FYI about dual-Xeon graphics workstations,
The latest PC Magazine reviewed six Pentium III Xeon workstations. Every workstation came with two Pentium III Xeon processors running at 500 MHz with 512K full-speed L2 cache. All of them also came with Seagate Ultra-2 SCSI hard drives with 8 GB of space and spinning at 10,000 RPM. Add 256MB of SDRAM and a high-end graphics card per system, and you have yourself a list of some very powerful workstations.
The prices ranged from $8,000 to $12,000. As usual, Dell won the PC Editor's Choice.
The editors also wanted to compare these Xeon workstations to competitive products based on Compaq's Alpha processor or Sun's Solaris systems, but neither company was able to supply workstations in time for the review.
One more thing. The editors also decided to try testing a similar Sun workstation based on dual Pentium III processors and see what difference the Xeon makes. The article says:
On the average, we found performance results to be only 7.3 percent lower with two Pentium IIIs than the same configuration with two Pentium III Xeons, with results ranging from a difference of 2.7 percent to 8.7 percent. ... If absolute top performance is not your priority, you can save anywhere from $200 (on the Dell) to $1,450 (on the IBM) by buying an equivalent system with two Pentium III's.
In my opinion, this is true, but if your spending over $8000 on a graphics workstation, you might as well take the plunge, go for the Xeons, and enjoy the small but noticeable performance boost.
Tenchusatsu |
