Xeon vs. Opteron Question

[goobee]

How does performance stack up between a quad core Xeon e5320 vs. a dual core Opteron 285?

I will be using it mostly for video editing and rendering. I use mainly TMPGENC 4.0 and Adobe Premier.

I currently am using Opteron 270 but am looking to upgrade. I'll have to buy everything from scratch if I go Xeon. Opteron just requires swapping cpus.

 

[zsdersw]

Video editing and rendering is typically faster, not insignificantly, on Conroe/Woodcrest, so the Xeon would be the obvious choice. It all depends whether the increased cost due to having to build from scratch is worth the faster performance to you or not.

 

[lopri]

zsdersw said it rightly. I tried encoding a same clip on Opteron 165 @2.80GHz and Core 2 Duo E6400 @3.20GHz, and C2D finished it in 51 mins and Opteron took about 67 mins. C2D is definitely faster but then again most of the times when I encode something, I just leave the machine running and do something else, so the difference isn't that big of a deal to me. But if you're sitting on your desk and encode many clips non-stop, then the time saving can be significant so I guess it all depends on individual usage patterns.

 

[sjwaste]

Wow. ~14% difference in clock, but ~23% increase in encoding speed. I didn't realize it was this big a difference, but I might just use a Core2Duo if/when I upgrade my HTPC from a Barton 3200. Right now I use my Opteron 165 main PC to do any transcoding, so that might be convenient to put it all on one machine.