How do 1mb L3 xeons hold up?

[tkotitan]

Hi Everyone,

I plan on building a new system next year and am doing the research for it. I currently run a dual XP 1800+, and I'd like to go dual AMD again, but mobile bartons won't quite reach my rule of "new system must double performance of old system." Dual opterons looks expensive, I may look at them again if somone releases a good overclockers board for them,but now it looks like I'll go the PC-DL rout and get dual OC'ed xeons. Also xeons are better at rendering than AMD so if I get to 3.2-3.4ghz i'll meet my requirement. I was wondering, if anyone has tried to oc a 2.4 or 2.6ghz xeon with a 1mb L3 cache. these chips cost about 300, as opposed to 200, but I'm wondering if it's worth it. Also, I can't find in the spec sheet if they still have the 512k L2 cache in addition to the 1MB L3 (I would assume so.) How well would they overclock? I would think more cache=less overclocability?

 

[Col_Loki]

Just looking at the Intel CPU finder (about 2 weeks ago) the 1mb cache Xeons seemed to all be M0 steppings...... which is a good thing.

The other people here would be better able to say after that .

 

[attack]

*Welcome to the forums*

I'm not sure exactly about the OCability of those Xeons, but for the AMD's keep in mind the opterons are entirely new instruction sets x86-64, and new arcitecture, so clock for clock they will smoke XP's and bartons (I think an opteron at 2.4ghz is twice the performance of a XP1800+...not 100% sure though). There is already a copy of windows 64bit out (think it costs 1000 dollars....but it's available)...and I'm not sure how much 64bit would help out in encoding/decoding, but It might be worthwhile to reconsider opterons.

None the less a dual Xeon setup is nothing to scoff at, I'd love to get either a Xeon or Opto setup...*drool*

 

[liquidtrance123]

i would have to guess you'd have an easier time OCing the 512's than the 1mb's as i have always thought it to be true that more cach = harder to OC to its limits

 

[tkotitan]

yeah I found a good article on 2cpu.com reviewing dual xeon setups, and the 2mb versions didn't outperform the 1MB versions by much, so I don't see much logic in going with 1mb when I can go 512k. Also they went into good detail about how the L3 xeon cahce is passthrough so with a 1MB L3 is like your total cache is 1MB, not 1.5+ This is not the case with amd chips, like the opteron.