Dual Opterons or Dual Xeon

O

orbitalpunk

n00b
Joined
Oct 21, 2004
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7
Hi people,

I am building a new modeling computer and am going crazy weither i should get a dual opteron or dual xeon system. My budget is about $350 per cpu so it looks like it'd would be between a AMD Operon 244 or a Intel Xeon 3.0G 800FSB based on the Nocona core.

My other concern is what would be best for the future of 64-bit computing and what would benefit most when maya is released in 64-bit form running on windows XP 64-bit version. Is Intel's EMT64 really 64 bit computing? it seem AMD64 is in the Opterons is. but am still confused about Intels EMT64.

Any opinions would be greatly appreciated. This is for Maya 6.

Thanks
 
opteron opteron opteron!!

with the onboard memory controller they opterons blow the xeons out of the water.

throw em in a Tyan board and you'll be flyin, i wish i could afford that..

oh, and Intel's EMT64 is a clone of AMD's, they do the same thing.. only i think intel is sticking with the Northbridge as opposed to onboard memory controller.
 
EMT64 isn't much good. it isn't nearly as fast as opterons in 64 bit, and the opterons beat xeons in 32 bit. so the opteron is the obvious choice. especially if you can get your hands on a good motherboard (seperate memory banks for each processor) and a NUMA-aware OS. i like the DK8N from iwill, personally. i've seen it get ~11.5 gigabytes/second memory bandwidth in windows 2003/some other NUMA-aware OS.

have fun either way, tho.

*244's appear to be slower (a bit) than xeon 3.0's, but that's in 32bit stuff, and AMD roxorz 64bit. so i'd go with opterons.
 
rogue_jedi said:
*244's appear to be slower (a bit) than xeon 3.0's, but that's in 32bit stuff, and AMD roxorz 64bit. so i'd go with opterons.
Click to expand...

What sense does that make? Does anyone even do 64-bit computing yet? If he said "I need to do huge SQL processing with 8GB of RAM" then I would suggest the Opteron.

But when the Xeon's (3.0's even, not even the fastest around) win in 32-bit processing that's the obvious recommendation.

By the time he would be ready to do 64-bit processing ANY current processor would be so overwhelmed it would probably burn up. Tried running 32-bit code on a 386dx recently? Just because it's 64-bit capable it doesn't mean it's going to be very fast at it when the time comes.

He'd be best to sticking with 32-bit until his next upgrade when 64-bit is more mature and make a 64-bit decision at that point in time.

Besides that, Xeons have long been the king of 3D development and a good majority of 3D apps are Intel-optimized.

-MrD
 
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=820140

As I recall, there were some decent replies in reference to amd vs. intel in that one, and then

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=820420

for some maya info. As for my own opinion, ask yourself this question: "when do I want to have to upgrade again?". 64bit = the future. Several months from now, it will be "dual vs. single core". Several years later "64 bit or 128 bit?" etc. Always try to abide by tomorrow's standards is what I always say. Or think, anyway... I'm tired :D
 
go opteron

you could get the cheaper processors for it now and most likely with a simple bios update drop in a couple of dual core opterons in later on if you wish.
 
OPTERON said:
go opteron

you could get the cheaper processors for it now and most likely with a simple bios update drop in a couple of dual core opterons in later on if you wish.
Click to expand...

Tee hee, you sure you aren't biased or anything, what with your name being "OPTERON" and all? :p

Juuuuust messin' with ya :D
 
I have a dual opteron 250 system and it blows my friends 3.0G away when it comes to maya and 3ds max
 
heh... well as you can see in my sig i am running intel at the moment and like it but when i was building my current system i wanted to go with dual opterons.... but the price difference was crazy.. and they were only 244's out i think and i wanted more..

definately though my next build will be dual opterons... or mabye even dual .. dual core opterons.... all depends on cash flow when the time comes....

intel definately have its strong points but when you start talking dual processor amd has the advantage at this point in the game...
 
Opterons always bench a little bit higher than their respective Xeon counterpart in Maya.

I'd go with Opterons for the future compatability, even though they are a bit more expensive than Xeons right now. Also, if you can wait a month or two and need/care about the features, there will be a bunch of new boards comming out supporting PCIe, SLI, etc. based off nForce4. Iwill has a pretty sexy one on the horizon...
 
well a few things i have learned the past couple of day. I've seen some good comparisons on dual opterons vs dual xeons with maya and 3d max. it appears xeons perform better in max, and opterons perform better in maya. yay...

reason is, max uses SSE3, maya does not. xeons have SSE3, opterons do not. but ive read they will in there next revision. either way, opterons are the way to go with maya. if i used max, i would have gone with intel. heres a good review i found.

