I'm in Australia so we don't have NewEgg here, sadly.
EDIT: HyperThreading is not application specific, or supported, it is either ON or OFF. An application that does not execute in 2/4 threads, and heavily use SSE2 (eg: SSL, Possibly SHA512, MD5, etc) will not gain anything with HT enabled, and in many cases throughput might rise a tiny bit, but response times will increase too unacceptable levels. Dual-Core (be it a cheap Pentium-D server on a decent server chipset, or a 4-Way/Socket Opteron with 8 processor cores and 4 way NUMA) processors are a far better choice for these reasons. (Summary only, é-mail contact on my webpage - See signature for URL).
Intel have already abandoned Hyper-Threading in the server space. Get with the program ! , Perhaps if they try for 'HyperThreading II' it won't be so bad in 2-3 years. But Intel are currently aiming for 4-issue server processors with 2/4 cores,
a far better approach than 2-issue processors with HyperThreading ever was, to be released in Q3/Q4 2006.
Above had to be said, too much 'disinformation' during the 'information age' ironically. (That or kids forgot how to read / understand techdocs & whitepages years ago - ???).
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I too am in Australia.
http://users.on.net/~darkpeace - is my dodgy ass website with my contact details.
You might want to consider something from Sun Microsystems,
http://www.sun.com - they have a decent footing in Australia. They offer x64 AMD Opteron servers.
If you can support it yourself then grab a Tyan system -
http://www.tyan.com - SuperMicro, etc are not 'that easy to find' in Australia, Tyan gear is just as nice to work with.
Remember my contact details are on my (dodgy ass) website.
HyperThreading is good for servers performing lots of SSE2 based stuff, like encryption / decryption, etc. It only raises MIPS by about 20% or so, but bear in mind that means 2 threads run at 60% performance instead of 50%, not that 1 thread runs at 120% performance (duh, but needs to be said as so many 'admins' have no clue about hardware, they won't admit it though but wouldn't last 15 min in a room with me
.... as you likely are already aware.)
The Opterons will be cheaper in the long run to run, over 2-3 years. (Look at Sun Microsystems website). Most people here will agree with their findings. Sun also make multi-threaded UltraSPARC processors, mostly for Solaris / Unix OS, but the documention may be of 'some use' when 'studying' Intel HyperThreading (I find many people don't quite understand how it works, and expect higher performance than it offers.... it actually decreases memory performance slightly when enabled due to 'sharing overheads' as there are more logical processors trying to access memory at once, and can decrease performance in various tasks when enabled... aswell a increase, but only 10-20% in server apps... Usually you won't hit 100% CPU load on both 'threads' either, as most software isn't designed for it, 50% on one both threads means it is max'd out, any more indicates the software being run is likely taking advantage of it.) - It is hard to go into depth on it in just one post in a forum. (You need to certify applications for the environment one by one, see if it helps or not, various CPU internals are only half effective when HT is enabled and the software isn't benefiting from it, which is why disabling HT can give better performance than just specifying affinity of each process, etc, etc, etc - Contact Me).
If you have RealVNC I'll be more than happy to let you remote desktop my rig here, (I also work in Gov, and we need to help each other, the stuff I see every day 'proves' it - hehehe) and get a feel for it if your are interested - Both in Australia so decent latency, etc, I also am not working this Friday (10/02/2006) so should be available on MSN. (Rig specs below, but can be respec'd more as a server with 3 x PCI-X slots (for RAID cards, etc), and 2 x PCIe slots (both of which can be used as has cheap ATI Rage XL onboard, since servers don't need 3D performance).
I've got SANDRA, but using RAID-0 on 7,200rpm HDDs (ample performance for what you may be doing though, the SCSI is optional and not always justified now that SATA HDDs have NCQ and large caches, P2P interfaces, etc... SATA/SAS is technically superior to older 'ribben' SCSI, people will argue otherwise, but they are just in denial most likely.)
The stuff you can build yourself & support with fast turn arounds, vs buying gear from Dell, etc may actually justify in 'in house' custom server(s) for this project, as we are only talking about 100 staff or so. Especially if there are support staff near the site, and the saved cash is put into hot spare equipment. (Beats waiting an hour or two for '3rd party' support, while business suffers, or is badly impacted, etc).
The whole 'rig' would cost under AU$10,000 , likely well under it too, or get 2 'more mid-range' rigs for a similar price... and remember to keep spare equipment in case of failures.... Also suggest a LSI or Adaptec, etc PCI-X RAID-5/6 controller for this purpose. (and no 3D card obviously enough
, you will be able to use
both the PCI-X (dedicated briges too) and PCIe x16 for RAID controllers in the future aswell. (assuming you are considering a Tyan K8WE S2895 in house build.
All my original notes are at:
http://users.on.net/~darkpeace/hardware/Opteron270.html
Get 128x4 RAM aswell, not 64x8 RAM, as ChipKill(tm) benefits only work on the 128x4 stuff... sure it costs more but stability over a 2 year period is important... why settle for single bit correction and dual bit detection, when you can have 'almost 99.99%' uptime without memory issues ? - In your case, and mine, the extra few dollars justifies the reliability. (Does Wiki have a entry for ChipKill(tm) ?)
Contact Info on my website - See signature below.