Opteron vs Xeon....opteron lost....regardless what they say.

[reza]

Just before we made a purchace...we made a deal with a shop here to let us do some serious test...and if the shop agreed we would pay extra 500 bucks...and we did...

The test was between dual xeon 3.06 1mb L3 cache...dual opteron 848 series

We were bored of external benchmark that were not reliable...1 tells you this is ok and the other tells you diffrently.

So we equip the pc with equal branded ram, same speed, same manufacturer same motherboard manufacturer,..identical HDD, latest bios...the works...not to forget..identical graphic card...Loaded both with Max 6.1 and rendered a scene.

And the results was shocking.....the AMD was just a 1 second faster...
which is not good from my point of view...it was suppose to be better cause its a new processor....and if you look at the price below...we could purchase the xeon 3.2 since its still lower than the amd's.

xeon 3.06 $475
xeon 3.2 $700
opteron 848 $1165

[cpnichols]

Just a short note on this... I am a little surprised that the Opturon was only 1 sec faster. However, two things in your testing are not really correct.

First you used the opteron 848 which is designed for motherboards that support up to 8 processors. To be on equal footing, you should have used the 248 which can only go up to 2 processors (same as the xeons). In all other cases the 248 should perform the same as the 848, up to two processors. The current cost of a 248 on pricewatch is $669.

Next your Opteron is still being crippled by the 32bit operating system and software. While it is not out yet, once vray is out for 64bit you will see a HUGE jump in performance. Plus you will be able to use a LOT more ram for your renders. Imagine being able to use 32gigs or more of ram as opposed to being limited to 2 gigs.

So no, the advantages of the 64bit procs are not really there until everything goes 64bit.

[vlado]

You have to note that most likely the Opteron did not run on 3.06 GHz (probably much lower than that).

Best regards,
Vlado

[cpnichols]

True.. the Opturon 248 or 848 both run at 2.2 GHZ

[cpnichols]

I was reading an article on Maximum PC (a mag that used to be cool), that Intel is announcing that the mhz naming is dead. With new caching techniques, 64bit computing, etc... mhz is no longer a good judge of performance. They will name things using BMW naming convension... sorta like the 3 series, the 5 series, and the 7 series.

[cpnichols]

True.. the Opturon 248 or 848 both run at 2.2 GHZ

[reza]

The test on the 200 series was not done because they we were about to purchase the 800 series to be used with the tyan motherboard that supports quad processor. and the argument still stands because even if it is running at 2.2 where xeon 3.06, we cant wait for amd to run at 3.06....and benchmarks around the globe seems to be useless to max users..

check these site...they to have similar findings...amd seem to run better on other application even maya..but not max...we are using max.

http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=60000284

[losbellos]

but what about the price? Is the opteron config is cheaper,isnt it?

[RErender]

The opteron 246's and the xeon 3.06's(w/ 1mb L3) are both about $500 US

[reza]

Hehehe...AMD 248 is $669, Xeon 3.06 1MB is $470.

AMD rendering speed is 1 to 2 seconds faster than Xeon 3.06 1MB. Here it already lost to Xeon in priceerformance.

Can you imagine using Dual Xeon 3.2 with 1MB...which is $699...just $30 bucks extra...

All the prices i quote here are from www.newegg.com.

Im sorry guys...didnt mean to be protective over the matter...its just that we need rendering power now...not wanting to wait for either 64 bit from microsoft/vray 1.5/3dmax7 or 8 just so that things work well.

[ihavenofish]

not to question your credibility, but what are YOUR benchmarks?

we have opterons and xeons and athlon mp's here and the opterons always come out well on top overall.

please justify your benchmarks before you potentially mislead people into buying the wrong system for THEIR needs. i assume you tested vray and max, but so many processes in max behave differently with different processors depending on who coded them.

show us a scene and specs so we can see what you are rendering. if your studio rendering solution is like most, max/vray isnt the only thing rendering, there might be other renderers, compositors, etc that will be running as well. one might run only 1 second faster on an opteron, another might be twice as fast, yet another might be twice as fast on a xeon. coming here and broadly claiming xeon is better price/performance (have you priced the mobo's and the extra electricity you'll need?) is no better than going to tom's hardware and watching them fumble through a max benchmarking session if you dont have any example to back it up.

i'm not cutting down your results, or even disagreeing. i just would like to see exactly what scenes you have tested these systems on. would be niice to see some real world benchmarks.

later

[reza]

Fair enough....could you mail me a scene which is worthy of rendering and doing benchmark with....ill post the results...and could you please post yours using the highest opterons workstation you have..

and as i mention before in my previous post...to me...benchmarking is something you compare your renderings with...not a third party software that tells you amd/xeon is good or bad.

[mike_kennedy]

We have a Dual Zeon with a Quadro 1000 and I just got a dual Opteron with a Gforce FX5900 and the Opteron System is noticeably faster too me.
No bench marks but the interactive keeps up the the Xeon, which it should not be able to do and rendering is faster.
Get a good mother board and RAM of course, but they (Opteron) are not that pricey.

[reza]

You should state which model of xeon and what motherboard and also which opteron....100 series or 200 or even 800....?


opteron will work well with small files but not bigger complex scene.(for the time being)

a 250 dual series is more expensive than a dual xeon 3.2.....those are facts...


xeon 3.2 1mb cache usd 695
opteron 250 usd 825
opteron 150 usd 630

[RErender]

Yeah, the price arguement really doesn't hold water, the new xeon 3.2's (800fsb) are even cheaper at around $500 and they support 64 bit code now.The new tumwater based MB's are pretty sweet too with DDR and DDR2 support, SATA raid and PCI express with prices starting at +/- $400. Dollar for dollar the xeons are faster than the opterons in almost all cases especially when the softeware is SSE optimized like 3DSMax.