Spending £300 on CPU - get two 2.8 xeon or one 3.4 p4 ?

[simonw2003]

This is for a pc I am building for a friend who wants to edit video on a PC using adobe pro.

The budget allows about £450 for cpu and mobo.

Would a dual 2.8 xeon setup be better than a single P4 3.4 ?


or is there a valid amd route for the same price range?


Thanks for any tips



simon

[skratakh]

if it were me i'd go amd, but until 64 bit video editing software theres no point.

[CMS_Edit]

Well... I might be able to help here, because we've just upgraded our other machine to a P4 3.2D 830 (Dual core) and we have been testing it against my 2.8 dual xeon nocona...

The dual xeon destroys the 3.2 dual core in every processor benchmark test... (It does have 4gb ram compared to the 3.2's 2gb but on the processor test memory isnt touched)

In the real world IE rendering timelines etc the dual nocona wins again hands down...

With the xeons being hyperthreading they show up as 4 Processors!!! its beautiful watching them all working in task manager when exporting etc.

So For pure processing power Id go for the xeons, but the mobo will be slightly more expensive, also theres only a few xeon mobos with AGP I have the asus ncch-dl which is wicked...

Also dont forget to budget for a 24 pin SSI powersupply... (Mine was £165 jesus was that a shock after forking out for the rest of it! ) but have come down now around £70 I think)

I hope that helps, feel free to ask if you want any more info.

[Mihai]

i already have amd64-bit, so if i were to upgrade again, i'd go for that dual setup

[Brian Gardner]

Reading other peoples set ups and i would agree i would also go for the DUAL set up