older quad xeons - please chime in!

[rusko]

i have always wondered how the older quad xeons (p2/p3s) perform. we serve a lot of dynamic content, so my thinking is that the 1-2 meg l2 cache would be highly beneficial. however, higher ram latencies etc may be the bottleneck.

in short, if you ran benchmarks comparing them to dual p4 xeons or at least have some experience with them, i want to hear from you =]

cheers,
paul

[interactive]

I haven't worked on dual p4 xeons much. But I can tell you that the p3 xeons do kick some butt. Not to mention they are extremly cheap (We're talking $35 for a p3 800). About 18 months ago a company was selling the Intel quad xeon board on pricewatch for $199 I'm still kicking myself in the butt for not buying one. I've got a couple SGI dual xeon boards that can be found for around $100, running dual p3 xeon 800's that out perform any of my p4 servers. I don't think there is a 1ghz p3 xeon though, so also look into the tualitins. They have the same size cache and perform just as well as the p3 xeons.

[rusko]

robert,

i specifically mentioned p3 xeons with larger cache. the ones with 1mb or 2mb cache are nowhere near $35. if you can find me a place to get them at that price, i will be happy to pay you off handsomely =]

paul

[interactive]

Ahh sorry was just mentioning them. I was talking about the 512. The 1mb or 2mb aren't that expensive last time I checked. Let me go pull up some book marks.

[interactive]

Here they are:
p2 xeon 400mhz 1mb cache: http://www.acmicro.com/PPmain.asp?IC=1183&Action=Mostrar&msk=PD
$21

p3 xeon 500 mhz1 mb cache: http://www.starmicro.net/cgi-bin/quikstore.cgi?store=&search=yes&detail=yes&product=1007&category=Xeon&keywords=XEON&hits_seen=&page=search.html&and=&affiliate_id=&exact_match=yes
$64


p3 xeon 500 mhz 2 mb cache: http://www.starmicro.net/cgi-bin/quikstore.cgi?store=&search=yes&detail=yes&product=1008&category=Xeon&keywords=XEON&hits_seen=&page=search.html&and=&affiliate_id=&exact_match=yes
$175 (thats a bit steep)


There's some better deals on pricewatch but those are the ones I found pretty quick.

[rusko]

the faster p3 1-2mb cache ones are $1k and above. the best deal i found was $129 for p3 500mhz 2mb cache.

the dilemma is:
i can get a 2-way p4 xeon 512kb cache box for approx the same price. it will have faster ram, faster fsb and faster scsi.
or, i can get a 4-way p3 xeon 2mb cache with a whopping 8mb cache total, but with laggy ram and shoddy scsi.

not sure what i should do about this one =]

paul

[rusko]

the p4 config would have 4.8ghz total and the p3 only 2ghz. im thinking the cache would compensate for a lot of the clockspeed gap, but its a big freaking gap and it has other stuff to compensate for as well.

[interactive]

It depends on what you're going to do. If you're doing shared hosting. I would invest the money in two seperate servers, rather than 1 quad xeon. Also remember, as far as I know only intel makes a quad xeon board (the sitka). It's not a regular form factor case, and you have to have a special case (also only made by intel) to hold it, as the memory slot is rather weird.

[rusko]

the prob is i wont be able to get 2 servers put together to perform as a quad xeon would (given the amount of cash). plus having a four-way xeon would give me a lot of bragging rights =]

[Jay Suds]

My preference would be the Dual Xeon P4's. You get standard rackmount cases, much faster memory, faster FSB, plus a future upgrade path. Plus then there's the spare parts factor - if the **** hits the fan, it's going to be *much* easier to come up with a P4 Xeon Dual mobo than a P3 Xeon Quad mobo.

[interactive]

Well Intel did make a ton of the sitka boards. And you can get a new one for around $400. Remember your application has to make use of all 4 processors. If you have a major app that just uses the first processor your machine is going to suck.

[rusko]

we run linux, which distributes processes (which clone() threads are) across all processors. so no, i am not concerned with the affinity issues.

with that said, i just bought 2 dual 2.4ghz xeon machines - waiting for them to arrive.

paul

[interactive]

Well good luck with them. Sounds like Dells?

[rusko]

bingo! our dell rep did really well this time, i got a whole bunch of free stuff - hard drives, switches, warranty etc.

paul

[beley]

I have used a quad zeon 400 server but recently moved the sites off to a newer server. It was a powerhouse w/ hot swappable scsi bays, a ton of ram, etc. It ran about 25 sites and kept loads under 0.5. They're not really high volume sites though... we just moved them b/c we had another use for the server.