which old computer to take

[DarkTXKnight]

So Ive got a friend who is shutting down his business and offered me one of two PC's he's been working on, 1 is an HP workstation with 2 XEON nocoma 3.2s instaled and the other machine is a an AMD Athlon X2 3800+ system I know I can expand the RAM on the HP more than the other system, but that aside which mahcine could I get more out of if paired with an 8800gts graphics card for some moderate gaming?

Thanks in advance for the advice!

 

[waffleironhead]

I would avoid the xeon machine personally. Those age of xeon are prescott equivalant iirc. Read- hot and slow-. So you are better off with the dual core x2 than the two seperate xeons. imo

 

[DarkTXKnight]

are they realy that much slower though??? I guess one other point is that that thing has 6 GB of RAM to it .the AMD has 2 . I was thinking that I could use it for some of my virtual machines as well.

 

[nyker96]

I'd go for the xeon simply to see how good it is. However, workstation machines are not made for regular gaming stuff, not sure how they will do with a 8800gts. I'd delegate them to server duties actually.

 

[Markfw]

It may now even have a PCI-E slot ! Check it out first.

 

[DarkTXKnight]

Actually let me give you the full specs:

2x Xeon nocoma 3.2's
6GB PC3200 DDR2 RAM ECC
onboard SCSI,SATA,fireware etc
PCIE 16 and 8

2 x Seagate 250 GB Satas

 

[Flipped Gazelle]

+1 for the 2x Xeon.

 

[Quiksilver]

Dual Xeon machine.

 

[DarkTXKnight]

I am assuming that Im probably ging to have to look @ Vista 64 for this beast since it technically has 4 cores and more than 3 GB of RAM... Ive only played with the 32 bit ... any other suggestions?

 

[Markfw]

Good luck with drivers on that old hardware and vista... I would just use the 3.5 gig of the 6 with XP.

 

[SolMiester]

+1 for the Xeons...
ESXi and have multiple machines on it....LOL

 

[DarkTXKnight]

Sol I really thought about using ESXi for this so that I could use multiple VM's but the problem is that I still wanted to use something with RAID for a fileserver. Since I dont have that many like disks, I was planning on setting up an unRAID server and using unRaid on this hardware alone would be massive overkill. So I thought that by using my current x2 system as a smaller unRAID server, I could make this box my primary computer.

As far as the OS goes... it looks like Vista has all the drivers for this machine, and that means that I could at least use all the RAM it has installed and run some dev. VM's on it as well. It just kinda worries because just about everything I use is 32 bit . I m not sure what Im walking into with the 64b it OS

 

[GundamF91]

Go with Xeon....back in its day it was cream of the crop...it'd be fun to just fire it up and test it to limits.

 

[Jingato]

Absolutely go with the xeons. I used to have a dual xeon machine and it was super fast. I then sold it and built a AMD X2 4800 machine and it def wasn't as fast.

 

[deamer44]

+1 or xeon

 

[Zstream]

Are you all insane? You are asking him to take a dual shitty Xeon...

Xeon is a name, it is the type of Xeon that matters! Those Xeons are crap compared to really anything. You have 3.2's which the 3.6's can not even beat an opteron 250 ffs.

http://www.anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2163&p=1

*sigh*

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: DarkTXKnight
I am assuming that Im probably ging to have to look @ Vista 64 for this beast since it technically has 4 cores and more than 3 GB of RAM... Ive only played with the 32 bit ... any other suggestions?

Did Xeons of that Vintage have 64-bit extensions? I didn't think that they did.

 

[DarkTXKnight]

Zstream,


We have had a lot of these xw8200's at work the last 3 years and I do know that working with them they felt "snappier" than my X23800 machine at the house. There have been a couple of reasons why Ive been leaning towards the Xeon box:

1. whether it's true for everything or not, the XEOn box felt snappier when I used them head to head back in the day. This was using windows 2003 server and XP 64 on different paired machines.

2. I use Vmware workstation 6 for a lot of admin and development VM's . When I had my single core 4000+ I was happy but needed to run more. Switching to the X2 I like everythign except for the fact that there is a "feature" (read bug) with the sckt 939 X2's (which I have) that results in very unusual performance hits on windows VM's (this was soo not good for me) unless you hard code some switches that basically mean turning of the advantage of dual CPU's in the box.

3. This guy has a lot of RAM in it. Yes it's ECC, but I don't have to buy anymore since it's 8 GB's worth

4. At work we depolyed this workstation with the version of vmware with zero issues.Plus with two hyperthreaded XEONS I do have theoretically 4 CPU's ( well 3 at least) to play with.

now for zstream, I have never used an opteron since we're an HP intel shop now, so I dont know how the opteron stacks up against a 3800, which I could then kind of have an idea of how the XEOns would perform. I would just like to get some opinions on which of the two machines would be better to add more of. I wasnt sure if the Xeons would be slower or faster than the x2

 

[Zstream]

The "snappier" feeling that you see can be related to all other parts not related to the CPU. You did not mention the 3800+ specs so no idea what OS, A/V, hard drive, ram speeds etc...

I have tried googling this said 939 bug but found nothing. if you are referring to hardware virtualization well then of course it does not have it. For virtual machines then yes go for the Xeon, for anything else including gaming I would not touch it.

 

[Zstream]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry

Originally posted by: DarkTXKnight
I am assuming that Im probably ging to have to look @ Vista 64 for this beast since it technically has 4 cores and more than 3 GB of RAM... Ive only played with the 32 bit ... any other suggestions?

Did Xeons of that Vintage have 64-bit extensions? I didn't think that they did.

Yes these Xeon's have 64bit capabilities.

 

[nyker96]

I wonder how much power they consume, probably using FDRAM or something interesting. how big is the PSU that come with this beast?

 

[Extelleron]

An X2 3800+ is far superior to dual SC Xeons @ 3.2GHz, in performance without a doubt and when it comes to performance/watt the X2 3800+ is another ballpark. For most workloads there isn't going to be a question as to which is better.

If you do a lot of rendering the Xeons have more of a chance, where HT comes into effect and performance may be around equal.

 

[DarkTXKnight]

Well giving it some thought it sounds like I should keep the x2 3800+ system as my main rig, and just run my VM's on the XEON to get past the bug. Id love to run esxi on this but since i also wanted a semi-raided fileserver as well it may be better to take this beast , load mythbuntu on it to use as my media backend, run vmware server on it for the VM's and use another box for unraid unless i get a sata raid card.

 

[Flipped Gazelle]

Originally posted by: Extelleron
An X2 3800+ is far superior to dual SC Xeons @ 3.2GHz, in performance without a doubt and when it comes to performance/watt the X2 3800+ is another ballpark. For most workloads there isn't going to be a question as to which is better.

If you do a lot of rendering the Xeons have more of a chance, where HT comes into effect and performance may be around equal.

I'm surprised by this. What sources/benchmarks back this up?

 

[PlasmaBomb]

What is the processor number for the 3.2 GHz?

The only 90nm processors which support 64 bit are the 7020, 7030, 7040, 7041 from intel's website, and none of those run at 3.2 GHz. All the 3.2GHz procs lack the important EM64T.