What is the AMD equivilent to...

[mrbios]

What's the AMD equivilent to an E5500 in performance terms?

For the past 2 years all the PCs we've been building at work have been E5400/5500 processors with cheap micro ATX boards + 2GB ram, so buying the cheapest things possible (without going near the dirty celeron dual cores *spit*) but i'm wondering if it's possible to get better performance for the same cost via AMD?

All suggestions welcome, but just as an example processor and motherboard combos currently will cost us around £70-75, i doubt i'll get cheaper for the same performance levels but it's always worth a shot

 

[Beerbaron]

i doubt cost/performance will be beaten plus the core 2 duos are a good cpu any way

 

[mrbios]

I was hopeful when i'd seen the price of the Athlon II X2 250 but then i noticed all the AM3 boards use DDR3, all our PCs currently have DDR2 memory

 

[d_brennen]

What's the AMD equivilent to an E5500 in performance terms?

For the past 2 years all the PCs we've been building at work have been E5400/5500 processors with cheap micro ATX boards + 2GB ram, so buying the cheapest things possible (without going near the dirty celeron dual cores *spit*) but i'm wondering if it's possible to get better performance for the same cost via AMD?

All suggestions welcome, but just as an example processor and motherboard combos currently will cost us around £70-75, i doubt i'll get cheaper for the same performance levels but it's always worth a shot

What is your current total platform cost per machine you build?

Edit: Generic DDR3 is buttons compared to DDR2 at the moment if you know where to look. Hell, the last PC I built for a cheap workstation has 4GB (2x2) of OCZ Gold 1.5v stuff. £30+VAT

 

[Indy500]

I was hopeful when i'd seen the price of the Athlon II X2 250 but then i noticed all the AM3 boards use DDR3, all our PCs currently have DDR2 memory

AM2+ boards are still around, they'll work perfectly fine with the Athlon II\Phenom II... and to be honest DDR3 isn't worth it with most current AMD processors.

 

[mrbios]

What is your current total platform cost per machine you build?

For processor, motherboard, hard drive, ram and PSU it would come to about £140 i guess as a usual cost

The last batch of stuff we bought was E5400s, gigabyte G31 matx motherboards, 2GB stick of value ram, nasty power supplies and whatever hard drive suites us at the time.

Edit: Generic DDR3 is buttons compared to DDR2 at the moment if you know where to look. Hell, the last PC I built for a cheap workstation has 4GB (2x2) of OCZ Gold 1.5v stuff. £30+VAT

Problem is we have about 200 PCs that are running on dieing foxconn boards (old style capacitors that have all started leaking) and pentium Ds (D stands for disgusting right?) but with the benefit that they all have a minimum of 2GB DDR2 in them

 

[d_brennen]

Source EXXXXs CPUs on eBay They can be had for buttons and CPUs rarely fail.

The G31 is a good business platform, I think it'd be hard to beat performance wise. The savings to be had at this end of the spectrum are tiny tbh

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

What's the AMD equivilent to an E5500 in performance terms?

For the past 2 years all the PCs we've been building at work have been E5400/5500 processors with cheap micro ATX boards + 2GB ram, so buying the cheapest things possible (without going near the dirty celeron dual cores *spit*) but i'm wondering if it's possible to get better performance for the same cost via AMD?

All suggestions welcome, but just as an example processor and motherboard combos currently will cost us around £70-75, i doubt i'll get cheaper for the same performance levels but it's always worth a shot

The Athlon II X2 235 and 240 should be similar to an E5500.

BTW,is that £70 to £75 excluding VAT??

i doubt cost/performance will be beaten plus the core 2 duos are a good cpu any way

The Athlon II is as good as the current Core2 in price/performance IMHO.

Even,Bit-tech which prefers Intel processors recommends the Athlon II X2 for its budget builds.

 

[mrbios]

Source EXXXXs CPUs on eBay They can be had for buttons and CPUs rarely fail.

