Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
PS: I've been looking into AMD, because they have 8 and 12-core CPU's that are affordable enough for me to look into. As far as I've been able to determine, the most powerful consumer CPU they now have is the 8-core FX-8350; but it can't hold a candle against the fastest 4-core i7 at this time. Even though it only has 4 cores, the i7 is almost 30% faster. (Granted, it's also twice as expensive.)
The same is true for the Opteron lines; in some instances, AMD needs a dual-Opteron setup to keep up with a single Xeon when looking at the same overall price levels.
I think it might be worthwhile to look into a dual Xeon setup again (I had one, based on a socket 604 board, from 2004-2007, before I got this computer). That might be a bit overkill though.
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FWIW, the machine this replaced was an AMD. It had 6 cores, but really wasn't even close to my 3 year old i7 laptop. I hate to say it, but AMD is just not competitive these days. And I do hate to say it, because we all owe a big debt to AMD for pushing into the current x64 world. If Intel had had their way, we'd have been in a completely different, far less compatible, and far more expensive 64-bit computing environment. My first x64 machine was an Acer Ferrari laptop running XP x64 Edition. And that was >10 years ago. The laptop, by the way, was finally retired by my neighbour a couple of months ago. But I won't bother giving him this AMD motherboard I just retired. It's only 5 years old, has 6 cores and 16 GB of RAM, but it's a total dog. I've got an Intel HP desktop machine from the same era that I'll probably give him, instead. It's still quite viable for everyday use.