Conroe 3060 or this month's dual 2.4 Xeon? Options

[Dietrich]

Mea Culpa--a dumb question from someone not used to dealing with hardware--and yeah, I searched--question must be that dumb that nobody else asked :[

I need to host three copies of Skype and a callcenter routing app. I'm trying to decide between the dual 2.4ghz xeons on special this month, or the Conroe 3040 (1.86ghz, DC). Base configs for both are $150/month. The other specs/offerings are either identical, negligible, or mostly irrelevant to the task at hand. Suggestions?

It's been a real bear finding benchmarks, even though I saw a couple of posts here with long lists of links for then. In addition, Intel makes at least two or three Xeons running at 2.4ghz. Which is the one that is offered?

Can someone throw me a bone before I open up another dozen tabs in firefox?

-D

PS> "Mission Accomplished," Intel, if you wanted to muddy the water on CPU specs. :]

[Jeff]

I *think* the xeon 2.4's on special are the oldest 533 mhz FSB xeons based on netburst with hyperthreading and 512Kb L2 cache. You'll see 4 cores, 2 physical and 2 virtual, due to hyperthreading, but hyperthreading is probably only ~50% efficient, so it's somewhere between.

The conroe I believe is 1066 mhz FSB based on core2 architecture with 2 MB shared L2 cache (so twice as much on-chip cache.)

Even though the clockspeed is slower, I believe the combination of the FSB being twice as fast for memory to CPU communication, the newer architecture, and the larger on-chip cache will make the conroe faster if no other hardware factors come to bear.

[Dietrich]

I *think* the xeon 2.4's on special are the oldest 533 mhz FSB xeons based on netburst with hyperthreading and 512Kb L2 cache. You'll see 4 cores, 2 physical and 2 virtual, due to hyperthreading, but hyperthreading is probably only ~50% efficient, so it's somewhere between.

The conroe I believe is 1066 mhz FSB based on core2 architecture with 2 MB shared L2 cache (so twice as much on-chip cache.)

Even though the clockspeed is slower, I believe the combination of the FSB being twice as fast for memory to CPU communication, the newer architecture, and the larger on-chip cache will make the conroe faster if no other hardware factors come to bear.

Thank-you. Yes, I was afraid it was the older Xeon (from 2002, I think). I meant "3040" instead of "3060," but I think your advice stands in that case as well for what we're wanting to do. Thanks again.

[Jeff]

I should say I myself am running a pair of dual 2.8 xeons and they are still good servers; in my case I have a lot of disk IO going and was able to get a good deal on the 2.8s with dual and triple 10k scsi drives so it's a good setup for me overall.