Quote:
Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker
For CPU, something in the Opteron 8300 series (Two of them of course, 8 cores in total) ... Need to find good reviews of this ...
|
Older Opterons (65nm, Barcelona/K10 based) are slower and generate more heat, get the newer ones (45nm, Shanghai/K10.5), they are very cools and have lower power consumption, as for model, get 2xxx model Shanghai, you need only 2-way CPUs.
In single core performance, Shanghai is (very) little after Core 2 (Xeon), but in terms of scaling (HaperTransport vs FSB@Intel) and virtualization (Netsted Page Table/AMD-V) AMD is far better, also bigger L1 cache @ AMD seems to do good thing.
Most services benchmark typical Windows applications, like SuperPI and 3DMark, but check
http://it.anandtech.com reviews, especially for newes Shanghai CPUs.