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Difference in Xeons

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Brunel07

Member
Joined
Nov 14, 2007
Hi,

Ive been on new egg. Basically im after a dual quad core xeon PC. However, i didnt realise quite how expensive some xeons are. What I find confusing is that you can buy a 2.4GHz xeon dunnington for $2300 and a 3.0GHz yorkfield for $350.

Why are some versions so much more expensive, and should I care, or should I just try to get the highest GHz that I can afford?

Thanks!

James

p.s Im only after processing power, things like power consumption arnt an issue as this isnt for a server and wont be on 24/7.
 
well, for starters, the dunningtons are socket 604, while the yorktowns are socket 775...

do you already have a motherboard? or are you going to buy that along with the CPU?
 
Hi.

I don't have a mobo yet and I'm using 2x quads to create a powerful workstation for 3Ds max and other rendering applications.
 
Hi,

Thank you very much for the reply, ive been looking at information online about xeons to get my head around it.

Would you mind explaining why the xeons you linked to are a good choice? Also ive been looking at these two:

Xeon EP W5580
Xeon EN 3570

According to the table below the specs of these two are identical, including memory, cache etc. So why does one cost $600 more than the other?

intc_xeon_nehalem_specs_.png
 
Wow, that's a big price. So only thing Xeon's are good is that you can put a few into the motherboard?
 
Xeon's are server chips and just carry a higher price tag because they have multiple QPI links for multi socket systems for Nehalem cpu's, and possibly the more expensive one is the extreme version with unlocked mulitplier.
 
Now that Nehalem is out, you might want to consider a dual LGA1366 board, with the Xeon 5300 or 5500 series. They should be significantly faster, and more expensive.

Forget about Dunnington, it's a Xeon MP, which is intended for 4 CPUs and up. You'll get a lot more processing power in the end, but it's a lot harder to build these systems, and a lot more expensive. Not to mention that all single threaded apps will be running at the slower ~2.4Ghz, than the ~3Ghz.

If you want to save some money, you could go buy a Xeon 5300 or 5400 series. The X5355 sells for around $200-300, and that's 2.66/8M/1333, get two of those and you'll have 8 cores.

Can you take advantage of GPU acceleration in your program? If so, a good motherboard is the one I have in my sig, the Supermicro X7DWA-N, as it has two PCI-E 16x slots, you can officially run in Crossfire I believe. That'll all give you a fairly cheap, yet very smooth system. Of course there's cheaper boards, and slower CPUs, and there's always more expensive parts as well. I do recommend the motherboard though. 24/7, it's never off, and never any problems. It's fast too. Using one out of 8 cores, it gets a 14 second SuperPi at stock, and keep in mind I have ECC/FB memory along with other things that slows everything down.

Good luck with your venture into Xeons! :)
 
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