[trilliansucks]

PAT and P4 hyperthreading vs Dual Xeon performance.

Assume both motherboards are the latest ASUS incarnations: P4C800-E and PC-DL

P4C800-E is 800 FSB and single CPU
PC-DL is 533 FSB and dual CPU

assuming 2 gigs of ECC DDR400 (4 pieces of 512) and one P4 3.0 vs two Xeon 3.0

for the purposes of gaming which one is the better performer?

for the purposes of desktop muckety muck which one is the better performer?

for the purposes of 2d graphics like photoshop7 and painter8 which one is the better performer?

I don't care about 3d.


I've heard two conflicting opinions. While XP itself has some kind of support for multiple CPUs do programs have to have their own internal support for multiple processorys to gain from dual xeon?

TIA

[Tomay]

In most games p4 would be better cos games don't use smp.
Photoshop would be better on xeons but I don't think you could notice the difference.

Don't forget to look at the price tag

[Immortal]

I seem to have heard, that when, on some I875P boards, u put in 4GB of RAM, pnly 3.6GB of it would be useable, this is a known issue with some 875P boards, as the other 400MB is reserved space for PCI, Audio or something?? ;(

Xeons already have Hyperthreading enabled so that cancels out. And your only left with PAT and the 800FSB.
800FSB does affect perforamce a lot, (up to 20% between a P4 2.4 533 and an 800FSB variant) and PAT decreases memmory latency!

Doom III and Half Life 2 have hyperthreading optomisations.. so both will be ok.

Photoshop and stuff, wont really metter as Hyperthreading would still enable the P4 to be SMP.

In the end u got P4 HT which will be 2 CPU's to Windows and Xeons HT which will be 4 CPU's to windows. This means that ul need a OS capable of 4 CPU's if u wantr to use the Xeons to their FULL advantage, and only Windows 2000/2003 Server can do that or Linux.

If the Xeons have large caches, 1MB+ then the Xeons it MUST be, if they have 512k, then its really ur choice.

P.S The new Intel P4 Extreme Edition is just an upped Xeon

[sapiens74]

I have dual xeons and a p4 on an 875 board


The P4 is fast with most things cept video editing

[Jerry Atrik]

i've had ht xeons since the day they came out (about feb 2001).
they arent much faster than a normal processor doing one thing but they are monsters of multitasking.
the biggest advantage for normal peeps is that java multithreads big time so all java apps, especially the expensive engineering apps will smoke.
my 2 dual xeon workstations are almost identical except the e7500 chip v i860
the i860 with rambus runs so much cleaner than the e7500 with ddr that
i wont build another dual xeon with ddr.

[sapiens74]

IM using the Server works chipset, and its fast with DDR

[Mr.Guvernment]

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for the purposes of gaming which one is the better performer?

Would not matter only handfull of games are MP ready - like Quake 3 i beleive and maybe a handfull of older game - fact is, games dont need that much pwoer to run

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for the purposes of desktop muckety muck which one is the better performer?

either or - dekstop crud does not use much cpu power - unless u opening a million IE windows and multi apps - then RAM is what matters and if you got 512 or more of anything DDR or Rambus u will be good

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for the purposes of 2d graphics like photoshop7 and painter8 which one is the better performer?

Dual Xeon's - PS uses dual CPU and Xeon have more cache.

Quote:

I don't care about 3d.

well anyways most 3d apps use MP so again the dual Xeon's would perform better then a P4 with HT

Quote:

I've heard two conflicting opinions. While XP itself has some kind of support for multiple CPUs do programs have to have their own internal support for multiple processorys to gain from dual xeon?

TIA

NO, the program has to be made top support MP - most video editing suits will use dual CPU's but most games and general apps wont - this is where hyperthreading could benefit,.

but fact is if you using 100% CPU power with P4 HT is useless - dual Xeons - u still got an extra CPU to use

and as said - look @ the price tag