The Difference between Xeon and Pentium 4 processors?

the only thing i know is i have seen the hardware department building Xeon servers at work. they have large blocks of solid foam in the case, apparently it is heat insulation to keep the more sensitive components at a safe temperature!

in terms of performance, these machines are built to run UNIX and service 15 or more users at a time. so, i have no idea how suitable they would be for "normal" home use.

my understanding is for winFX the graphics card and its drivers are key, not the processor. a good ATI Radion seems to be a good recormendation, which is what i am going to get soon to replace my %&$@*@* nvidia card.

I believe Xeons are primarily for servers but you can get them in desktops from Dell. (The 'Workstation' desktops that is, not the 'home computer' desktop)

Yeah I thought from what I read of Xeon chips they were for servers or lagre datbase systems.

And its funny you mention Dell because I plan on getting a Dell and I wanted a workstation because of all the high calulation intense (like 3D lighting, architectural drawing, apps, sql type stuff). When I saw the Xeon I was thinking to myself, "...isn't that for servers????"

I can't wait to get it!!! I will be so happy. And many thanks to feline because of here questions I know what to get (like the graphics card thing... when I explain that to other people I am just as baffled about why one card doesn't work and othr do when it is designed on standards and its doing mostly one thing... graphics!)

Anyway, thanks for your help! I really needed it. Now I can move on to other choices.

xeon = same as the normal p4's with more cache + $100 extra

honestly, unless you're going to be doing high end professional graphics/running a big server... there really isn't a performance curve over the p4's that makes it worth it

But doesn't having more cache good for memory?

Anyway, I am going for the Pentiums. I might get a dual processor, but even then I don't think that will help much soooo... just one pentium for me please.

Now to figure out what else this system needs to have.

Oh and this is what I'll be running on it; short list

Photoshop
Illistrator
After Effects
3D studio Max 3
Premiere
Win FX
Desktop X
AutoCAD 2000
IIS
Test running some Oracle scripts (PL/SQL)
Test running some php
and on the other drive some MySQL
...hmmmm I might host my own site, but it is not likely. I really don't want to by a T-1 line just to make sure people can get to my site
Some games... low end mostly, nothing like Warcraft or anything (I want to play Train Simulator)

hmmmm... now I am lost again. Why is this so hard?

As a joke.....

KONA STARTS STUPID COMMENTS>>>

actually this difference is they both suck. Do yourself a favor and get the one of the 2 chips that outperforms bith of them. The AMD Athlon 3200 Barton or the AMD Opteron.

KONA ENDS STUPID COMMENTS AND PREPARES TO DUCK>>>>>

bith

damn laptop keyboard. I meant Both...

The above post was BTW IMHO

Throw the extra $100 into a video card.
You'll get more out of it.

Don't the Xeon's usually come with SCSI drivers (which makes them cost
more)?  I'm not really sure if they are useful on a consumer side. 
you would probably be better off spending the money on a high end video card and
RAM.

joetheblow - I might get a dual processor, but even then I don't think that will help much soooo... Win FX Desktop X AutoCAD 2000

with regard to 2 processors, as i understand it (from people at work who have these sort of machines) you need winNT, win2k or winXP to get any benifit out of this. since you will presumably get winXP you are safe

most programs apparently have no support for dual processors, so unless you are heavily into multi-tasking you are unlikely to see much of a benifit.

as for AutoCad, i remember learning ver 12 for DOS at college, it ran on a 486 with 16 meg of ram

unless you are going in for massive drawings, or 3D solid models i didnt think AutoCad needed that much of a monster of a machine?

winFX and DesktopX, here the graphics card is probably the best place to spend any extra money i recently asked for advice on a new card, and 95% of people said get an ATI Radion

at work i have a 32meg matrox card, and winFX transparent window draging is SO smooth

on my home machine (similar spec, when it works) has a 64meg nvidia gforce2 MX card, and transparent window draging is painful in comparison to work.

not a very scientific comparison, but that is my experience.

AutoCAD (atleast 2k4) has SMP support.

Hi!

