Re: Opteron Vs. Athlon X2

Thanks everyone for your thoughts. I've told my wife (with help from a 
vendor's web-based wish list) that I would like the Athlon 64 X2 4400 
suggested by Peter. If that shows up under the tree, I'll go ahead and 
get the Asrock board. I will see what develops. I think I might look for 
some sort of integrated SD/Compact Flash/MMC/Memory stick card reader 
that can slide into a drive bay and probably a dual layer DVD+RW drive 
while I'm at it.

Meanwhile, I want to thank everyone for the helpful comments.

And yes, I really would like to cut down the compile times.

Bob Cochran



Peter Arremann wrote:

>On Tuesday 06 December 2005 00:21, Robert L Cochran wrote:
>  
>
>>Thanks Peter, Bryan, and Bill for your thoughts.
>>
>>I would like to keep to a budget of about USD $600-700 for a CPU
>>upgrade. I want to both develop and use open source software, which
>>means a lot of code-compile-test cycles. I want the compiles to finish
>>quickly. For example, PHP 6.0 (from snaps.php.net) takes about 4-5
>>minutes to compile on my single core Athlon 64 3500+, and I'd like to
>>cut the compile time in half. I also want to do web development with PHP
>>and databases. I want to be able to keep up with the current  CPUs and
>>get exposure to them.
>>    
>>
>you're unhappy with 5 minutes? Now I'm suddenly happy with the users at work - 
>they are happy with the 30 or more minutes it takes for our apps to build :-)
>
>
>  
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>>With these goals in mind what hardware will give me what I want and fit
>>inside that $700? What do you think will work for me? I want to make use
>>of my existing power supply, memory, and drives as much as possible. If
>>I have to replace my motherboard, I'll consider it.
>>
>>So -- and I say this with humor! -- what can I ask my wife to give me
>>for Christmas without generating heavy expense but still be good enough
>>for me, a computer programmer who does a lot of development?
>>    
>>
>For me, reuse of components is the most important thing usually. 
>The situation you're personally would go the following route - I know its not 
>the greatest technical nor performance wise - but the price/performance for 
>this upgrade can't be beat (it is also what I'm running, so I can tell you 
>its rock solid)
>
>Start with the 939Dual board from Asrock (lowend asus). Its based around a SIS 
>chipset and has the huge advantage that you can not only keep your memory but 
>also the graphics card. Almost all boards that support dual core are pci 
>express. This board also has a 16x PCI-Express slot, so you can later upgrade 
>to such a card (or like me, run a dual head setup with a 8xAGP and a 
>16xPCI-Express card). In addition to that, the board is dirt cheap - less 
>than $70. 
>http://www.asrock.com/support/CPU_Support/show.asp?Model=939Dual-SATA2
>It runs Centos4U1, FC3,4,5T1 without any issue. Centos 3.5 and Solaris 10 both 
>didn't like the network card - but for a developers workstation you can just 
>buy any old pci ethernet card without much thinking about it. 
>
>Then take a Athlon 64 - X2 4400. Its less than $500 boxed. The next step up 
>would be the X4600 but with only 200Mhz more and half the cache I doubt it 
>will be worth the extra $130 you pay for it. 
>
>That CPU/board combo should give you a nice performance boost since you got 
>the same clock per core but dual core and twice the cache per core... You 
>won't see half the compile time though because one of the slowest thing these 
>days is linking - and that's always done single threaded. 
>
>Peter.
>
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