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=noconaopteron&page=11

you can back up to page one and read the whole article. a good read indeed.

also yes, i like that face AMD64 is really the next standart for 64 bit instructions and AMD has a better implementation of it. and that amd uses a 40bit bus while xeons use a 36bit bus.

64 bit computing is not that far at all. I already have my 64bit windows burned and ready to install. just need maya to be ported to 64bit and its show time. and if windows64bit does have enought drivers, linux is already set to go.
 
I dont know what NUMA is. i know its in amd's. and i know its a good thing, and i know you need a numa aware OS and windows xp is after SP2. but still not sure what it is or does. guess i should look it up.

thanks tho
 
orbitalpunk said:
I dont know what NUMA is. i know its in amd's. and i know its a good thing, and i know you need a numa aware OS and windows xp is after SP2. but still not sure what it is or does. guess i should look it up.

thanks tho
Click to expand...

NUMA works like this:

You have two processors, CPU 1 and CPU 2. Each CPU has it's own bank of DDR RAM, which is dual chan. If CPU 1 requests data from CPU 2's RAM, without NUMA it basically sends the request to CPU 2 which retrieves the data and sends it to CPU 1. With NUMA, CPU 1 can access CPU 2's RAM and it's own RAM at the same time. ;)

There was an article I read some time ago, where using synthetic benchmarks, a 10 gig/second bandwidth was acheived. ;)
 
wow, sounds cool.

say, one more question..

on my memory choices i am thinking of either getting DDR400 with a CAS or 2 or 2.5. would there be any decent speed benefit in rendering with memory with a CAS of 2 or should i just get the 2.5. its about a $200 difference in price and wondered if its worth it.

thanks again
 
i think my eyes are gonna pop out from reading too many reviews. Im just trying ot figure out what motherboard to use.

iwill dk8n
tyan tiger or thunder
msi master 2 far.

i was starting to lean toward the msi but shit, i just read that standard AMD heatsinks dont fit. you need to use the once they give you, which are from two different manurfactures or P4 heatsinks. not only that, it voids amd's cpu warranty. msi is on crack. on the other hand msi seems to be the fastest. ughh.. and thunder doesnt have usb 2.0, but tiger does. but then do i need spearate memory banks, like 4 banks for each cpu to actually make use a NUMA, or can NUMA be achieved in a standard 4 bank board using 2 slots. I sure wished asus made a dual board. they were alwasy my first choice.
 
I have an Athlon 64 overclocked to 2.4GHz running x86-64 Gentoo, and a dual Xeon 2.8/800 box running x86 Gentoo.

I have to say, I love SMP, but the Athlon beats out the Xeons at times.
 
orbitalpunk said:
i think my eyes are gonna pop out from reading too many reviews. Im just trying ot figure out what motherboard to use.

iwill dk8n
tyan tiger or thunder
msi master 2 far.

i was starting to lean toward the msi but shit, i just read that standard AMD heatsinks dont fit. you need to use the once they give you, which are from two different manurfactures or P4 heatsinks. not only that, it voids amd's cpu warranty. msi is on crack. on the other hand msi seems to be the fastest. ughh.. and thunder doesnt have usb 2.0, but tiger does. but then do i need spearate memory banks, like 4 banks for each cpu to actually make use a NUMA, or can NUMA be achieved in a standard 4 bank board using 2 slots. I sure wished asus made a dual board. they were alwasy my first choice.
Click to expand...

i e-mailed msi about this before i bought the board and they said the heatsinks do not void the warranty because they are approved by amd.

from what i understand there is only 1 ram back though.
 
orbitalpunk said:
i think my eyes are gonna pop out from reading too many reviews. Im just trying ot figure out what motherboard to use.

iwill dk8n
tyan tiger or thunder
msi master 2 far.

i was starting to lean toward the msi but shit, i just read that standard AMD heatsinks dont fit. you need to use the once they give you, which are from two different manurfactures or P4 heatsinks. not only that, it voids amd's cpu warranty. msi is on crack. on the other hand msi seems to be the fastest. ughh.. and thunder doesnt have usb 2.0, but tiger does. but then do i need spearate memory banks, like 4 banks for each cpu to actually make use a NUMA, or can NUMA be achieved in a standard 4 bank board using 2 slots. I sure wished asus made a dual board. they were alwasy my first choice.
Click to expand...

