On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 6:54 AM, Lenny <five2one.le...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi again, > sorry to wake an old thread, but this is still an issue for me. > > I was offered a Dell R200 server today, which comes with a single Xeon x3220 > 2.4GHz Quad Core CPU. > (I understand it's a repacked Q6600 or something). > I was wondering if this would be sufficient for my needs.
I'm not terribly familiar with the Xeon's, but that's certainly a newer model than the CPUs in the x336. I believe you'll find this system performs MUCH better. The Intel spec page (http://ark.intel.com/cpu.aspx?groupId=28034) shows this as a 1066Mhz front side bus and an 8M L2 cache (2M per core it appears). L1 cache (from another site) appears to be 128K. The 5420 (http://ark.intel.com/cpu.aspx?groupId=34446) mentioned below has 12M cache (3M/core) a 1333Mhz front side bus and (from another site) 256K L1 cache. Compare these to your existing CPU specs (http://www.xpcgear.com/xeon80036fa.html) 12+16KB L1 cache (I used to know what the 12+16 actually meant) and a 2M L2 cache. The L2 cache difference isn't much (it's per physical CPU, which more or less equates to the cache in the quad core boxes. The L1 cache is actually a big deal, that seemed to make all the difference in the world with the Opterons I was testing that had a larger L1 cache. Of note, I'm not sure if the 128K and 256K numbers I referenced above are per core or total for the chip - if total (as the L2 numbers were), then you have 32K and 64K respectively. > The better option is to get a Dell 1950 III with Xeon 5420, but I don't > think my CEO would spend additional $700 on it, so... $700 seems like cheap insurance to me. It blows me away that a company that has 300mbit of internet traffic won't pay a few dollars for some hardware and would rather waste their employees salary. Put it this way, every hour you spend dicking around with hardware is an hours salary that they've added on to the cost of inadequate hardware (soft dollars vs hard dollars is a bogus argument here, in two weeks it's still very real currency leaving their hands). Ask the vendors for eval gear and make sure it supports the load before you buy. --Bill --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: support-unsubscr...@pfsense.com For additional commands, e-mail: support-h...@pfsense.com Commercial support available - https://portal.pfsense.org
