Dual Xeon or Prescott

[RiotActing]

So I have 1500 to spend on a rig... I priced out a dual xeon with these specs

2 Western Digital Caviar Special Edition WD800JB 80GB ATA/100 7200RPM Hard Drive w/8MB Buffer
$63.00

2 Corsair 512MB DDR266 PC2100 CAS2.5 ECC Registered Double Data Rate Memory Retai
$120.00

2 Intel® Xeon TM Processor 2.4GHz 533MHz 604pin .13u 512KB Retail
$225.00

Tyan Tiger i7505 S2668 Intel E7505 Dual Xeon DDR ATX Server Board w/Audio, LAN Retail
$218.95

Logitech Cordless MX Duo Elite Keyboard w/MX700 Optical Mouse Combo Retail
$54.99
   
Enermax EG651P-VE 24Pin 550W Power Supply for P4 & AMD K7 Retail
$138.99

Chaintech SA5900X GeForce FX5900 XT AGP 8X 128MB DDR Video Card w/TV-Out & DVI
$199.99 

Zonet ZFN2600 IEEE1394 3+1-Port Firewire PCI Host Card Retail
$19.99

Samsung TS-H492A/WBGH DVD 16x + CDRW 52x32x52 Combo Drive w/Nero & PowerDVD Software (Black)
$43.49

Subtotal
$1562.39

My question is this a good set up? Or should I look into a faster prescott.
Thanks for ALL suggestions

 

[RichPLS]

Depend on what you'll be doing. I have run dual processors for years, and loved it. But dual 2.4's would be hard pressed to beat a 3.4GHz Prescott generally in most apps. much less a 3.8GHz Prescott.

<pre><font color=red>°¤o,¸¸¸,o¤°`°¤o \\// o¤°`°¤o,¸¸¸,o¤°
And the sign says "You got to have a membership card to get inside" Huh
So I got me a pen and paper And I made up my own little sign</pre><p></font color=red>

 

[Aidanoridania]

one drawback: it's not prescott but pressHOT

the pressies heat very much and they are known to throttle down on high load with not enough cooling

on the other hand Rich is right: they beat the dual xeon on every benchmark.
and they run smoothly when they are well cooled, it's just a matter of paying more attention to that cooling aspect and it will be fine.


<font color=purple><i> Enosi and I.... </i></font color=purple>

 

[grafixmonkey]

Dual Xeons won't give you much of a boost in games, but with some intelligent management of them and a large amount of RAM you might be able to do things like leave a video encoding on one processor and play a game on the other. For video editing / encoding and 3D rendering, dual is really really awesome. (I've got dual 3.06 xeons here.)

if you're going dual processor, since most of the things you need dual processor to do also benefits a lot from RAID, you should make sure you have a motherboard with built-in SCSI or at least a PCI-X slot or two. (I didn't look your mobo up I'm just suggesting so ignore if you already did) In my RAID experiments I've come to the conclusion that SCSI is just superior in every way possible, even to SATA Raptors. And the PCI bus maxes out at a really low throughput so if you do RAID you want PCI-X.

EDIT: oh wait, dual 2.4's... I didn't read very carefully - unless your apps scale perfectly with dual procs (pretty much just video processing and 3D rendering) a single processor of 150% the speed would do better for most things. (so dual 2.4's are _maybe_ marginally better in rendering and video production.) The only other benefit of the duals is that you can get PCI-X slots with those if you end up wanting a PCI-X card. (but PCI Express might solve that anyway, it's enough faster than PCI that it's a good alternative to PCI-X.)
<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by grafixmonkey on 12/06/04 05:34 PM.</EM></FONT></P>