Dual E5530s & Win7 worth folding on?

[cactus]

Looking at getting getting a box running again. I reacquired one of my folding rigs from a few years ago wondering if how it will fair. Last I was here, running linux under VB was giving better performance than Windows native, is that still true? The box is going to double as a HTPC so looking to not run Linux native. TIA

Doing some quick math, dual E5530s are ~19.3GHz, might be worth a couple hundred to get two L5638s for ~25GHz. Do they fair any better?

 

[Pocatello]

what are the details on your dual CPUs?

 

[cactus]

what are the details on your dual CPUs?

2.4GHz Quads with HT. IIRC I was on the lower end of BigAdv on Linux a couple of years ago so I am guessing SMP only. If there is a windows vs linux penalty, it might not matter much if I'm stuck with SMP.

 

[musky]

You are stuck with SMP unless you upgrade to something like X5650 hex cores and switched to native Linux.

 

[bigted]

Why is Linux out for htpc duty? There are plenty of awesome media apps available for Linux.

 

[Pocatello]

Why is Linux out for htpc duty? There are plenty of awesome media apps available for Linux.

Linux was out for me as an HTPC.

I needed to scale/size the video output over DVI and this was not available with Linux. It was easy to do in Windows with the nVidia software.

 

[musky]

Linux was out for me as an HTPC.

I needed to scale/size the video output over DVI and this was not available with Linux. It was easy to do in Windows with the nVidia software.

This is pretty much my recollection the last time I tried to hook a PC up to my TV. Linux options were just nowhere near as easy to set up and use ans good ol' WMC.