Difference between PIII copermine and XEON

[ozzie01]

I was wondering if anybody can help me I'm buying a Giga-Byte GA-6VTXE motherboard and I was going to get a PIII 600Mhz copermine but then I found a better deal on a PIII 750Mhz XEON the MB says it supports copermine but it doesn't say anything about XEON can I use the XEON and whats the difference? Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks

 

[CitrixEngineer]

You can't use Xeon processors in an ordinary PII/III motherboard. Xeons have to have a Slot 2, not a Slot 1. Even the newer "Flip-chip" Xeons have more pins than there are holes in the PIII/IV equivalent board; There are major architectural differences within the two processors, which I'll discuss if you want - but are probably outside the scope of this forum.

The main differences between the two, as far as a consumer is concerned, are;

1) The price. For the money, a PII/III gives far more bang for the buck. The huge price difference (for a new processor) does not justify the performance difference for the average user. Xeon processors are designed for use in servers, in which case they are worth the extra for their reliability, scalability and longevity.

2) The Cache. Xeons may have up to 2Mb (or is it 4Mb?) cache. This improves multi-processing and intensive operations, such as database search/indexing - but has very little effect on games.

Interesting Note: If you ran a PIII 750 with 512Kb cache next to a PIII Xeon with 512Kb cache, you would see very little difference in performance overall. This has been remarked on Tomshardware.com, among other sites.

Note 2: Although these processors do not improve games in their own right, at one place I worked we rigged a quad-Xeon box, with 4Gb RAM, and a 128Mb RAID controller so that 10 of us could simultaneously play Quake III via Citrix MetaFrame - it wasn't bad!

PII/III Xeon processors are being sold very cheaply second hand because there is no real market for them, and getting hold of a Xeon (Slot 2) motherboard is not at all easy. Many are manufacturer-specific, and are devils to get to work in alternative cases.

The short is; I'd advise staying away from Xeons, unless you really need a heavy-duty file/data server.

I hope this helps CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk

 

[ozzie01]

Thank you very much thats what I needed to know I'll stick with the PIII 600Mhz for $79.00 the XEON 750Mhz was $69.00 I fiquered there was a reason it was so cheap thanks again.