The Contender: Intel-Xeon System
Where there's Opteron, there's Xeon so, to get the best comparative benchmarks, we built a Dual Xeon system equipped with brand new 3 GHz CPUs. The Intel E7505/Placer chipset can't be beat when it comes to performance, and our test rig for the Xeons was equipped to give AMD a worthy contender. Most Xeon platforms on the market are still based on older chipsets for 100 MHz FSB (corresponds to 400 MHz marketing clock speed).
Fresh out of the box: Intel Xeon 3 GHz with 512 kB L2 cache.
The contender: Dual Xeon with 3 GHz.
Socket 604 times two.
Intel motherboard with the Intel E7505/Placer chipset for Dual DDR333 operation. Compared to the new Canterwood chipset (875), this board offers only a 133 MHz FSB (533 marketing MHz!).
