I am working on upgrading my ZM machine, and I have either a Pentium D 3.0Ghz (930 I think) with a Supermicro PDSMi motherboard, or an Opteron 170 with a Supermicro H8SSL-i motherboard.
The Opteron seems to work well enough from what I've seen during testing, but would the Pentium D be better? It uses DDR2 vs. the Opteron's DDR400, but I think the Opteron might be a bit more efficient with memory bandwidth.
I'm using an 8 input card, with each input set to about 15FPS. I figure I can put 2GB of RAM in either machine.
I'd like to end up with a Ubuntu based setup, but for now I'm using the Mandriva 2007 Live CD. I had bad luck with ZMLArch when I tried it.
Hardware opinions?
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kylejohnson
- Posts: 260
- Joined: Tue Aug 21, 2007 1:42 pm
- Location: Baltimore, MD
I would go with the Pentium chip. Below are the basic differences between the two chips, so that you can judge for yourself:
- Both CPUs are dual-core, so they are even in that aspect.
- The Pentium chip is 1GHz faster than the Opteron.
- The Pentium chip has 1MB of L2 cache more than the Opteron.
- The Operton chip has a faster bus speed, 1000MHz vs. 800MHz, than the Pentium.