Multi-Processor PC's

[Alpha]

Anyone have any knowledge of these? I'm looking into buying a snazzy new desktop. I've thought about Mac but I just can't justify the price when there are refurb PC alternatives on the cheap. I want power. I'm accustomed to working on a quad processor G5 w/ 8g ram.

I'm looking at the PC lineup and I'm confused over the processors. Does anyone know what the difference is between the Core 2 Quad desktop processors and the Quad core xeons? Also, given the right board, how difficult would it be to drop in an extra processor or two? What sort of board should I look for?

A lot of the boards seem to be the Intel 5400, which looks like 2 processor max...

 

[Easy_Target]

Xeons are for servers only and are several times more expensive.

I'm not sure what you mean by "drop in an extra processor or two," do you mean having two CPU chips on one motherboard a la "dual cpu processing" from about 10 years ago?

 

[saltface]

Actually, they're starting to put Xeons in workstations these days. The architecture is different than a Pentium so it's not quite apples to apples.
I assume you're looking at boards with dual sockets, right?
And you can't use XP Home.

 

[Alpha]

Yes, I'm looking at dual sockets. Right again on workstations. Why would I want to use XP Home? lol

 

[astrostu]

Things to look at would be printing size (65, 55, 45 nm), power consumption, front-side bus, and L2 Cache. I would *assume* that the Xeons will be better-spec'ed than the Core 2s just because they're newer architecture.

 

[Alpha]

So, small printing size, fast bus, big cache. What's the story w/ power consumption?

 

[Hawaii Five-O]

I would stick with the Core 2 Duos and win XP, I wouldn't bother with Vista

 

[Alpha]

Who says I'd have to go vista on Xeon?

 

[Hawaii Five-O]

I think the only dual socket pc motherboards nowdays are for servers running xenons. I haven't seen anything dual sockets for Core 2 duo. Intel is supposed to release its 8 core in Jan of 09, and sixteen core in the near future.

 

[Hawaii Five-O]

Who says I'd have to go vista on Xeon?

Why would I want to use XP Home? lol

Ok, what are you going to run? Its just advice, I wouldn't bother with vista with any platform right now.

 

[Alpha]

Well, I'd like to run two quad-core xeons. SOOOO much cheaper than buying the new power mac.

 

[Helen B]

I have a couple of dual-processor quad-core Xeons for regular Photoshop-type use. They have RAID 0 SCSI system disks, with a 20 GB partition reserved solely for the PS scratch disk, and I use XP Pro. I'm happy with them. These are the two that have the external 4 TB eSATA storage drives, connected via a RocketRAID controller, as mentioned in the external hard drive thread.

Best,
Helen

 

[Alpha]

Anything you'd change about your setup? Pros or cons?

Thanks.

 

[Helen B]

I don't really think about them too much these days - they are the least of my concerns. I'd like to have them in another room because of the heat and the noise (I have four or five computers and two 4-bay drive enclosures going most of the time) but I don't have the space for such luxury right now.

Best,
Helen