Does anyone know if the Xeon X3360 will drop in and work instead of the QX9650, the same way the Xeon E3110 is a drop-in replacement of the E8400?
 
The 3360 is rated 2.83Ghz, where the QX9650 is 3.0, but I can't imagine the 0.17 GHz making that big of a performance difference.  
 
X3360:
 
http://compare.intel.com/pcc/showc [...] ture=en-US
http://www.lagoom.com/INTEL_CPU_XE [...] 80392.html

Its not exactly "replacing" the Xtreme chip.  You are paying the extra money not for the speed, but for the POTENTIAL speed on the X chips. (unlocked multi).  It is actually the counterpart to the Q9550.

 
Yea thats what they are now. Used to be both unlocked multi and a nice big helping of 2MB L3 cache. My old Pentium 4 EE 3.4GHz Northwood has 2MB L3 cache and let me tell you it makes a huge difference. Even from a 3.2GHz Pentium 4.
 
But yea this is just a Q9550. So you can get it now and say you had one first technically.

And server chips are believed to be higher quality to handle running 24/7/365

I think they've found that the server versions are identical in overclocking potential with the core 2 arch. Made a big dif. with opterons though.

So far the prices for 45nm processors (as of March 21 2008):
 
QX9650 with unlocked multiplier has an average price of $1125 US/CDN
Q9550 with locked multipler has an average price of $620 US/CDN
X3360 with locked multipler has an average price of $605 US/CDN
Q9450 $385 US/CDN
X3350 $395 US/CDN
Q9300 $320
X3340 $335
E8400 $230
E3110 $245
 
The price for Socket T Xeon and Socket T Core 2 seem to be close to par. (Socket T = LGA775)
 
I used Google to compare prices from the leading US and Canadian Internet Retailers. I did not compare prices from retail chain stores.
 
The prices stated above are +/- 15% of the prices researched. I gave an estimated average. I didn't search for maximum/minimum price differences.  
 
Google...It's a power tool!

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