Go with the DK8N. The Nvidia chipset doesn't have the problems with ATI cards that the AMD chipset does (go figure!). Also Iwill has (IMO) better build quality than Tyan. I own the DK8X and it's worked flawlessly so far with Photoshop, AutoCAD, and various and sundry games :).

You need 4 banks per CPU to enable NUMA. Without the extra memory banks CPU1 has to go through CPU0 for memory access. The performance difference is negligible though and after a point you get diminishing returns with NUMA with a huge amount of memory. Performance wise a NUMA -enabled system with 2 memory modules will out perform a dual-channel system at the same capacity. Once you go beyond 2 modules (4,6, etc) dual-channel has better performance albeit with lower total bandwidth. However, once NUMA aware applications are widely available there will be more benefit. NUMA is really not all that useful currently.
 
my computer is more of a gaming rig with bragging rights so i went with the k8t800 master2far. It puts out excellent performance and its red which is very sinister. if your video card is gonna have one of those huge cooling solutions you may want to go with something else as the cpu2 is extremely close to tha agp port(im sure you already noticed)
 
Came accross this comparison. Basically says that the 240-244 range you are better off getting a Xeon because there is not a big difference between the 3.0 and the 3.2, but there are some pretty big differences between the 246 and the lower models. Basically a 248 has a frequency gap of with the Xeon 3.0 of 45%, but a gap between the 240 and a Xeon 2.4 is at 71% and that ant be made up. If you are getting a 242 which runs at what 1.6Ghz, there is about 70% gap in clock freqency between it an a 3.0.

http://www.sudhian.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=487&pid=1811

I am certianly no expert so I would love someone to tell me I was wrong. What I would like to see are benchmarks between the Xeon 2.8 or 3.0 64 bit vs the 242 because I think I am seeing a lot of comparisons with the older xeons.

RDL
 
robleclerc said:
Came accross this comparison. Basically says that the 240-244 range you are better off getting a Xeon because there is not a big difference between the 3.0 and the 3.2, but there are some pretty big differences between the 246 and the lower models. Basically a 248 has a frequency gap of with the Xeon 3.0 of 45%, but a gap between the 240 and a Xeon 2.4 is at 71% and that ant be made up. If you are getting a 242 which runs at what 1.6Ghz, there is about 70% gap in clock freqency between it an a 3.0.

http://www.sudhian.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=487&pid=1811

I am certianly no expert so I would love someone to tell me I was wrong. What I would like to see are benchmarks between the Xeon 2.8 or 3.0 64 bit vs the 242 because I think I am seeing a lot of comparisons with the older xeons.

RDL
Click to expand...

You can't use clock speed as a pure measure for comparison. The top of the line opty is much slower than its Xeon counterpart, but the performance is equal or better in most tasks.

The 242 is comparable with the Xeon 2.8 or 3.0 depending on the application. Check this gamepc article.
 
Moog said:
You can't use clock speed as a pure measure for comparison. The top of the line opty is much slower than its Xeon counterpart, but the performance is equal or better in most tasks.

The 242 is comparable with the Xeon 2.8 or 3.0 depending on the application. Check this gamepc article.
Click to expand...

I saw that but it looks like they are not using the Nocona processor since it only has 8k L1 and 512 Ls, whereas the Nocona has 32k L1 and 1 MB L2. From what I saw the difference between the Nocona and non nocona was pretty big so if the 2.8 non-nocona is ~ to the 242 then the 2.8 Nocona should be quite a bit better?
 
question,

can pci cards fit into a a PCI-X slot? im a bit consufed. the only reason being is alot of the nicer opteron boards have like 1 32 bit pci slot and the rest are PCI-X. i have 2 pci cards i abolutly need. pro audio stuff. just cant trade that kind stuff in. I hear confilicting reports about this and how the notches work. i mean the slots do look different. somone at Fry's said no, no pci card work on PIC-X slots, then i emailed belkin about here 2.0 USB cards and they said they all will work in a PCI-X alot. reason for a 2.0 USB card is the Tyan Thunder only has 1.1 USB and i wanted to add a 2.0 USB card to.

