opteron or xeon?
 

I've been thinking about getting myself a new dual-processor box for workstation and fileserving stuff. I was wondering if anyone with experience working with Xeons and Opterons can give me a recommendation. I've looked through a few reviews on the web, but they only seem to test Windows apps, so I would imagine that the Opterons' 64-bitness wouldn't be coming into play. Any thoughts?

The other issue is motherboard availability. While there seem to be a wide variety of Xeon mobos available, the only choices for the Opteron seem to be Tyan and MSI. Any experiences with the opteron offerings from these two companies?

well d00d i have no hands on experience with either, but the way i am personally i
would pick that opteron over a xeon anyday, just like i would use linux over windows
any day .. i am a huge fan of amd, and that goes without saying, because amd just
eats up an intel processor, especially when it comes to a opteron, cause them bad boys
can have the FSB clocked at the speed of the processor, which is just totally rad,
amongst many other things that make it better ...
oh and also, there are many other board manufacturers for opteron boards, just take
a peak here --> http://www.amdboard.com/opteron_boards.html

These days Opterons a way to go because each processor has its own memory controller. If you go for the quad or even an octal motherboard (never seen an eight processor motherboard), it will beat four Xeon processors easily. About four Xeon processors can only be mounted on a motherboard because of hardware limitation of the processor design. Two Opteron processors still beats two Xeon processors even if hyperthreading is enabled on the Xeon processors. The Opterons are very scalable with out worrying about memory bandwidth.

The Xeons have been seriously lagging with their 533FSB and 333DDR memory speeds. But intel is set to release a new verison within a few days called Nocona, which will have faster bus and memory speeds. I've been waiting for this for a long time because Opteron boards and processors are very, very expensive. I am like you, I've been wanting a dual cpu system for over a year now. When the benchmarks of the new systems, compared to current xeons and current opterons come out, I will then make a decision. I would suggest waiting for a bit before you buy.

@DrOzz: I agree, AMD makes some pretty sweet processors. Normally I would just trust them and go ahead and buy some stuff, but dual Opterons are pretty expensive. Of the mobo's I've looked at, the Tyan Thunder looks the best (don't remember the model number, but its the one with the AGP 8x/Pro). Any opinions?

@Electro: that would be relevant if I could afford 4 CPUs and a 4-CPU mobo ;)

@Pontius: The nocona benchmarks haven't been very forthcoming... except for that really short german one. And I've been hearing some bad things about the 64-bitness of the nocona. So it looks like opteron is the way to go. It'll be a couple weeks before I get the money, anyway, so I'll keep an eye out in case something dramatic happens to change my mind.