mmoy,
I would buy but the
X2 5800+ or X2 6000+ seems like a good fit for my application.
Curiously, X2 6000 will be faster in most apps that this Quad FX. X2 6000 is basically identical to FX 74, except X2 6000 will not be slowed down by the multiprocessing overhead.
Look at Anand's review where he compares the system with 1 FX 74 pulled out. It outperforms 2 socket solution by a solid margins in majority of apps. Of all of the apps, only a small minority can take advantage of cores beynd 1st and 2nd.
Still, X2 6000 will still come behind high end Conroe, will probably only match mid range Conroes. So it depends on how AMD prices these.
Since I have 4800 at home and 4600 at work, and most of the lag I experience in daily usage are due to HD (or network / Internet lag) I am not sure how much performance benefit I would experience from extra 600 MHz. Probably not all that much.
I imagine 4 MB of Conroes' cache (on a high end processor) could provide some perceptible gains in select areas.
My current problem regarding performance is the performance of RAID. I set up RAID 5 at home, to increase capacity and to protect myself from dead drives. The problem is that the performance, especially write performance seems to have dropped to about 1/2 of the single drive. I am using built in RAID of nVidia chipset (590).
I came across one review that convirmed it. I don't really get it. Nvidia RAID is actually the best of the motherboard integrated RAID solutions, beating Intel's, but still, it is bad.
I have not really paid a lot of attention to storage in detail, but my perception was that RAID improves performance across the board. At least that's why database vendors includ 100s of drives in their configurations.
What do those RAID solutions do that mobo integrated solutions can't? And can I get it myself in form of an add-on card for within $100?
Joe
PS: I currently have 3 drives. Read performance does not seem to be much of a problem, but writing is.
