Discussion Forums > Technology
New PC - Xeon or Opteron?
Pentium100:
--- Quote from: zherok on October 03, 2013, 10:33:02 AM ---What do you plan on doing with your server that 32gb is inadequate?
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Running virtual machines consumes RAM quickly. It's good that Linux can be made to work normally with 512MB or maybe even 384MB, but try running Windows 2008 or 2012 and you will run out of RAM fast.
And the main reason for a big fat server is that I won't need many tiny little servers (or big fat old servers).
--- Quote ---With the most intensive games still usually being console ports, and the next gen only having 8gb to deal with max (and they too require a good chunk of their RAM to go towards system processes), it's unlikely there'll really be all that many games that will try to require more than what consoles are capable of. And you're still talking doubling that potential with 16gb.
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Game uses 8GB, Firefox uses 1.5GB, some other app uses 1GB and look, you are out of memory if you only have 8GB.
--- Quote ---It kinda sounds like your future hypothetical server is more important than the main PC usage you're planning on getting out of it now. Why spend so much now when all this ultra-high end stuff is just for your hand-me-down server later? I mean, if you really want to spend that money, go for it, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with your usage.
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I may have written it inaccurately:
At first I wanted a really overpowered system that could last 7 years without upgrading the motherboard.
Then someone suggested me a small temporary system now, for a year. Then, a year later, upgrade to a really overpowered system (parts of which are not on market yet).
Now, in this case, the temporary system will spend more time being a server than a main PC, so I should be concerned about that use too. In this case buying an older AMD dual CPU hardware would be better than brand new single CPU system. It will last the year as a main PC just OK and then it will be a good server.
Honemi:
--- Quote from: Pentium100 on October 03, 2013, 03:42:37 AM ---Did I get it all?
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AMD processors will have superior mulitasking performance not multithreaded performance. For pure performance, Intel still wins out in almost every price range. Games will be designed around 8 cores, but for computers, that means 8 threads. An i7 will not be inadequate to run these games thanks to Hyper-threading; Hyper-threading allows the i7 processor to handle more threads than it would normally would. kitamesume was not wrong when he (?) summarized this as allowing the processor to utilize more of its power.
The only real advantage AMD processors will have over an Intel equivalent is multitasking performance due to their sheer core count. Intel still beats comparable AMD processors in most every multithreaded task. If you need better multitasking, get an AMD; if you need more raw performance, get Intel. Games in general likes Intel processors a lot more than they do AMD's processors, and unfortunately for AMD, this is particularly true for CPU-bound games. AnandTech has released Part 2 of their 1440p CPU article. Tom's Hardware with StarCraft II which is another CPU-bound game, I believe. [H]ardOCP has some results, but because of the low resolution used, the results are a bit more exaggerated than it would be in real life. AMD processors are not really worth unless you're into mulitasking: their single thread performance is a joke, and their multithreaded performance is not so great either.
If you're going to be doing a lot of multitasking as you indicated you will be, then I recommend AMD. Their core count allows them better multitasking performance in exchange for Intel's general performance. Its a choice between good multitasking and performance in other words.
As for the RAM bit, I have a hard time imagining games using more than 6GB of RAM at this point in time, and I believe even in a few years 32GB will be overkill for gamers. I'm pretty sure that RAM usage is tied to VRAM usage as in the less VRAM you have the more RAM is used. I'm not too sure about that though. Maybe people more knowledgeable on the subject can educate me.
I hope that helps. It's kind of hard to collect information about the CPU's effect on performance. It isn't a secret that most games benefit from a beefier graphics card instead of a beefier central processor, so major review sites tend to focus on the former to the exclusion of the latter.
edit: In the article I linked to earlier in the thread, it also showed that AMD had trouble competing with its Intel counterpart on most tasks. It could still probably multitask better, but the multithreaded performance crown still goes to Intel. AMD's strength is in, once again, their multiple cores which allow them to multitask much, much better than Intel, and well, AMD pricing is better. Since you're planning on using the computer with virtualization and other things, I suspect the Opteron would be the better deal.
