Opteron Vs. Athlon X2

[Peter Arremann]

On Tuesday 06 December 2005 00:21, Robert L Cochran wrote:
> Thanks Peter, Bryan, and Bill for your thoughts.
>
> I would like to keep to a budget of about USD $600-700 for a CPU
> upgrade. I want to both develop and use open source software, which
> means a lot of code-compile-test cycles. I want the compiles to finish
> quickly. For example, PHP 6.0 (from snaps.php.net) takes about 4-5
> minutes to compile on my single core Athlon 64 3500+, and I'd like to
> cut the compile time in half. I also want to do web development with PHP
> and databases. I want to be able to keep up with the current  CPUs and
> get exposure to them.
you're unhappy with 5 minutes? Now I'm suddenly happy with the users at work - 
they are happy with the 30 or more minutes it takes for our apps to build :-)


> With these goals in mind what hardware will give me what I want and fit
> inside that $700? What do you think will work for me? I want to make use
> of my existing power supply, memory, and drives as much as possible. If
> I have to replace my motherboard, I'll consider it.
>
> So -- and I say this with humor! -- what can I ask my wife to give me
> for Christmas without generating heavy expense but still be good enough
> for me, a computer programmer who does a lot of development?
For me, reuse of components is the most important thing usually. 
The situation you're personally would go the following route - I know its not 
the greatest technical nor performance wise - but the price/performance for 
this upgrade can't be beat (it is also what I'm running, so I can tell you 
its rock solid)

Start with the 939Dual board from Asrock (lowend asus). Its based around a SIS 
chipset and has the huge advantage that you can not only keep your memory but 
also the graphics card. Almost all boards that support dual core are pci 
express. This board also has a 16x PCI-Express slot, so you can later upgrade 
to such a card (or like me, run a dual head setup with a 8xAGP and a 
16xPCI-Express card). In addition to that, the board is dirt cheap - less 
than $70. 
http://www.asrock.com/support/CPU_Support/show.asp?Model=939Dual-SATA2
It runs Centos4U1, FC3,4,5T1 without any issue. Centos 3.5 and Solaris 10 both 
didn't like the network card - but for a developers workstation you can just 
buy any old pci ethernet card without much thinking about it. 

Then take a Athlon 64 - X2 4400. Its less than $500 boxed. The next step up 
would be the X4600 but with only 200Mhz more and half the cache I doubt it 
will be worth the extra $130 you pay for it. 

That CPU/board combo should give you a nice performance boost since you got 
the same clock per core but dual core and twice the cache per core... You 
won't see half the compile time though because one of the slowest thing these 
days is linking - and that's always done single threaded. 

Peter.