dual althlon vs. dual xeon vs. dual opteron

dual Althon MP vs. dual Opteron vs. dual Xeon vs Athlon 64FX

looking to build a high end workstating for computer animation. I'm wondering what setup is going to give me the most bang for my buck. i don't plan on buying another system for awhile, so is it worth going with a 64 bit processor or are they not up to snuff yet? Again primary use will be 3D apps. like softimage, and if half-life 2 plays well on it then that doesn't hurt too.

Rendering typically favors Xeons over opteron/A64/FX. It depends on the app though, I can't say for sure about softimage. Try google, see if you can find any benchmarks.

As for the "64 bitness", it sure won't hurt, but I'm not entirely sure it will make a big difference for rendering unless you'd work with *extremely* complex scenes. Once 64 bit windows hits the shelves and rendering engines get optimized for it, opteron/A64/FX might get a decent performance boost because of the doubled number of SSE2 registers. Wether or when this will apply to your apps, is anyone's guess.

I short, flip a coin, I think both xeon and opteron would be a good choice, I would avoid the the MP's unless you're on a really tight budget, and the A64 FX doesnt make much sense either, since rendering typically scales rather well with SMP, so you'd get more bang/buck with a dual cpu setup than a super fast single cpu setup.

= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my wife. =

As P4man mentioned, rendering tends to favour Xeons. Dual Xeons on an Asus PC-DL or Iwill DH800 (DH800 if you need PCI-X) would be my vote.

If you need more then 4gb of memory that would mean Opterons.

*Dual PIII-800 @900 i440BX and Tualeron 1.2 @1.7 i815*