will an Athlon 64 system smoke a dual athlon MP system?

[Valhalla1]

I'm running 2x athlon mp 2100 1gb pc2100, old radeon 8500 aiw video and 10k rpm scsi disk

thinking of building a new box, but considering upgrading what I've got

so if I went with-
2x mp 2800 (or whatever the last one made was?)
2 gigs ram
upgraded to u320 scsi raid or sata raid
new agp video card

how bad would this system get its ass kicked by something like-

1x athlon 64
1-2 gb fast ass ram
sata raid
new pcie video card


I like having 2 cpu's, but dont want to spend the money for dual opteron right now
basically wondering if I should go with an upgrade on my box instead of building all new for athlon 64, and waiting until I can build a dual opteron for cheaper

 

[Pariah]

Dual mobiles should be the choice. XP mobile 2600+ is under $100 and is practically guaranteed to hit 2.4GHz or higher with the simple pin mod. It won't be the ultimate gaming machine, but judging by your video card, that's not much of an issue. Cheaper than dual 2800+ MP's, and a lot faster. 2GB's of RAM is a waste, save the money for a future purchase.

 

[otispunkmeyer]

why not wait for dual core? then upgrade, then u can have A64 and 2 cpus

 

[xsilver]

maybe wait for the dual core amd64's ??? or if you cant wait, upgrade now and change the cpu later.... (only a bios upgrade needed apparently)
in single thread it will smoke it
in multi thread it will be close in performance (i'd still give the lead to the amd64 tho)

 

[keldysh]

Athlon MP will smoke if start without heatsink bolt on!

 

[imported_Phil]

Dual-core A64, 10krpm SCSI disk, 1-2Gb RAM. Smokey.

 

[Lonyo]

Dual P4 will beat dual MP 2800+ (2.8GHz P4)
Dual AMD 64 will beat dual P4.

A dual core P4 2.8GHz would be a better deal I reckon than dual 2800+, and probably not hugely different in cost.

Go here to compare single CPU's in various tests and see what might be best, and how much of a perf. increase AMD64 and P4's would give.
(And figure how much you need 2 CPU's)
ie: if a P4 2.8GHz is faster than a 2800+, then Pd 2.8 will be faster than dual 2800+.
You can also then compare the perf of a Pentium D with a single AMD64 using Anandtech's article on the PD Here and here

 

[Valhalla1]

guess its wait for dualcore..

but by the time thats pretty standard, I'll be wanting 2 x dualcore cpu's ! will that be possible with athlon64?

 

[keldysh]

Dual system also have more bandwidth and i/o performance than desktop system proper. This make tremendous difference with multitask users and polythread application.

 

[ohnnyj]

Originally posted by: Valhalla1
guess its wait for dualcore..

but by the time thats pretty standard, I'll be wanting 2 x dualcore cpu's ! will that be possible with athlon64?

You could get a dual dual-core Opteron system. Four cores of goodness, of course I am not sure if many apps take advantage of that many cores. Plus it is the most you can get by with XP Pro which supports two physical CPUs and four logical.