In terms of performance and being able to sustain / query large database sets.

Option 1-
Intel Dual Xeon 2.4 GHz
(2)73GB SCSI Hard Drives
2 GB Memory
2000 GB Monthly Transfer

OR

Option 2-
Single Processor Intel 5130 Woodcrest Dual Core
Dell PowerEdge 1950
250GB SATAII HardDrive
1 GB Memory (Fully Buffered Dimms)
1500 GB Monthly Transfer

Cheers,
Ernest

I would say the dual Xeon. The Xeon one has SCSI drives, SCSI is amazing for MySQL queries. It also has 2GB of RAM, which means that you can cache a lot of the queries and speed things up. And then, it has two processors. Twice the power.

We can get SAS drives and RAM upgrades if you contact custom.orders@ev1servers.net. We're working on the pricing for that now.

Just as it is configured I would go with the dual xeon. As aaron said you can upgrade them which can make the dual core processor better if you paid more. The dual core is nice but the dual xeons would win out for what you are looking for - the RAM is also important which it has 2x as much of.

As configured, the Dual Xeon without any question.
Twice the RAM.
10k SCSI drives vs. 7.2K sata drives for 50% faster sustained throughput and faster access speeds important on a server.

There may be specialized users where the fast cpu and slow hard drives and little ram would shine, but for general web/database server I suspect most would see that server with 10% cpu utlilization and 95% iowait.

Excellent! Thanks for the fantastic feedback guys.
Dual Xeons it is

Ernest