Xeon or Barcelona Opteron

[Chimerical]

Right, basically I have the option of buying a £300 dual socket server (Socket F or LGA771) board and either two dual core 5130 Xeons or two AMD "Barcelona" 1.8GHz Quad Core CPU's. Does anyone know the performance of the Opterons, as it seems like I can get an eight-core system AMD for the same price as the Intel version.

Any advice much appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[Chimerical]

I'm a student and I'm going to use it for video editing (with multithreaded programs obviously) so I'm guessing the Xeon's are better with their high FSB's and larger amounts of cache.

Although I don't actually know anything at all for definite, which is why I'm asking of course. This whole area of computing is new to me.

 

[Chimerical]

Okay, cheers for the quick replies. I'm going to buy a copy of Adobe Premiere/XP64 to run on it probably or Final Cut Pro/Mac OSX Leopard and dual boot (if I can do that?). The AMD's seem like a good option though.

 

[Chimerical]

Cheers for the replies.

If you want the best video editing, get a Mac Pro, it will distroy and windows based PC.

Yeah, going purely for a Mac is an option, but I need the best of both world's really, plus the option to upgrade in the future, not only that but a custom build can obviously be bought in bits and a Mac Pro requires one massive lump sum. The Octo-Core Opteron option looks very good; will wait for some reviews of the Phenom and I'll wait for the Intel Seaburg chipset to be released aswell (as part of Skulltrail I'd imagine).