I'm currently using a intel q6600 and i've been an intel fanboy since .. i knew what a computer was. The only AMD cpu i have is in a bad averatec lappy so my experiance hasnt been very enjoyable. Until i saw these 8 core magny-cours's. I want a set. however, i'm looking for a superpi or some first hand benchmark we can compare vs my q6600. any help would be greatly apperciated.

thanksguys!

SuperPi is a good measure of single threaded performance and would be not be very good on a low clocked 8 core Opteron.
More cores are valued in highly multi threaded task. Unless you do alot of virtual machine, video encoding/editing, 3D CAD, etc that can make use of 8 cores the Opteron may not suite you.

Here's a review of the 12 core version. Link
and another Link

Not much on the 8 core version but if you had two eight cores for 16 total it would be pretty safe to say adding a 25% increase in performance compared to a single 12core would be fairly accurate excluding memory benchmarks,
which should be roughly the same any how.

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More Advanced Micro Devices than Intel

I know its a single threaded thing, but its still a valid speed test. I'm looking at dual 8s, rather than dual 12s which i originally planned.

Its a valid single threaded test yes but its pretty pointless to use when looking at a system with 16 cores.
My guess is in a 1m test it would be some where in the range of 30-35 seconds.

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More Advanced Micro Devices than Intel

its a valid comparison to my q6600, i cant think of anything better to show per core improvement. i'm really trying to justify spendng a thousand dollars damnit. i suppose it i drop from 50seconds to 60-65seconds per core and gain 12 additional cores it'd make up for the small decrease in speed, RIGHT?! =D

What are you intending to use this system you want to build for anyway?
More cores wont help in most situations unless you are intending to use it for applications I already mentioned.

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More Advanced Micro Devices than Intel

for the purposes of this conversation we'll say 1080p video encoding. and virtualization. mostly im going to use it as a heater in the winter though, between that many cores and my monitors i should stay toasty warm =D

I just built a dual Opteron 6128-based system and will put in my two cents. The Opteron 6100s are roughly as fast clock for clock in single-cored tasks under Windows as your Core 2 Quad. They are a little faster under Linux, so your Q6600 will perform pretty similarly to a 2.3 GHz Opteron 6134 costing a little over $500 or a 2.4 GHz Opteron 6136 costing a touch under $800 in single-threaded Windows tasks like SuperPi. You'd be much better off buying a 3.2/3.6 GHz Phenom II X6 1090T for about $300. Plus, no Opteron boards support overclocking and Phenom II AM3 boards do.

The things the Opteron 6100s excel at are multithreaded tasks and those that require a bunch of memory capacity or memory bandwidth, since you have just under 50 GB/sec of bandwidth and up to 64 GB per socket with current boards and RAM DIMMs. The only benchmarks the Opteron 6100s will excel at are very heavily multithreaded ones like Cinebench and programs that calculate pi to over 1 billion digits in a multithreaded manner and need gigs and gigs of RAM like y-cruncher.

However, your intended usage of video encoding and virtualization are excellent reasons to buy a pair of 8-core Opteron 6100s. Those and compiling code are the reasons why I bought my pair of 6128s and the machine absolutely excels at those tasks. The Opteron 6100s are efficient, but they can also throw off a bit of heat when run at full load. (At idle, they barely get warm because the voltage and clock speed are dialed down very low.) I can tell the difference in the temp of my basement between my new dual 6128 system and my old single-CPU Athlon 64 X2 machine when they are being run flat-out. The Opteron is roughly 10 times faster, but it also puts off a fair bit more heat too.

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MU_Engineer: I am about to build a dual Opteron 6128 system to work with vSphere and some servers. If I swap the boot drive once in while with another with Windows7 and add a EVGA GTX470 video card... will it work OK?
I find interesting your comparison with a Q6600 since I have one and a 9550. I was going to get a 1090T for VMs and build an i7 for me.. but I guess the Dual Opteron suits better for VMs and I can get a new
AMD Bulldozer or Intel next year. Any thoughts you can provide? What coolers are you using? What about the two 8-pin EPS? Any chance I can reach you via PM or email? (I have two days to place the order)

I am not 100% sure about what you want to do with the boot drive. Are you intending to have two different boot drives for the same system, one with Windows 7 for games and one with vSphere and VMs for work? That would work, just go get yourself a hot-swap drive enclosure and two trays and it will be as easy as shutting down the computer, swapping drive trays, and rebooting. Adding an EVGA GTX470 video card would be fine as the KGPE-D16 has PCI Express x16 slots for it.



The KGPE-D16 as well as other G34 boards are supposed to be able to be upgraded to Bulldozer-based CPUs next year. All of the current Intel stuff is end-of-lifed as Intel will introduce all of their new Sandy Bridge stuff on new sockets (LGA2011/Socket R.)



Dynatron A6s.



My PSU has one built-in EPS12V connector and I got a PCI Express to EPS12V adapter for the second. Big PSUs 1000 W and better will have two built-in EPS12V connectors, but you don't need 1000 W to drive a dual Opteron system unless you have something else like a couple of GTX295s in there sucking down a lot of juice.



You can click on the PM icon below to send me a PM.

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I decided to wait for bulldozer procs before I burn serious cash on a new computer, however your sig raises a question for me. i have two vertex2 60gbs in a RAID0, what kind of performance are you getting on those?

I get about 550 MB/sec reads and writes. I haven't really benchmarked any more than that.

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alright now im irked. what controller? mines getting 90mb/s write. i swear, i will eat glass before i ever deal with an nvidia chipset again. its caused me nothing but problems since i got this board. its sad its the only 775 board newegg even sells anymore.

The SSDs use the AMD SP5100 southbridge's SATA controller. The four HDDs use a HighPoint 2310 PCIe controller card.

NVIDIA's SATA controllers do suck. My old machine had one (NF4 SLi chipset) and it could only handle two SATA drives without bogging down with I/O. It was disgusting, which is why I got the HighPoint unit in the first place.

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