Dual Intel Xeon E5504 Nehalem 2.0GHz LGA or Intel Core i7-920 Bloomfield 2.66GHz ?

[SanjayChand]

Hmm tough one id say get the Xeons. You have two physical procs with 8 cores total vs 1 physical proc, 4 cores, totaling 8? virtual cores with the hyper threading.

I think the dual Xeon will render faster. Then again I could be wrong.

[luxwork]

unless you already have a fast workstation, get the 920 and plan to overclock it slightly
but if you are only talking rendering, the xeons will win, but skip the one you said and go to the 5520's

my cinebench on my normal clocked 920 is around 16000, it may get around 19000 when OC'd, the dual 5520 is around 23000

but I prefer to do my setup work on the 920 since single thread stuff runs faster.

MD

[SanjayChand]

5520's only hit 2300? Id expect them to get at least close to 3000.

[notlongago]

Hi

Thanks for the suggestions and insight. I will try researching more. But you have given me some ideas.

[LOTK]

Take a look at this old thread as well:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=23&t=750788&page=3&pp=15&highlight=920+5520

You are talking about $300 difference in your configs, that's not a bad difference compared to when I was looking at the same dilemma six months ago. You have to change your spec a bit and consider starting from 5520 if you want Xeons.

One thing I'm not sure about is if the Nehalem Xeons need ECC registered RAM. Because if you consider that, it will increase your costs significantly, although someone said that they might be running ok without ECC reg RAM.

Consider the following, if you are planning to do work that requires a lot of single core performance, you would want to go for the one that can run a faster clock. Also note that the Xeon is locked and cannot be overclocked (in case you had that in mind).

I got a 920 D0 back then and I'm still very happy with it. If money is not an issue, you might as well go for a dual 5520 config, just ,make sure you choose a good and stable mobo.

[luxwork]

you don't need ECC if you are fine with capping it off at 12Gb. With that cheaper Asus dual proc board z8NA-d6 (we have 5 of them, they are great but very bare, no sound, etc) they use the same ram as the 920. So basically the diff is only in the price of the extra proc. since the MB is almost the same at $300 vs $250 for a quality asus single proc mb.

to throw some more confusion in, take a look at the other i7, the 860. It looks pretty good performance wise, the only downside I see is capping the ram at 8Gb (although you can go higher, but with very expensive 4gb modules). The mb is cheaper and supposedly it can OC well. We might pick some up as basic workstations.
MD

Take a look at this old thread as well:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=23&t=750788&page=3&pp=15&highlight=920+5520

You are talking about $300 difference in your configs, that's not a bad difference compared to when I was looking at the same dilemma six months ago. You have to change your spec a bit and consider starting from 5520 if you want Xeons.

One thing I'm not sure about is if the Nehalem Xeons need ECC registered RAM. Because if you consider that, it will increase your costs significantly, although someone said that they might be running ok without ECC reg RAM.

Consider the following, if you are planning to do work that requires a lot of single core performance, you would want to go for the one that can run a faster clock. Also note that the Xeon is locked and cannot be overclocked (in case you had that in mind).

I got a 920 D0 back then and I'm still very happy with it. If money is not an issue, you might as well go for a dual 5520 config, just ,make sure you choose a good and stable mobo.

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