Need help deciding on a dual cpu system.

[thor17usa]

I am having a little trouble deciding if I will be better off with a dual system of stick with what I have for now. I have 2 options right now: dual 500MHz or Single 1GHz system. Here is the really issue.

Motherboard combo 1 has dual 500Mhz with 512kb cache running at 100FSB. The motherboard is only ATA33. This board has 512MB of PC100 Ram.
Motherboard combo 2 has a single 1GHz with 256kb or 512kb and 133FSB. The motherboard has ATA100 and has 512MB of PC133 Ram.

Should I stick with the Dual setup or go with the single setup. I have a Quad Xeon 500Mhz, but I will have to decommission it because of it heat output and power draw. :cry: The quad has 1GB of PC100 that I might put in another system. I am planning to do game hosting, video encoding and file storage. I posted a similar question in a different forum section but I figured I would get a better respone here. Any help is welcome. :confused:

[IFMU]

IMO, from what I have heard/seen with what you are wanting it for, the dual would handle it a bit better. I could be wrong, but I dont think so.
Man, wish I had the $ Id haveta buy that quad offa yea, gawd Id love to get a quad setup. wow... lol

Honestly Id say stick with the dual, but then again I am bias, duals over single any day.

[diehrd]

If the Quad can run with 2 processors make your life easy and remove 2.

[wquiles]

From what I have read, the Quad Xeon system will run with 1-4 processors - you just need to have the appropriate CPU terminator(s) for those that you are not using. For a Dell PowerEdge 6350, it would be something like this:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=11213&item=5701819583&rd=1&ssPageName=WD1V

[zachj]

I think that sounds like a much better idea . . . you might even make money on the deal if you sell the extra Xeons. To be honest, neither sounds like much of an upgrade, so if it were me, I'd save my fundage and wait until I could buy something that would perform noticably better. As it is, a dual 500 won't be any faster than what you've got in encoding, and I doubt that the 1GHz will be either (though it might be slightly, since I don't know that SMP is a 100% boost in any app), assuming your apps are well-coded for SMP use.

Z

[thor17usa]

Thanks for your help. Unfortunately I have to sell the Dual combo, but I am in the process of finding a new one on ebay. If anyone happens to find a good dually cpu and motherboard combo on ebay, please let me know.

Thanks again.