Dual Xeon or Prescott

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.

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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.


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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>