new server performs slower than old system

[stevesideas]

It seems that there was actually a problem with the motherboard. The item has been sent back to the manufacturers.

Thanks for the advice..

[DIGITAL_FACTORY]

What is a transactional power horse ?

Every other test I performed on these cpus proved that they were twice as fast at processing as the qx6700. Maths calculations, which is what we are talking about here.

Theres no way a quad core 6700 would be slower than dual xeons rated at the same ghz and with a higher level 2 cache....im pretty sure anyway.

There are enough benchmarks out there to show that the type of software being run on different types of CPU plays a role.

A lot of "server" CPU's are geared towards multiple, short transactions. Typically, that would be a web server or a SQL server. These would be required to perform thousands of transactions, each independent of one another, in a very short time. The entire architecture is optimized for this transactional environment and such CPU's may not be ideal for long running batch processes like a 3ds/Vray render.

Case in point would be that 3ds Max is often used as one of the benchmarking categories to test a CPU's performance. That is clearly because 3ds places different requirements on a CPU/Motherboard than Excel, even if both programs spend their time doing math calculations. As such, in princple, I disagree with your basic premise.

All the same, when I said "bang for bucks" what I meant was that for the price of a single Dual Xeon machine, I can buy 4-5 Intel Q9300 (at least here, in Costa Rica). Those 4-5 machines, jointly, can run rendering circles around a single Dual Xeon - at least with 3ds.

I agree that if you get a CPU that's fast enough, you'll be able to make up for whatever architectural shortcomings it may have. You may be able to hold your own but you wouldn't necessarily be getting more bang for your bucks.

See http://www.tomshardware.com for interesting CPU/Software benchmarks and note that 3ds doesn't perform like other software on any given CPU- sometimes much better and sometimes not.