any info would be appreciated
Thanks again guys
 
orbitalpunk said:
question,

can pci cards fit into a a PCI-X slot? im a bit consufed. the only reason being is alot of the nicer opteron boards have like 1 32 bit pci slot and the rest are PCI-X. i have 2 pci cards i abolutly need. pro audio stuff. just cant trade that kind stuff in. I hear confilicting reports about this and how the notches work. i mean the slots do look different. somone at Fry's said no, no pci card work on PIC-X slots, then i emailed belkin about here 2.0 USB cards and they said they all will work in a PCI-X alot. reason for a 2.0 USB card is the Tyan Thunder only has 1.1 USB and i wanted to add a 2.0 USB card to.

any info would be appreciated
Thanks again guys
Click to expand...

i believe PCI-X slots are backward compatable wtih PCI cards, but from what ive heard, depending on the board of course, it doesnt work too well...
 
robleclerc said:
I am certianly no expert so I would love someone to tell me I was wrong. What I would like to see are benchmarks between the Xeon 2.8 or 3.0 64 bit vs the 242 because I think I am seeing a lot of comparisons with the older xeons.
Click to expand...

You mean like this?
Or this?

Naconas really don't do much beyond scale with more MHz. I'm not impressed with them versus AMD offerings, and I work with them on a daily basis. I do love my Xeons though, but I didn't pay out the wazoo for them either...
 
If you're using pci in a pci-x i believe it needs to be 3.3v compatible, i might be wrong on that tough, someone correct me if i am. I do know my older soundblaster will no fight in the pci-slot of my motherboard.
 
That's true, they must be 3.3v compatible. The older 5v ones are supposed to be notched differently to prevent use, but not all of them are.
 
Here is an honest opinion for someone who has one and has played on the other.


WAIT.

I have a DH800 right now with 2 2.8's running in the 3.5 area and it is a nice system but not for what I paid to build it.

My buddy has a dual Opteron 246 (something like that) and I cannot say that I was really that impressed with it either.

For my system I spent 320 for both processors (ES CHIPS) and 280 for the board (woot Ebay). Then throw in the other 105 for the Switech HSFs and you have a nice system that I do not feel is living up to what I paid for it. All of the other parts I had here btw from my old system.

To be honest I feel now that I should have bought an Intel EE chip for my Ic7-MAX3 board.

Now I can hear the !!!!!! calls...just so everyone knows I have almost an equal amount of Intel to AMD systems and servers.
 
gamepc has several articles on xeons v. opterons, including some with analysis of the noconas. the benchmarks they run represent what i am going to do with the system a lot more than the DB benches anand throws together (not that he doesn't do a good job though.) if you're comparing clock speed to clock speed you are definitely going to buy the wrong thing though. a 2ghz opteron will perform in most tasks on par with a 3ghz xeon.

except F@H. the xeons own F@H.
 
With regards to PCI-X.. they are 3.3v now.. .older PCI 64bit had 5v, but as mentioned, it's keyed differently slot wise. For sound boards we've been using the SB Live! (the cheapy) it works in our 64bit PCI only machines. You will likely have problems with many other 32-bit boards however because they are not "keyed" right (usually an indication of 5v).

If you run gigabit, you'll get superior performance with a 64bit card.... likewise for HW RAID.

I have a dual Xeon 3.2 (500 FSB, e7505) and a dual Opteron 246... they feel roughly the same (benchmarks aside). I don't think you'll go wrong with either. Certainly more choices on the Xeon side today though.
 
MrDigital said:
What sense does that make? Does anyone even do 64-bit computing yet?
Click to expand...

Sure, I do. It's terrific. Even if you're not using more than 4 gigs of memory, the increased number of registers in 64-bit mode DO noticeably increase performance.

MrDigital said:
But when the Xeon's (3.0's even, not even the fastest around) win in 32-bit processing that's the obvious recommendation.
If you're sitting around with a stopwatch waiting for a video encoding to finish, get the Xeons. But having a good stack of dual Xeons, quad Xeons, dual Opterons, and quad Opterons, I can tell you that for an all-around desktop, workstation, or server, I'd take the Opteron any day.


steve
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
I am an AMD f4n b0y and i say its all in what you want. If you want a good scaling server, go for the opteron. If you want HT, then obviously go for intel. End of story.
 
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