Also, I'd like to point out that the Dual-Socket setup hurts performance for games rather than helped. So the main use of that would be to use on a server and not any desktop use.
Also, too, for PhysX, you're either getting a secondary (strong enough not to bottleneck your current) nVidia card or you're getting a pretty beefy nVidia card. The latter is so cost-effective. Really, though, PhysX is not really common enough on games to justify picking only nVidia cards let alone basing your PC around it. There are other physics engines in use today, and they will need a better processor to use them. Also, no to your question regarding PhysX; more cores will not help with it. The primary use (almost singular use) for PhysX is to offload the physics engine caculations onto the graphics card rather than the processor. The entire point of it is nVidia cards. Nothing else has the cuda cores required to make it worth it. Again, you'll be looking at better multithreaded performance for physics engines not using PhysX, and you'll be looking nVidia cards for games using PhysX. Simple.
zherok:
--- Quote from: JoonasTo on October 03, 2013, 10:59:27 AM ---Skyrim, modded do all benefit from ram over 8GB, even if they can't utilise over 8 or 16 by themselves.
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Skyrim actually crashes if you go over 3.1gb memory usage. It's an upper limit on modding. I wouldn't suggest less than 8 on a new machine but 32 or higher has nothing to do with games in the foreseeable future.
Honemi:
--- Quote from: zherok on October 03, 2013, 03:20:57 PM ---
--- Quote from: JoonasTo on October 03, 2013, 10:59:27 AM ---Skyrim, modded do all benefit from ram over 8GB, even if they can't utilise over 8 or 16 by themselves.
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Skyrim actually crashes if you go over 3.1gb memory usage. It's an upper limit on modding. I wouldn't suggest less than 8 on a new machine but 32 or higher has nothing to do with games in the foreseeable future.
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Even after it is patched with the 4GB patch? I thought they did an update that allows it to use more memory. Wait, its still an 32-bit application, so it would be limited to approximately 4GB.
Maybe Joonas confused the combined usage of RAM and VRAM for just RAM? Shit, I'm confused.
JoonasTo:
32-bit applications/OSes have not been limited to 4GB or 3,2 GB of memory since 1995 and pentium pro. That's an artificial constraint introduced by Microsoft to make their life easier for creating drivers. Thus most gaming companies follow this to make their life easier when porting stuff to Windows. And even then that's only limit for a single process so one program running multiple child processes can exceed that limitation. Like mods that run parallel to the main process. *wink, wink*
Also even if a program is limited to 8GB or 4Gb or whatever, if you only have that much ram, the program won't be able to make use of that all since a significant portion of the memory is going to all the background processes, OS, antivirus, browser, torrents, mediasharing, etc. etc. So if you have more to satisfy those too, you can get the program to use the maximum memory. And you can run your swap/temp in the ram.
Oh and actually part of the reason why 32 bit windows(consumer, server editions can deal with more, all the way upto 128 gigs in the best versions if I remember correctly) is unable to utilise over 3,2GB of ram is that the addresses for the rest of the 800 megabytes is reserved for vram and other system addresses. So technically the more vram you want to use the less ram and so on.
--- Quote from: zherok on October 03, 2013, 03:20:57 PM ---
--- Quote from: JoonasTo on October 03, 2013, 10:59:27 AM ---Skyrim, modded do all benefit from ram over 8GB, even if they can't utilise over 8 or 16 by themselves.
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Skyrim actually crashes if you go over 3.1gb memory usage. It's an upper limit on modding. I wouldn't suggest less than 8 on a new machine but 32 or higher has nothing to do with games in the foreseeable future.
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They fixed that, you can go upto 4gb.
EDIT: Oh, and Microsoft and Intel have been married since forever so you can expect the new intel instructions to be included in Windows environment around two years earlier than AMD ones. This is how it's gone historically. Linux usually gets everything a year earlier than Microsoft but you mentioned you won't be using it so that's a fact that you might want to keep in mind.
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