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#1
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Xeon 533 FSB or P4 800 FSB ? (Corrected post)
Hi Guys,
I am planning to build a high performance workstation. So I know I want a dual chip system with SCSI. Form Intel's site it appears that Xeon is a better chip BUT the current Xeon available here in Toronto is mainly 533 MHz FSB. These days the P4 with 800 FSB AND higher clock rate is very common in fact. So I am wondering weather I should really bother going with Xeon. Xeon has parallel instruction (in some instructions) BUT then P4 is higher FSB. Also if I build the system on 800 FSB I can get a faster BUS on the motherboard. Another problem with Xeon is (I think not sure though) that it has different pin config so I cannot move to P4 later if I want to . Any comments ? -Thanks Manish M |
#2
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"Manish M." wrote in message
. .. Hi Guys, I am planning to build a high performance workstation. So I know I want a dual chip system with SCSI. Form Intel's site it appears that Xeon is a better chip BUT the current Xeon available here in Toronto is mainly 533 MHz FSB. snip... -Thanks Manish M My memory, admittedly vague at times, tells me that P4 chips cannot be used in multi-processor systems as the P3 chips could. Have you considered a single processor machine with one of the new "extreme" P4 processors? With the 800mHz bus and huge cache they would seem to have the best of both worlds for many tasks. Or, you might just consider going to one of the new AMD 64-bit machines which seem to be really great performers. Performance is roughly on par with (but often better than) the best Xenon systems depending on the task. And there are a lot of great new MBs coming out to support multi-processor configurations. Tom's Hardware http://www6.tomshardware.com/ has had a couple of test articles on various MBs using these chips. Their most current test found one that they though very highly of. -- John McGaw [Knoxville, TN, USA] Return address will not work. Please reply in group or through my website: http://johnmcgaw.com |
#3
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If you were gonna go for an Athlon FX51, DON'T!!!! Wait a few weeks, maybe a
month or 2. This chip is being replaced. And its getting a slightly new design that means to upgrade a FX51 will require a new motherboard. The new FX53 has a different pin arrangement and will start at the same speed as the 51, but later a slower chip and faster ones will come online. When the 53 is released the 51 will be finishing production as far as I know. While there is no doubt its an excellent chip just be aware that its out of date a few weeks after its release. Martin. "John McGaw" wrote in message ... "Manish M." wrote in message . .. Hi Guys, I am planning to build a high performance workstation. So I know I want a dual chip system with SCSI. Form Intel's site it appears that Xeon is a better chip BUT the current Xeon available here in Toronto is mainly 533 MHz FSB. snip... -Thanks Manish M My memory, admittedly vague at times, tells me that P4 chips cannot be used in multi-processor systems as the P3 chips could. Have you considered a single processor machine with one of the new "extreme" P4 processors? With the 800mHz bus and huge cache they would seem to have the best of both worlds for many tasks. Or, you might just consider going to one of the new AMD 64-bit machines which seem to be really great performers. Performance is roughly on par with (but often better than) the best Xenon systems depending on the task. And there are a lot of great new MBs coming out to support multi-processor configurations. Tom's Hardware http://www6.tomshardware.com/ has had a couple of test articles on various MBs using these chips. Their most current test found one that they though very highly of. -- John McGaw [Knoxville, TN, USA] Return address will not work. Please reply in group or through my website: http://johnmcgaw.com |
#4
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On Thu, 4 Dec 2003 17:26:02 -0500, "Manish M."