The G31 is a good business platform, I think it'd be hard to beat performance wise. The savings to be had at this end of the spectrum are tiny tbh

Ebays not really a solution seein as we would be looking to buy about 115 in one go

While the savings are small per unit, when you buy a bulk load it adds up, for example there is a £700 difference in overall cost when one product is £7 cheaper than another, small saving per unit but large saving overall!

 

[d_brennen]

Ebays not really a solution seein as we would be looking to buy about 115 in one go

Ahh. Do you buy trade or retail/etail?

 

[HeX]

You can pick up a Gigabyte AM2+ mATX board for about £32, and an X2 255 for about £45.

So £77 (inc VAT) all in, probably slightly cheaper if you are buying in bulk.

Which would let you reuse your spare DDR2.

 

[mrbios]

Ahh. Do you buy trade or retail/etail?

Retail but with special prices (close to trade prices via retail means), whether these "special" prices are due to buying in bulk or because we're a school i don't know though.

We have special super secret trade accounts for some things, but not pc parts sadly

 

[jak731]

This board on oc costs £27.56 inc VAT, they sell the 250 x2 for £44 so that comes to £71.56 per cpu and mobo and you can reuse your ddr2. That motherboard has some solid caps for the cpu voltage regulators but isn't all solid cap.

 

[mrbios]

This board on oc costs £27.56 inc VAT, they sell the 250 x2 for £44 so that comes to £71.56 per cpu and mobo and you can reuse your ddr2. That motherboard has some solid caps for the cpu voltage regulators but isn't all solid cap.

oo good find. That knocks cost down to £59.63 as im working in ex VAT, forgot to mention that £70-75 before was ex VAT too

over £10 cheaper than the intel offering which gives me a minimum saving of £779 (i say minimum becuase it varies depending on what spec i have in my price lists, probably a max saving of about £1.1k)

That's more like it!

 

[jak731]

It's rated to take 95W cpus and the 250 is a 65W part so you should get a reasonable lifetime out of them. Biostar page

Feel like i've done my charity work for the year if i've just saved a school a grand

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Many of the cheaper motherboards don't run the HT at full speed BTW.

With an AMD chipset you need at least the SB700,SB710 and SB850 southbridge IIRC.

The Nvidia 8000 series chipset are also fine AFAIK.

The Gigabyte GA-MA74GMT-S2 can be had for around £36 at some places and uses the 740G chipset and the SB710 southbridge

 

[mrbios]

Feel like i've done my charity work for the year if i've just saved a school a grand

May even be more, we have a habit of pushing our suppliers to as low as they'll go, so could even be more than a grand in the final saving

Main reason behind all this is that 4 years ago i had no input behind a really big build, we have buy 165 pcs, monitors, keyboards, mice etc to fit out a whole new building.... this was about the time when E2180s were the super cpu, cool and fast, but what was purchased? pentium ******* Ds (the super hot prescott core) with 512mb of ram which at the time cost more than the E2180s!!!! We eventually upgraded the memory in order for us to be able to move to windows 7 smoothly but I've never forgiven the guy who purchased it all without asking me.

I'm making sure that when we change the dieing foxconn boards and super hot pentium Ds over this time that we have something much cooler and the right budget buy for it's time. Which leads me to my final question, what are the temperatures like with the athlon II processors?

EDIT: we'll probably get one AMD machine to hammer and test that it would work properly for us before buying in bulk, which is also something that's never been done here before (it's amazing how much money that taxpayers circulate round to them, waste on utter crap)

 

[jak731]

The temperatures are usually pretty decent on the stock cooler at stock speeds for athlons, e.g. <35-40 degrees idle, <60-65 at full load for several hours. Obviously dependant on ambient temperatures and case airflow. They are 45nm parts and the 250 in particular is low end. Needless to say they will be far less power hungry than pentium Ds! You will probably save more than a grand on leccy each year.

Here equivalent intel systems seem to consume 10W less at load and idle. Note your total power consumption per system will be far lower than the total values on xbitlabs as they are using high end ram and a high end motherboard with a 4890 (which uses about 80W just by itself at idle).

Yeah it's a good idea to test 1 system if you're going to buy 100.