AMD V INTEL

[PeterJ]

There is an interesting comparison of dual processor machines at Tom's Hardware, which you can go dig out (http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030422/index.html) for yourselves. The comparison pits a dual proc Xeon machine against a dual proc opteron and shows that for server tasks the opteron is the preferred machine but that for workstation machines the Xeons have an edge. However, the test machines were based on 3Ghz Xeons and 1.8 GHz Opterons. Opteron is now available as a 2.2 GHz option for those that want to go down that route.

The most telling part of it the report is exhibited by the images below which show comparisons between the machines for rendering work.

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030422/images/chart_lightwave.gif
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030422/images/chart_cinema_4d_8.gif
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030422/images/chart_3dsmax.gif

[beegee]

There is an interesting comparison of dual processor machines at Tom's Hardware, which you can go The comparison pits a dual proc Xeon machine against a dual proc opteron and shows that for server tasks the opteron is the preferred machine but that for workstation machines the Xeons have an edge. However, the test machines were based on 3Ghz Xeons and 1.8 GHz Opterons. Opteron is now available as a 2.2 GHz option for those that want to go down that route.

I've moved these posts to a new thread, although I don't really want to get into that sort of discussion, but I'm just changing one of our machines from AMD to dual Xeon and did some research about that....

Did you read what Tom said about stability ?

Another factor is the stability and product quality of a system: while all Athlon processors suffered from occasional instability in our tests, the Pentium 4 platform ran without a glitch.

Reasons for this behavior might not lie in the processor itself, but rather in the motherboard design and the chipset used.


Chris Connolly at Game PC had this to say

Our particular market, the high-end / gamer segment, seems fairly split, many loving the raw speed and low price of the Athlon, while others love the well-endowed memory bandwidth and ultra-stability of the Pentium 4 platform.


and Kyle from [H]ard OCP
"Intel components are still the pinnacle when it comes to building a problem-free system that we can rely on."


Now, before you bombard me with posts about how good AMD is, I'm not saying that their chipsets suck. I'm merely saying that you have the greatest chance of configuring a rock-solid system if you use a motherboard based upon an Intel chipset. And in an office environment, I believe stability is what its all about.

[PeterJ]

I think there will always be diehard fans of both processors. I was just interested in the rendering tests given that we are looking at rendering benchmarks right now.