. Xenon

3. Opteron

I basically use my machine for video/music encoding and some high end games. i'm looking for the "most bang for the buck" essentially: and I ain't rich either .

My thanks
Hephaestus64

 

[TheBoyBlunder]

If budget is a problem, go Athlon MP. Xeon and Opteron will probably break your bank. As far as the motherboard, I don't know dualie systems, so wait for more responses.

 

[OverVolt]

1st, tell us what you want all that processing power for, the apps you want to run might not even be capable of using both CPU's. Unless your a heavy multi-tasker!

Like for DV and multimedia stuff, i think a P4 with HT (fake dualie) might do the trick w/o breaking the bank. For just a multi-taskin rig i'd go with the AthlonMP's for the best price/performance. I know i'm not going to buy any opterons until i know the details on the Win64 edition, any perf gains, and what apps it'll be able to run.

BTW why do some people call them Xenons? there Xeons And i wouldn't suggest them for a home rig, you'd be better of getting a 2.4C and Oc'ing on a normal consumer board than having no OC options on a server board.

Unless your rolling in the big $$$ and plan on going with 15k SCSI drives and need the 64bit PCI slot-a-roos, otherwise don't worry about "Xenon"

EDIT: also AthlonMP's are the suck at DV, not sure about Opterons. And a P4 has a higher FSB then the Xeons do 133vs200Mhz (533vs800FSB effectivly).

 

[DaviDaVinci]

i think people at 2cpu.com will be more helpful since that's what it's all about......2 cpu's

i'm sure your question has been answered over there. I think i saw someone asking last week.

Ciao

Davi

 

[TerryMathews]

Originally posted by: OverVolt
Like for DV and multimedia stuff, i think a P4 with HT (fake dualie) might do the trick w/o breaking the bank. For just a multi-taskin rig i'd go with the AthlonMP's for the best price/performance.

EDIT: also AthlonMP's are the suck at DV, not sure about Opterons. And a P4 has a higher FSB then the Xeons do 133vs200Mhz (533vs800FSB effectivly).

I think you've got it backward. HyperThreading helps with multitasking more than it does with one intensive task like DV editing.

I would also draw contention with your statement that "AthlonMP's [sic] are the suck at DV". I don't know what program your using, but it must suck really bad if it doesn't take advantage of multithreading. TMPEGenc does. As a matter of fact, I've got measured 80% efficiency when SMP is enabled in TMPEGenc when encoding a video clip from WMV to MPEG2. Nothing spectacular about my system, 1GB DDR 2x2.26GHz procs, RAM timings are 2-2-2-6.

If you're on a budget and want a dually, there is nothing greater than AthlonMP. Buy a 760MPX board, some unbuffered DDR, and a pair of AthlonXP 2500+s. Reconnect the L5s and experiment with the multipliers. Find a nice stable overclock, somewhere in the 2GHz range, and you've got one hell of a budget workstation.

SMP is not beneficial for gaming. At least, currently. It's not detrimental, but there is no benefit from having a SMP workstation. OTOH, SMP would allow you to say encode a video in the background and play BF1942 in the foreground. A trick I've pulled too many times to count.

A word of advice if you do go the 760MPX route: There's a bug in the PCI33/32 bus that limits PCI writes to ~25MB/sec. The onboard IDE controllers are unaffected, as are the PCI66/64 slots. So, either A) put your HDs on the internal IDE controllers, or B) make sure whatever storage card you buy (IDE, SCSI, FireWire, SerialATA) is compatible with PCI66. Or, at least PCI2.2. Basically, the card has to support 3.3V PCI signaling to operate in the PCI66 slots.

Personally, I use a Promise FastTrak TX4000 and 4 WD400BBs in RAID0. It's great, very fast and very responsive.