wrote: Hi Guys, I am planning to build a high performance workstation. So I know I want a dual chip system with SCSI. Form Intel's site it appears that Xeon is a better chip BUT the current Xeon available here in Toronto is mainly 533 MHz FSB. These days the P4 with 800 FSB AND higher clock rate is very common in fact. So I am wondering weather I should really bother going with Xeon. Xeon has parallel instruction (in some instructions) BUT then P4 is higher FSB. Also if I build the system on 800 FSB I can get a faster BUS on the motherboard. If you want a dual chip system, you're stuck with xeon. If you rummage through Specbench CPU2000 results for HP and Intel: http://see.sun.com/Apps/DCS/mcp?r=70...28rR0mLAKVLAe_ you can draw your own conclusion about relative performance. Of the published results, the P4 3.2GHz 800MHz FSB is just about neck and neck with Xeon 3.2GHz 533MHz FSB if the xeon has the 1 Megabyte L3 Cache. Dell Precision workstation with P4EE womps both of them on CPU2000, which is a good predictor for technical workstations. That is to say, a bigger cache makes up for a faster bus, but a bigger cache with a faster bus is best of all. What a surprise. For the P4EE you get about a 20% boost in performance for a single processor. With hyperthreading and all, price no object, that would probably be my choice. Be sure the credit line on your platinum card is in good shape. Another problem with Xeon is (I think not sure though) that it has different pin config so I cannot move to P4 later if I want to . You're asking about dual Xeon's and thinking about upgrading already? If you're not going to wait for Prescott, don't even think about the future. Make your decision on what you can buy today. RM |
#5
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"John McGaw" wrote
in : "Manish M." wrote in message . .. Hi Guys, I am planning to build a high performance workstation. So I know I want a dual chip system with SCSI. Form Intel's site it appears that Xeon is a better chip BUT the current Xeon available here in Toronto is mainly 533 MHz FSB. snip... -Thanks Manish M My memory, admittedly vague at times, tells me that P4 chips cannot be used in multi-processor systems as the P3 chips could. Have you considered a single processor machine with one of the new "extreme" P4 processors? With the 800mHz bus and huge cache they would seem to have the best of both worlds for many tasks. Or, you might just consider going to one of the new AMD 64-bit machines which seem to be really great performers. Performance is roughly on par with (but often better than) the best Xenon systems depending on the task. And there are a lot of great new MBs coming out to support multi-processor configurations. Tom's Hardware http://www6.tomshardware.com/ has had a couple of test articles on various MBs using these chips. Their most current test found one that they though very highly of. "The Pentium 4 Extreme Edition is a reconfigured Xeon server chip designed to work in a desktop, ...", according to InfoWorld (http://snurl.com/39wd). "Intel was able to beef up the caches quickly because the new Pentium 4 is actually the same basic chip as the Xeon MP with 2MB of level-three cache, a chip for multiprocessor servers that has been on the market for months.", according to News.com (http://snurl.com/39wg) and ZdNet (http://snurl.com/39wh). The Pentium 4 Extreme is *NOT* Intel's next Intel Pentium 5 (dubbed Prescott). It's a repackaged processor they already had! They wanted to fold the Xeon family under the much better known Pentium 4 brand name. You haven't gotten used to Microsoft's hype yet? Athlon finally comes out with their 65-bit processor and steals the news, so Microsoft takes an existing 64-bit processor that they've had for awhile and slaps on a new name to give it some press to dampen Athlon's thunder. They wanted something to announce for the Christmas crowd. If you don't have applications and games that actually support dual processors then it's a waste of money to build a system for software you don't even have yet or won't be using. Same goes for Intel's hyperthreading (when you hit the store, how many software boxes do you see "P4 Hyperthreaded Enabled"?). And some applications, and *especially* games will NOT run with dual processors and/or hyperthreading. You have to specify that the game's process run only under one processor or hyperthreaded model (so the other processor sits idle). -- __________________________________________________ __________ *** Post replies to newsgroup. E-mail is not accepted. *** __________________________________________________ __________ |
#6
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On Fri, 05 Dec 2003 04:45:35 GMT, "*Vanguard*"
wrote: "The Pentium 4 Extreme Edition is a reconfigured Xeon server chip designed to work in a desktop, ...", according to InfoWorld (http://snurl.com/39wd). Well, now that it's public....It's a Gallatin processor with the MP 'nads castrated... /daytripper (It's all marketing magic ;-) |
#7
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"Manish M." wrote in message ...
