Single Core2Duo Quadcore vs. two dualcore Xeon?

[Johan Ström]

On Aug 15, 2007, at 17:38 , Martin Cracauer wrote:

> Johan Strm wrote on Thu, Aug 02, 2007 at 10:41:13PM +0200:
>> Hello
>>
>> I'm in the process of purchasing a new server. I'm currently looking
>> at two Supermicro based options, one with a Core 2 Duo Q6600 Quadcore
>> 2.4GHz 2x4MB (on a PDSMi+ board) , and another with two Xeon 5110
>> dualcore 1.6GHz 4MB (on a X7DVL-i board).
>
> Well,  the 2.4 GHz will be faster than the 1.6 Ghz :-)

Very true :)

>
> The FB-DIMMs are bashed by some for high latency and maybe that's true
> if you use all slots.  Personally I couldn't observe this, 667 MHz
> FB-DIMMs perform about as 667 MHz unregistered for me.
>
> However, the 775 platform allows you to either buy 800 MHz memory, or
> even overclock memory, so potentially you get much more memory
> bandwidth if you require it.

Overclocking a server doesnt seem like a good idea, for desktop its  
one thing but I'll rather keep my servers stable and secure than a  
little faster

>
> The dual 771 platform also allow much more memory.  I find 8 GB to be
> very tight these days.

Yeah, from what I've understood thats the "strong" thing with FB- 
DIMM... Able to take much more memory..

The Xeon Quad core just got a major price reduction though, so now  
I'm looking at a dual quad xeon (with 5320, 1.68Ghz or 5330 2.0GHz)  
instead...
The "default" mobo at the supplier (www.mullet.se) uses the X7DVL-i  
board, which takes 6 FB-DIMMs on two channels (max out at 16 gig)..  
But I'm thinking about getting the upgrade mobo instead, X7BDE, with  
8 slots on 4 channels with max 32GB (and also full KVM features in  
the IPMI slot..)

But I'm curious if this kind of platform will ever be able to use all  
this? Disk access, memory bus & cpu etc.. lets asume I max this  
system in the future with 32 gigs of mem and 8 2ghz cores.. Will I  
ever be able to use that much with a raid5 (or 10, whats the lists  
opinion on this? 5 or 10?) config on a PCI-X slot? I think the disks  
will be the limiting factor before the PCI-X is maxed out though..  
But realistically, for a php,mysql,apache,java etc machine with a  
number of jails, i wonder if I will ever be able to use this much  
power or if I should aim lower and if the box gets too loaded I'll  
get another one..

Thanks for answers! :)

Johan