If you had an opportunity to buy either a Dual Xeon 5130 computer for $1200 or a Core i7 920 computer for $800, which would you choose? They are for sale by a guy I know, so they aren't new machines... well, that's probably obvious.

They both have 12GB of memory and other similar features. The Xeon machine has an nVidia 8600 graphics card and the Core i7 machine has a GTX260 and the other components are similar.

But, just to be clear, when I say Dual Xeon 5130, I mean 2 of those processors on the mother board. These Xeon's don't do Hyperthreading... I think. So, I guess I'd be looking at a single 2.66 Ghz processor with 8 cores versus two 2.00 Ghz processors for a total of 4 cores. But, maybe the 2 Xeons would still be the better performer.

I ask because I'm not very familiar with Xeon 5130s.

I won't be doing any gaming. But, I will be folding. Well, that is if I do get one of these. May not happen though. Other people are interested in the machines also.

Honestly that depends on how much you want to spend. Me personally, I would shoot for the dual xeons.

Thanks for the reply. Luckily, I'm at a point where a couple hundred dollars here or there doesn't make much difference. But, if the Core i7 is gonna outperform these two Xeons in Folding, for instance, then I would go with the Core i7. But, as I said, I'm not very familiar with the Xeons, other than Xeons are server quality parts, but not necessarily faster.

So, -why- would you shoot for the Xeons? Stability? Speed? 'The Cool Factor'?

To be completely honest, between stability, and that fact that it is dual xeons. The more better IMO

So, anybody else have additional input on the Xeon 5130s running in a dual processor machine?

I saw a couple of charts, something like bang for the buck, and a dual Xeon 5130 setup was at about 3.9 or so and the Core i7 920 was at about 16 or so. I forget the exact thing that was being mesaured, but in a couple of other charts the Xeon 5130 dual processor setup was way below the single Core i7 920. That was just a quick, casual observation.

I would definitely go for the i7. It has four cores with Hyperthreading at 2.66 GHz, The dual Xeon machine has also four cores, but without HT and only 2 GHz, and interconnected per FSB. The Core i7 has a newer architecture and should be faster. If you want to go for folding you will also benefit from the GTX260 card.

I'm not sure which would be faster, it may be the i7, because it is newer and has more cores and is capable of hyper-threading. So, if your program is capable of multi-threading, then I would go with the i7. If not, then the Xeon may be more powerful, per core at least.

Server would be xeon, workstation would be core i7.

Sounds like something I would do. I prefer AMD though...

Roger that. And it would be a workstation situation. Here's what I posted up over at justlinux:

Well, after some more searching, I found some charts that put the Core i7 920 way out in front of the dual processor Xeon 5130 in a few categories. It generally looked kinda like this:

Core i7 920:

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Dual Xeon 5130:

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I think my choice would be clear then.

Definitely the i7. The Xeon's are older dual cores based on 65nm tech. The i7's are newer and are 45nm. If they were comparable Xeon's to the i7 I would say Xeon for what you are going to use the system for, but the smaller tech, four cores in one package, and HT giving you eight logical cores, and faster clock speeds the i7 wins hands down.

I am not familar with the dual CPU server machines but could the second CPU working only as a backup like RAID 1? If this is the case you get reliability but not much performance.


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# Processor: 2.93GHz Intel Core i7-940
# Memory: 6GB DDR3 1333MHz
# Graphics: ATI Radeon HP C4096A 1GB (F-860-a), NVIDIA GeForce GTX260 896MB ( F-860-n)
# Hard drive: 1TB SATA-II 7,200-rpm

In most common computers the second is not really a backup as such. We use a lot of dual xeon boards that can easily disable one or the other in bios if the cpu fails. Not really a great feature since I have only seen a cpu fail once in the last 10 years. We get a lot of other stuff that fails before that.

In special computers for banking and other 4x 16x or more redundant systems they do have a way to set cpu's as any number of backup and error checking.