2xE5620 or 1xE5630

[Mark Woodward]

I just set up a couple quad core AMD Phenom systems about a year ago. 8G 
RAM, two 1TB disk drives each and I run about 4 VMs on them with no 
problems. It will probably set you back less than 3 bills for 
MB/CPU/RAM. Remember, CPU speed is, for all intent and purposes, 
infinite. The bottle necks are the usual suspects of I/O, RAM, and L2 cache.

I know its a dream system and all, but economics, especially these days, 
is important.  My AMD 64 Athlon dual core desktop still rocks and its 
gotta be about 3 years old now. I haven't seen ant REAL compelling 
improvement in CPUs in a couple years. Clock speeds are stagnating and 
more core don't actually equate to a full CPU.

If you are asking for advice, save some money, get a cheaper CPU set, 
but with more memory.

From: Stephen Adler <adler-wRvlPVLobi1/31tCrMuHxg at public.gmane.org>
> Subject: 2xE5620 or 1xE5630
> To: "Blu unix (blu)"<discuss-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org>
> Message-ID:<4CB9FB08.3000506-wRvlPVLobi1/31tCrMuHxg at public.gmane.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Hi BLU!
>
> I'm thinking of scratching my itch by upgrading my desktop. I'm settling
> on the 5600 based Xeon system with a supermicro x8dtl board. The
> question I'm pondering is whether I should spend $570 on one E5630 Xeon
> processor or spend $770 on two E5620 Xeon processors.... My goal is to
> have a desktop in which I don't have to worry about how many virtual
> system I have running at once... Well to a finite extent... 2 - 4
> virtual systems.... It seems that spending an extra $200 and doubling
> the number of cores but sacrificing .18 GHz may be worth it....
>
> Any comments?
>
> Do you guys know if RHEL will support the 5500 chip set?
>
> Cheers. Steve.
>