Hi Guys, I am planning to build a high performance workstation. So I know I want a dual chip system with SCSI. Form Intel's site it appears that Xeon is a better chip BUT the current Xeon available here in Toronto is mainly 533 MHz FSB. These days the P4 with 800 FSB AND higher clock rate is very common in fact. So I am wondering weather I should really bother going with Xeon. Xeon has parallel instruction (in some instructions) BUT then P4 is higher FSB. Also if I build the system on 800 FSB I can get a faster BUS on the motherboard. Another problem with Xeon is (I think not sure though) that it has different pin config so I cannot move to P4 later if I want to . Any comments ? -Thanks Manish M You should look into the P4's with the HT (hyperthreading tech.) HT seem's to be very similar to Parallel Instruction execution. I think you would also get the 800MHz FSB. The 800MHz FSB will only help you if you use memory intensive apps. If you are running ONLY business apps then AMD's Athlon XP's might be better/cheaper. Go here http://www.rojakpot.com/ to see some benchmarks. If money is no object then look into the Athlon 64 chips. Also unless you need to daisy chain 7-14 drives or the queueing abilities. IDE ATA133 should be cheaper and most Motherboards have RAID controllers that support levels 0 and 1. Or look into SATA150 RAID. good luck building your computer |
#8
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"*Vanguard*" wrote in message news:P3Uzb.231556$Dw6.818793@attbi_s02... [snip stuff about the P4 extreme that I agree with] If you don't have applications and games that actually support dual processors then it's a waste of money to build a system for software you don't even have yet or won't be using. No specific application support is needed for dual processors. The OS has sufficient support to get much of the benefit of dual processors whether or not the application was designed with dual processors in mind. Same goes for Intel's hyperthreading (when you hit the store, how many software boxes do you see "P4 Hyperthreaded Enabled"?). No need for the software to know about HT. The OS makes it mostly invisible. There are some very obscure exceptions (for example, if the application implements its own spinlocks), but they just sap performance a bit, they're not fatal. And some applications, and *especially* games will NOT run with dual processors and/or hyperthreading. I have heard only a single example of a program that didn't work correctly on an SMP machine and that wasn't a game. I also know of one driver, but an alternate driver was available. Do you have any examples to back this up? You have to specify that the game's process run only under one processor or hyperthreaded model (so the other processor sits idle). The other processor will not sit idle. It will do all the other things that need to be done. The graphics driver will use it. The disk driver will use it. The network driver will use it. In fact, you may see a very significant benefit as the game application isn't constantly interrupted to service peripherals. DS |
#9
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On Thu, 4 Dec 2003 23:56:22 -0800, "David Schwartz"
wrote: snip, snip "*Vanguard*" wrote in message news:P3Uzb.231556$Dw6.818793@attbi_s02... [snip stuff about the P4 extreme that I agree with] If you don't have applications and games that actually support dual processors then it's a waste of money to build a system for software you don't even have yet or won't be using. No specific application support is needed for dual processors. The OS has sufficient support to get much of the benefit of dual processors whether or not the application was designed with dual processors in mind. Nope, most people aren't running more than one processor-intensive application at a time, so the 2nd CPU would be barely used if the (whole purpose of the workstation) application support isn't there. For those who are running multiple intensive applications the better solution is a 2nd system. The other processor will not sit idle. It will do all the other things that need to be done. The graphics driver will use it. The disk driver will use it. The network driver will use it. In fact, you may see a very significant benefit as the game application isn't constantly interrupted to service peripherals. In fact, the benefit is slim-to-none, even a performance decrease in Quake 3: http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/200...l_xeon-12.html Dual CPUs are ideal for a high-end workstation running the right apps, but not worthwhile for any box appropriately called a "PC". Dave |
#10
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"kony" wrote in message ... Dual CPUs are ideal for a high-end workstation running the right apps, but not worthwhile for any box appropriately called a "PC". I have strong anecdotal evidence to the contrary. In a previous thread on a similar subject, numerous people posted that they've switched to multiprocessor PCs for normal desktop use and have no intention of ever switching back. The difference is huge. DS |
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