Running dual-duals?

[jonessoda]

I have an idea (probably not original at all) to run a dual-processor setup with, say, 2 Opteron 275s (which seems to be the closest equivalent to my Athlon64 X2 3800+ in Socket 940). What sort of performance boost, if any, would be seen? I commonly use Photoshop CS2 (including some heavy effects renders, Blender w/ Yafray, and higher-end games like Quake 4, HL2 (not so high-end anymore, I guess), F.E.A.R., etc. The graphics would be 2 7800GTX 256 in SLI, not sure on mobo.

Edit: Actually, are there even any dual-processor motherboards that support SLI?

 

[stevty2889]

This should give you a pretty good idea, Duvie did some good benching with his dual 270's.

 

[jonessoda]

So you can get a performance gain, but in most cases it's not worth the expense is what I see from it... is that what you would say?

 

[stevty2889]

For gaming there really wouldn't be much of a boost, it might be pretty helpful with photshop, but photoshop is a ram hog as well, and hard drive performance can come in to play when working with the large files. I would go with a dual core, 2gig of ram, and a raid-0 setup with a large drive for backups and storage

 

[Duvie]

Depends on the apps...some of those performance curves were very good...considering you have no option to get those speeds in any single chip configuration and not likley to have anytime soon...


I say get cheaper 265 or 270's and get an ocing mobo like the Asus K8N-DL and then oc to 275-280 levels


Also 275's are 2.2ghz with 1mb cache per core...NOT equal to 3800+ X2's....more like 270's are closer to 3800+ X2's...

 

[Hard Ball]

Quad cores will provide a huge boost in productivity; I use Linux the vast majority of the time, and it's great to be able to write, compile, and test several pieces of codes at the same time, at least, and I'm sure that it applies to a number of different development, engineering or scientific applications. And I imagine that it's not that different for Windows applications, especially rendering apps and such.

If you want SLI with dual socket Opterons, you may want to look at this board, which is getting rave reviews from many posters on 2cpu.com and arstechnica:

http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?p=MB-H8D...81868317a5cc3e4c24b6d29f974194b83743a#