I am looking at these 2 servers now but I do not know which is suitable for my usage.

I host a few hundred sites. Some of these sites store a lot of emails in webmail causing occasional high cpu loads. Other sites would just contain Wordpress blogs and forums. I am currently using only Celeron 2.0 with Ensim under RHEL.

If I narrow down to these 2 servers, which one would provide better performance? Would the Dual Xeon mean 'heavy duty performance' since it is a multi processor? Would the Xeon 3040 mean 'only fast performance' but not powerful enough to handle sites that take up a lot of memory and cpu resource?

Pls enlighten me, these servers are completely new to me...

What are the exact deals you are looking at and there associated costs? we can give you input from there.

I think it will be...

Xeon 3060 SATA with 250GB HDD, 2GB RAM, 2000GB BW, $152

VS

Dual Xeon 3.2 SCSI with 2 x 73GB HDD (10k RPM), 2GB RAM, 2500GB BW, $135

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Is the Xeon 3060 really that fast? By how much? What are its strengths over the Dual Xeon 3.2?

Based on the performance of the two processors in benchmark tests the Xeon 3060 SATA performs better than the Dual Xeon 3.2 processor-wise by a little more than 32%.

The speed between cores is typically faster than speed between processors so in most cases a single dual core server performs better than a dual single core server and a single quad core server would perform better than a dual dual core server. Also multi-core processors usually have more cache and a faster front side bus than single core processors and tend to use newer hardware in terms of the drives and RAM.

The Dual Xeon you mentioned includes 2x 73GB SCSI drives though which are 10k RPM drives, whereas the SATA drive with the 3060 has a speed of 7.2k RPM. You may want to change that to a 146GB 10k RPM SAS drive for a faster drive performance.

If you have any other questions or would like to proceed with an order, please feel free to contact me directly. You can reach me by email at bkyle @ theplanet.com or by phone at 281-714-3127. Or, you can just ask for me in chat from theplanet.com.