Skeleton said:
Hi,
Just wondering if there's much difference between a core 2 duo setup and a
dual xeon setup ? I'm looking to upgrade and want the best number-crunching
power (e.g. video editing, encoding, etc). I'm not a gamer, so gaming
performance isn't an issue.
Regards,
Chris
The question would be, who would be benchmarking Xeons and what kind of
benchmarks do they run ? Typically, a web site benching Xeons, would run
web servers or database servers, and run web or database benchmarks. They
seldom run desktop benchmarks on server type equipment.
That being said, the latest Xeons are actually based on Core 2 Duo cores.
One difference might be the clock rates used, which is something you can
check for.
Core 2 now has some quad core units available, if you've got the bucks
for it. And likely anything you can see in a Core 2 product, is also
available in some form as a Xeon.
Xeon list
http://processorfinder.intel.com/List.aspx?ProcFam=528
Xeon equivalent to a Core 2 Quad, but only 2.66GHz. 771 package.
(There are also some much faster Xeon dual cores in 771.)
http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SL9YM
Core 2 Quad at 2.66GHz. LGA775 package.
http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SL9UL
In any case, with either system, you could use ECC RAM, to protect the
contents of RAM against single bit soft faults. For the Core 2 Duo,
the 975X chipset from Intel has ECC, while the 965 doesn't support it.
I don't know how many of the competing chipsets have ECC, so you'd have
to check the manual for those ones.
I'd have suggested looking at this page, but the results seem to suggest
that the benchmark chokes on the FSB. And may not represent how well it'll
work for what you want to do.
http://www.spec.org/cpu2000/results/cpu2000.html
There are some references to Kentsfield here (which is the quad core
Core2). I guess they also noticed some FSB saturation on the quad
core. Maybe a higher clocking dual core is a better answer.
(And that saturation could be why the Xeon quad core has a FSB1333
front side bus.)
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=104101
Paul