The new Xeon chips are alot like the P4's but have 'hyperthreading' that makes one physical cpu appear as two logical cpus. One Xeon appears to the OS (W2k, XP) as two cpu's shown in task manager. I have several servers at work (Compaq DL-380 G3's) with four CPU's, so it looks/acts like eight processors. It also has 4 gig of ram and supports 350-400 users under Windows Terminal server. If you really want to geek out, a review can be found here:

http://www.digit-life.com/articles/pentium4xeonsmp/

Most servers are built for redundancy and reliability, not raw speed. They have redundant, hot swappable power supplies, hot swappable SCSI RAID drives, hot swappable PCI buses, hot swappable cooling fans, and in the servers mentioned above, hot swappable memory boards. In theory, you could dang near replace everything but the motherboard and never turn the server off to do it.

I learned AutoCAD in college too. It was called Autocad-86 and ran on my dual floppy 8088 clone. Acad ran on one 360k floppy and I saved my drawings on the other 360k floppy. That was in 1985 ...

The new Xeon chips are alot like the P4's but have 'hyperthreading' that makes one physical cpu appear as two logical cpus.

correction... P4 does have hyperthreading as well....

P4 will be fine unless your running CATIA, UniGraphics or some such design application and are working on a new 787 Super Jumbo Jet or creating a full length feature animation movie like Shrek or Finding Nemo. Then again you would have to stuff it with 4 gigs of ram with an extream graphics engine along with large gig SCSI Cheetha drive, maybe even run SMP's...

Your bottle neck will be ram, ram and more ram, oh and maybe disk space. Serial Drives would probably be a good adition if not the Seagates, also a 9800 filled to the brim

I started out with acad 86, moved to acad 9 on a ibm 286 (cooking now) then acad 386 on a full blown moster 386 25 with a whopping 4 megs ram and a monster Seagate 80 meg SCSI drive and a Number 9 graphics engine with 1 meg ram. cost $4000.00 makes me want to puke thinking of it...




Though a Workstation would be sweet SGI's have dropped in price

[Message Edited]

ah ha...

I know enough now to see that I should just stick with the Pentium 4 and get a good graphics card and enough ram (and bus as well) should allow me to do what I need to do.

My AutoCad drawings can get a little complex. Even in 99 on AutoCad 14 I had a whole housing complex, 4 blocks around it with buildings, sidewalks, cars and trees. The main designed buildings had interiors (furniture, chairs beds) and all sorts of details to transport to 3D studio for animation and rendered drawings.

I haven't tried AutoCad 2004 to know is uses (or can use) 2 processors but that would be nice knowing how much calculations go into some drawings. Sounds cool.


hmmmm... I don't plan on using this computer as a server in any way. (I would just get a server for that ) But I do se me needing a workstation more than a regular computer... and I want to play games too... but nothing to complex like Warcraft or something. (Save that for the Playstation)

OK
After typing all of this I feel like it would be nice to have dula processors (but most if not all the programs I know don't have anything in the software that takes advantage of the ability... except not AutoCAD )


AND!!!

I really like the name Xeon Processor



Anyway, Pentium for me. Dual hardrive (no RIAD) with Magic Partition areas with Linux running on part of the other harddrive.

Ohhhhhh I can't wait to get this thing!

oh...

and I also want that program that makes stuff like Shrek.

Like a modeler or something... I should give Dangeruss a call. He hould know.

Your bottle neck will be ram, ram and more ram, oh and maybe disk space. Serial Drives would probably be a good adition if not the Seagates, also a 9800 filled to the brim

I though the bottle neck would be the bus? Not the SCSI bus, the computer BUS (like front side bus.. the thing that the data goes through... right)

Oh and thanks for the link stonecipher

vid ram / gpu speed/through put pushes more pixels faster...

loads of system ram limits swaping to disk while editing graphics...

fastest disk speeds you can afford gives you the largest read/write through put to from the drive(s)...

fsb is some what an issue, but most are getting up to 800 mhtz or at least above 400 mhtz so it is less an issue you will notice...




SGI isn't selling Intel based Legacy systems anymore but they are sold through third parties...

SGI MIPs Visualization and Workstations rock! without a doubt. but $$$ still

http://www.sgi.com

SGI's site has some wild reading on it if you've a mind to