Dual LV Xeons

Not too terribly great. They do have relatively low clockspeeds. They may be ok if you overclock them a bunch...
 
Ultra Wide said:


I've got a pair of 1.6LV's running at 3.2GHz Prime95 stable for 29+ hours on AIR.
Sandra benchmarks that more than double my 3.0GHz Prescott's. And they run cooler than my prescott does too.

Plus they are reasonabley cheap. ~$150.00 on ebay for a pair. ~$150.00 for an ASUS PC-DL motherboard + plain jane DDR.


 
Yes, if you get a pair of D1 stepping LV 1.6's you are almost guaranteed 3.2. See my rig in my sig. Hey, that rhymes...
 
Depends on what you want. Some LV Xeons would certainly perform well with a solid overclock, but "Prime95 stable for 29+ hours" isn't stable enough for me. I want 365+ days stable operation on my system.

If you want to overclock, save some money and pick up the LV Xeons. If don't plan to overclock, get an Athlon64 X2, or perhaps a dual Opteron system.
 
SLiLOVER said:
Would opteron 242's do better?

Nope. Overclocked you won't get too much out of the Opteron 242's which are only 1.6GHz. Yes they are faster than a 1.6GHz LV Xeon in stock form by quite a bit. However, in both actual performance and price, you won't be able to match a pair of LV Xeons@3.2GHz Xeon's with only a 1.6GHz dual Opteron setup.
 
visaris said:
Depends on what you want. Some LV Xeons would certainly perform well with a solid overclock, but "Prime95 stable for 29+ hours" isn't stable enough for me. I want 365+ days stable operation on my system.

If you want to overclock, save some money and pick up the LV Xeons. If don't plan to overclock, get an Athlon64 X2, or perhaps a dual Opteron system.

So you have Prime95 running for 24/7/365 on your computer?????
And nothing else. The Prime95 torture test is an accepted stress test and calculation validation method for all computers - OC'd or not. It works by preforming calculations then comparing the results against known values. If it's off to 128k places then it errors out. The lite version starts at 8k for each calculation.
Also a lot of peeps that have OC'd LVs are using them for Folding@Home and they have been running Stable at 100% cpu utilization for well over 2 years.

If that isn't stable enough for you.....
I just don't know what would be.

What do you do with this uber stable computer?
Maintain the planetary orbits of the debris field around earth for NASA? :rolleyes: j/k

That kind of stability isn't on the market.

And I'll put my Xeon LV's up against any stress test you can name for as long as you want to prove their stability. In that 29+ hours of Prime95 torture the temps never got above 50C. I've got a nonOC'd P4 Prescott that runs 49C at idle and is a lot less stable.

 
rodsfree said:
If that isn't stable enough for you.....
I just don't know what would be.

What do you do with this uber stable computer?
Maintain the planetary orbits of the debris field around earth for NASA? :rolleyes: j/k

Hey, I'm not trying to be an elitist bastard or anything, but just because a computer can crunch some numbers correctly for 1-3 days does not mean it is stable. I'm going to have three of my four cores totally maxed out for the next month running some work related biology simulations, and I really don't feel like having to start all over again because of a crash or bad data.

People who's top priority is to have their machines work 24/365 use registered ECC memory, use hardware RAID, and probably have some sort of battery backup system. And they most certainly do not overclock.

Though, yeah, I'm getting off topic, and your probably right. The OP was talking about games. I don't know why I brought this up in the first place. 1-3 days stable should be more than enough for any gamer or average computer user.
 
visaris said:
Hey, I'm not trying to be an elitist bastard or anything, but just because a computer can crunch some numbers correctly for 1-3 days does not mean it is stable. I'm going to have three of my four cores totally maxed out for the next month running some work related biology simulations, and I really don't feel like having to start all over again because of a crash or bad data.

People who's top priority is to have their machines work 24/365 use registered ECC memory, use hardware RAID, and probably have some sort of battery backup system. And they most certainly do not overclock.

Though, yeah, I'm getting off topic, and your probably right. The OP was talking about games. I don't know why I brought this up in the first place. 1-3 days stable should be more than enough for any gamer or average computer user.

Exactly, if you're worried about stability then don't OC.
 
cnick79 said:
Exactly, if you're worried about stability then don't OC.

Couldn't agree more!

But one of the advantages of the 1.6LV's is that you can un-do the OC in the bios and change the jumpers back to stock and they become some of the most stable and cool running chips around. Even without un-doing the volt-wire mod.

Kinda gives you a computer with a Clark Kent/Superman dual personality.

I suppose a real smart cookie could replace the 2 x 3 pin header/jumper selector with a couple of 3 way slide or toggle switches and be able to switch back and forth without opening their case.

Might be a project in that for me......hmmmm


 
visaris said:
Depends on what you want. Some LV Xeons would certainly perform well with a solid overclock, but "Prime95 stable for 29+ hours" isn't stable enough for me. I want 365+ days stable operation on my system.

If you want to overclock, save some money and pick up the LV Xeons. If don't plan to overclock, get an Athlon64 X2, or perhaps a dual Opteron system.
given the price of the 3800+/4200+ X2, I wouldn't say overclocking isn't a viable option for these chips. Sure the pricerange is ~$450 instead of $150, but I'd rather have dual 2.6ghz cores than 2 xeons@3.6, the performance just isn't there on games.

Plus I think we are leaving out the fact that SMP will do jack shit for 98% of games on the market, and those Xeons will be well outdated by the time SMP optimizations do come around, imo.
 
mikelz85 said:
given the price of the 3800+/4200+ X2, I wouldn't say overclocking isn't a viable option for these chips. Sure the pricerange is ~$450 instead of $150, but I'd rather have dual 2.6ghz cores than 2 xeons@3.6, the performance just isn't there on games.

Plus I think we are leaving out the fact that SMP will do jack shit for 98% of games on the market, and those Xeons will be well outdated by the time SMP optimizations do come around, imo.

Your apps and games will have to be SMP aware / multithreaded to take advantage of the 2nd core of the X2 also (the OS sees that 2nd core as another CPU)....So you have a self-defeating argument.

Based on your argument, we'd all be better off buying single core / non-HT / single cpu systems until the software catches up. But the software won't change until dual core / SMP becomes the hardware mainstream. This is kind of like the chicken and the egg argument.
So what do you want first???
** OS - already SMP / multi-thread aware - Linux and Windows XP
** Hardware - we've had multiple CPU systems since the days of the Slot 1 Pentiums. The X2 and Pentium D are just combining 2 cpu cores on the same chip.
All that's left is for the app and game developers to get onboard.

These chips becoming part of the desktop environment, instead of the server/workstation genre will push the App and Game developers to go to SMP / Multi-threaded programming techniques.
Those of us that have been running dually systems for years can tell you that they will run the current apps and games better than a single core / single cpu system. It's just been too expensive for the average user to do.

My first dually was a pair of 1Ghz P3's on a Gigabyte motherboard. I'd still be running it if it hadn't fried the caps one day.

mikelz85 said:
Sure the pricerange is ~$450 instead of $150, but I'd rather have dual 2.6ghz cores than 2 xeons@3.6, the performance just isn't there on games.

And here you want to pay more for less preformance....on games and apps. My Xeons have exactly the same code optimizations that the current P4's have....+ more on die transistors. And based on personal experiance, they play CS:S a lot better than my P4 Presscott.

 
Sorry for the confusion, I often just call dual core/dual processor "SMP", as I feel they are the same thing.
 
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