Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 18:45:05 -0500 (CDT) From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Dual-Athlon vs Dual-PIII ... opinions? Message-ID: <14739.16001.736066.397333@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <84135264@toto.iv>
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Nathan Vidican writes: > Dual Athlon based systems are not available (yet). I'd still reccomend > you go with AMD though. I find that if you spend the extra money that > you would have spent on the CPU's/Mainboard to be running Intel on more > Ram/better Disks/etc, that you can generally build a better system. I've Makes sense - spend the money you saved on the CPU on making other things faster, and the system will perform better. Considering how much faster CPUs are than everything else these days, that makes sense. The same logic applices to IDE disks vs. SCSI disks for single-user, single-disk workstations. But... > got a dual PIII 500mhz machine with 768megs of ram, and to be > completely honest with you I find almost no difference in processing > speed to that of the 800mhz Athlon system I run at home. Both are > running the same release of FreeBSD (4.0-STABLE). The Athlon has > only got 256megs of RAM, but I never end up using all of it anyhow. Seems like your experience contradicts your own advice; you bought more memory than you normally use anyway! > I know this is a little hipocritical in that I actually used a dual > PIII system myself, but I tell you looking back I'd have MUCH rather > spent the money on some faster hardrives than the CPU's. I'd stick with > AMD, (in fact I have been now for quite a while), on any new box. I've > setup somewhere between 30 and 40 AMD K62-500mhz machines to run as > FreeBSD servers by now, and have never regretted doing so. The CPU's > were cheap enough that I could usually double the ram or storage > capacity for the same price as using an Intel CPU would have been. My own experiences contradict yours. My primary workstation has dual 400MHz PII Xeons and an all-SCSI disk subsystem, with 256 meg of ram. I've got an 500MHz AMD K6-2 with a UDMA-33 drive and 64 Meg of ram. Even though the Xeon box starts two copies of setiathome at boot time, and I don't bother with X on the AMD box, the AMD box just seems sluggish. Both are usually running -CURRENT less than a week old. On the other hand - the current cost of a PII Xeon CPU is about what I paid for the AMD cpu+motherboard last month. Personally, if I were going to build a workstation these days, I would feel remiss if I didn't at least price a dual Celeron system. The new celerons have on-chip cache that runs at CPU speed. <mike To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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