x86 Hardware-Single P4/800 FSB or Dual Xeon 533 FSB?

[FSICorporate]

Our marketing/design team are running into some seriously time consuming delays when rendering high DPI retail packaging artwork. As of now they are on typical corporate desktop hardware.

As a network admin that does not use the Adobe packages on a regular basis, I am unsure what type of workstation will yield the greatest benefit. I am looking at 2 different architectures; 3.2 GHz P4 with 800 MHz Front Side Bus and 2GB of DDR RAM, or Dual 2.8 GHz Xeon CPUs (512 cache)with 533 MHz Front Side Bus and 1-2 GB of RAM.

If anyone in the know can give me a little more information about the Adobe packages' multithreading capabilities, or any other pertinent information, I would certainly appreciate it.

Thank you,

Andrew K

[dave milbut]

can't speak to the xeons, but I just got a 2.8c hyperthread w/the 800mhz fsb and 1gig pc3200 (dual channel 400mhz) ram. it's sweet. I'd say go w/the 800 fsb and the bus won't be a botleneck.

ps makes use of hyper/multi-threading. some areas more than others.

[FSICorporate]

Thanks Dave.

That's the way I'm leaning. Not only is cost a factor, but the bump up to 800 MHz FSB on the new P4s has been one of the biggest improvements to that architecture in some time.

Unless someone has some indepth knowledge of SMP hardware and Adobe's use of multi-threading, and can show me some data to support the benefit/cost, I believe that to be the avenue we'll approach.

Again, thanks for your timely reply.

Andrew K

[dave milbut]

just a note, as with all new technologies, i'd stick with the original manufacturer. there are some cheaper boards out there, but this one screams and is right (as in correctly built) from the designers.

here's the actual system I got:

<http://www.googlegear.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=154013-I2.8K>

[YrbkMgr]

You piss me off. That's a nice MB. I'm jealous.

You know what's cool though? The product showcase software they're using from Kaon. What a great way to demo a product.

[dave milbut]

yes it's cool... i like the flyovers! :)

that system was pretty cheap... added in the serial ata 160gig seagate and a combo dvd/cd-rw, with tax and shipping came out to 1100 bux. added my own vid card (ati AIW 9700 pro) and floppy and sound (although the board has that on board - still not sure if i'm going to use it) and i was in business.

[r_harvey]

For a generation, CPUs have contained multiple pipes, for speculative execution; much of the time, these resources go unused. Hyperthreading uses the idle parts of the CPU to run a separate process, though since both processes share the same I/O, and Pentium IV processors are I/O-bound anyway, you won't get two-for-one performance.

Intel Rigs Up: P4 Series with FSB800 <http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030521/index.html> mentions it. HyperThreading Threads Its Way into Application <http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20021227/index.html> is more thorough.

If performance is more important than cost, Hyperthreading gives you ~3-20% performance increase, while dual processors give you ~30-70% increase.

[dave milbut]

so get the dual xeons w/the 800 mhz bus!!!

[Chris Cox]

Get the faster bus. It wins for all but a few (uncommon) filters.

[dave milbut]

I love it. I can't believe the diff between this machine and my p3 800... or even my p4 1.8 at work. This thing absolutely SCREAMS!

[David Bradley]

FSICorporate,

It's hard to make a good recommendation without knowing more about what kind of work your people are doing with Photoshop. Some basic questions:

How big are the files they are editing? 10MB? 100MB? 500MB?

Are there a 1, 2, or 3 specific Photoshop operations that are taking up all the time? If so, it would be worth finding out whether those operations are multithreaded.

One advantage of a Xeon system, in spite of its slower FSB, is that most of them come with 64-bit/64-MHz PCI slots. If your people are editing very large files then the PCI bandwidth of a 32-bit/33-MHz PCI bus could be a bottleneck.

With more specific, more specific recommendations can be made.

[dave milbut]

one more thing about the 865perl board... 8x agp. very nice.