opteron 144 or athlon 64 3200+ 2

[dalchri]

I am getting ready to put together some CAD workstations. I have settled on the MB as a MSI K8NGM2-L GF6100 939. I have an Athlon 64 3000+ and am pretty happy with the performance coupled to a WD Raptor 10K rpm but I was a little surprised to see the CPU maxing out in taskmgr as much as it did. I thought that the HD was usually the bottleneck.

For $40 more I have the option of an Athlon 64 3200+ or an Opteron 144. Which would you recommend? I understand that the Opteron is a server or workstation class processor. Would it deliver better performance than the Athlon 64 3200+?

Thank you for any feedback or suggestions!

 

[kmcferrin]

The Opteron 144 is a 1.8 GHz CPU with 1MB of cache. The Athlon 64 3200+ is a 2.0 GHz CPU with 512K of cache. Both of them seem to have the same instruction set support (3DNow, SSE, etc). I suspect that they will probably be very close in performance.

For comparison, on Socket 754 AMD released two different models of Athlon 64 3000+ CPUs. One was a 2.0 GHz 512K cache, and the other was a 1.8 GHz 1MB cache. Their performance was so close they were given the same performance rating. However, since most applications tend to be more sensitive to clock speed than cache size (especially since the Athlon 64 and Opteron lines have such low memory latency anyway), the 2.0 GHz tended to be a tad faster.

I think it's a wash really. If I had to make the choice I would probably go with the higher clock speed.

 

[cdogg]

The lower speed Athlon 64's in the range you're looking at only have 512KB of L2 cache (which is good, don't get me wrong). But the Opteron you are referring to has a full 1MB. In addition, it does have better thermal ratings and can be overclocked (as I've read) over 1.2GHz.

At stock speeds, though, it runs slower than the Athlon64 3200+. In terms of overall performance, you won't likely notice much difference between the two. The extra cache and stability of the Opteron does help in intensive database applications (DB2, SQL, etc). But as a workstation, it's likely not worth the extra $$.

Just my 2¢

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
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[cdogg]

Sorry to repeat some of what kmcferrin already said. Took me a while to hit submit after getting sidetracked....

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884