So what's the difference between....

[ZrO-1]

In short: for now, not a whole lot.

The biggest difference is that right now, the Athlon 64FX runs at a higher clock speed, and has only one Hypertransport bus; the Opteron has two (or is it three?) Hypertransport busses.

[Emmortal1]

So do you think it's worth selling off my Dual 2.8ghz Xeon machine for a 64bit Opteron system?

Full Specs on my system as it stands are:

(2) 2.8ghz 533mhz FSB Hypthreading Xeons
(2) 1gb PC2100 ECC Registered Mushkin Memory Sticks
Intel SE7505VB2 Dual Xeon Motherboard with SATA RAID 10/100/1000 LAN USB 2.0 AGP 4x/8x
Intel Server Case SC5200
ATI Fire GL X2 256
Sound Blaster Audigy 2
Adaptec 29160 UW SCSI Controller
Western Digital 18gb 15,000RPM SCSI Drive
IBM 36gb 15,000RPM SCSI Drive
Compaq 36gb 10,000rpm
Western Digital 120gb IDE Drive
Sony DVD +RW +R/CD
Toshiba DVD-ROM


Emmortal

[MimikOctopus]

nope i sure don't think so. That system looks very good, and the opterons while very fast, are insanely expensive, the 246's i bought were over $800 per chip, and the motherboard was $500... Personally i would keep the xeon until you've run it into the ground and then buy 64 bit chips when their is ample software and lower prices. I just don't think its worth the money unless you've moved beyond what your xeon can handle...... And the Opterons have 3 hypertransports in case you were wondering. Another difference is that the opterons run in single, dual, and quad as well as 8 processor configurations.

[Emmortal1]

Interesting, thanks for the advice. I work primarily with Maya 5.0 in Windows XP Professional. I'm going to stick it out and see how the prices come down in the future. I could probably sell off my system now and get a pretty close cost wise equally equipped dual Opteron system, but it doesn't seem like it would be worth it from what you've stated. Thanks again,

Emmortal

[MadMax]

Originally posted by Emmortal1
So do you think it's worth selling off my Dual 2.8ghz Xeon machine for a 64bit Opteron system?

Full Specs on my system as it stands are:

(2) 2.8ghz 533mhz FSB Hypthreading Xeons
(2) 1gb PC2100 ECC Registered Mushkin Memory Sticks
Intel SE7505VB2 Dual Xeon Motherboard with SATA RAID 10/100/1000 LAN USB 2.0 AGP 4x/8x
Intel Server Case SC5200
ATI Fire GL X2 256
Sound Blaster Audigy 2
Adaptec 29160 UW SCSI Controller
Western Digital 18gb 15,000RPM SCSI Drive
IBM 36gb 15,000RPM SCSI Drive
Compaq 36gb 10,000rpm
Western Digital 120gb IDE Drive
Sony DVD +RW +R/CD
Toshiba DVD-ROM

IF you can get a good price I would.

28 ghz. 533 CPU's, a bit outdated since the 800's came out.

PC2100 definitely outdated.

What I do is frequently sell my gear to upgrade. This way I get a good price out of my investment while I still can. Otherwise you'll end up selling the entire steup on eBay for 30.00 if you wait too long.

Ditch the motherboard, ram and CPU's, salvage the rest to migrate to new system.

I did that with perfectly functional Athlon MP systems that had similar gear to yours. Got a good price, used it to pay for new upgrade.

[Emmortal1]

I had to go with PC2100 ECC Registered memory because the Xeons, from what I was told by Intel, would not run in Hyperthreaded mode without ECC ram. Mushkin was the obvious choice to go with and that was the fastest ECC RAM at the time, which was 5 months ago.


Emmortal

[Emmortal1]

Also in dual configuration set up on the Opteron 246 CPU system, the fastest ram they take is 333mhz (PC2700). So the PC2100 RAM I have in my system isn't all that outdated comparetively to the fact that PC2700 is the fastest available now for dual CPU setup on Xeons and Opterons.

Emmortal

[stephen2002]

You still have a kickass system. I certantly wouldn't jump ship because the next level of hardware really isn't all that far above what you already have.

How is the FireGL working for you with Maya?

[Emmortal1]

Well I had some serious issues when I first installed it, Maya would crash everytime I would software render. So I had to change the AGP Aperture setting in my BIOS to 128 (was set at 256) Then after installing the latest chipset drivers for my mobo, I didn't have any issues. The performance is pretty good, they do not however have a certified driver for Maya as of yet for the X2, so I'm waiting for that to be released to see if that boosts up the speed.

But all in all, was a good investment, and is much faster than my old Quadro 4 :)

Emmortal

[milkyman]

dooood, seriously. stop with the post thing. the thread title is sooo vague. really annoying. :annoyed:

[Emmortal1]

I cut off the thread title because the whole question couldn't fit in the subject line. I'm sorry I wasted 2 seconds of your life by "making" you click on my thread, have a nice day :)


Emmortal

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