2CPU.com » News » October 2004 » Opteron 250 vs 3.6ghz Nocona @ THG

I haven't visited Tom's Hardware Guide in quite some time, but while visiting AMDBoard this morning, I stumbled over this link. THG has posted an article entitled "AMD's Opteron 250 vs. Intel's Xeon 3.6 GHz in a Workstation Duel of the Elite" that looks to be a pretty good read.

For a long time, the workstation sector was stagnating. Now, Intel's Xeon, code-named Nocona, has finally found its way into the retail channels four months after its unveiling. While the device offers a 3.6 GHz clock speed and a technically sophisticated platform, numerous difficulties held back its commercial launch, including an unusual number of steppings that crept into the chipsets.

I haven't waded through all 39 pages of it myself, but go check it out and post your thoughts in the comment thread.

09/15/2004 08:00 PM: Opteron Continues to Outsell Itanium by duke
Mikey loves to point out the successes of AMD's Opteron and the failures of Intel's Itanium... and today we're once again going over sales statistics for both processors. A PAGE ON the Sun Microsystem...

09/14/2004 07:33 PM: Iwill shows off dual Opteron cube PC by duke
The Inquirer made mention this morning that Iwill is showing off its upcoming dual Opteron small form-factor PC at a cafe in Akihabara, Japan. The red cube PC and the Nforce 3 Professional chipset wer...

09/13/2004 06:59 PM: Intel Xeon 3.6 (Nocona) vs. AMD Opteron 250 - Database Test by BuyALambo
Leave it to the Boy Wonder to be the first on the block with a Nocona/Opteron Battle Royale. As has been the case at Anandtech, all the benchmarks are run in a 32bit Windows environment, but they are ...

09/02/2004 03:15 PM: Dual-Core Opteron Pictures @ AMDZone by duke
The girls over at AMDZone have managed to obtain some photos of a 90nm dual-core Opteron. If you'd like to check it out for yourself and possibly peruse some design information, click here....

08/26/2004 02:02 PM: Sun claims Opteron sales outpace Itanium by duke
The Inquirer is reporting that Sun has made the claim that Opteron is out-selling Itanium. Citing a Gartner Dataquest report, Sun claimed that in the second calendar quarter of this year, the firm out...

08/25/2004 03:09 PM: Think releases Thinktank Opteron boxes by Jim_
The Inquirer has a post up regarding another firm, "Think", who is releasing an Opteron solution. The ThinkTank Q station X2+2 includes two Opteron 200 series chips and two Infiniband interc...

08/24/2004 03:47 PM: HPC starts selling eight way Opteron system by Jim_
The Inquirer is reporting that HPC Systems is now selling an 8-way Opteron box. HPC is supplying a 5U rack optimised chassis which support eight Opterons, up to 64GB of memory using 32 DIMMs, and whic...

08/12/2004 01:03 PM: Water-Cooled Opteron Workstations by Liebermann by Jim_
Tom let me know about these rather fancy Opteron workstations that are being thrown together by a company Liebermann. They utilize water cooling and apparently they're even working on a Quad Opteron w...

08/10/2004 02:15 PM: Opteron is the Force behind Star Wars Episode III by Jim_
I noticed this link by way of the HardOCP this morning. It appears as if AMD's Opteron has been the digital backbone for the final Star Wars prequel. The AMD64 digital processing pipeline at JAK Films...

07/23/2004 03:08 PM: Sun rounds out Opteron line with 4-way by Jim_
Jack was kind enough to let me know about an article over at InfoWorld regarding another Sun Opteron offering. Sun Microsystems Inc. on Monday will announce a new server based on Advanced Micro Device...

Occupant Registered User Posts: 2421 Joined: 2002-03-04

#32097 Posted on: 10/04/2004 09:52 PM I didnt bother with all 39 pages either. However he did arrive at the correct conclusion.

imposter nope, it's not me Posts: 379 Joined: 2001-12-10

#32098 Posted on: 10/05/2004 03:36 AM What are you talking about, didn't you see how the Opteron got trounced in Windows Movie Maker? :eek: Heh, jk.

terminalrecluse is home now Posts: 3802 Joined: 2004-08-07

#32099 Posted on: 10/05/2004 09:53 AM I saw this review up a long time ago, but still a good re-read. Sorta makes me wish I had a tech review site to get my greasy fingers on dual opteorn 250s.... 121 total Ghz, 304GB in total memory... Arch Linux - stable : 3930k @ 4.4Ghz, 64GB DDR3, 120GB Samsung 840, HX850 DAS - Norco 4020 - 20x Seagate 3TB, 1KW PSU FBSD 10 ZFS server - SM Chassis, SM X8DTE, 2x L5520 Xeons, 48GB Reg DDR3 ULP, IBM 5015 w/ 512MB DDR2 cache, RAID-50 - 42TB storage Dell C6100 - 4 nodes, 2 1.1KW psu's, 2x L5520s, 6x e5530s, 192GB reg DDR3 (48GB each), F@H, etc

LRSeriesIII Aspiring Rocket Scientist Posts: 1128 Joined: 2002-08-29

#32100 Posted on: 10/05/2004 05:59 PM Wasn't Tom's Hardware considered somewhat biased and unreliable in the past? Or am I mixing things up? ->Computers ->Folding for team 3074

arock SMP Newbie Posts: 7 Joined: 2003-01-20

#32101 Posted on: 10/05/2004 06:37 PM LRSeriesIII - do you think THG is biased and unreliable? If you have reason to be skeptical of THG, let's hear it. Right now, though, it sounds like you're just asking the other people here to remind you what your opinion should be.

rmn oh my, it's huge! Posts: 6013 Joined: 2002-01-26

#32102 Posted on: 10/05/2004 07:57 PM Biased, sometimes, unreliable, quite frequently, but mainly just clueless. They don't seem to understand which benchmarks make sense in which case, so they kept writing ridiculous articles (comparing professional CAD cards by running Doom, etc.). They still seem to be pretty clueless, but since now they run about 500 different benchmarks, some of them end up making some sense (although, in few notable cases, their results were completely different from everyone else's). Nice place to see lots of bar graphs, not such a nice place to read the reviews. To use the Slashdot scale, it's a +3 interesting and a +2 informative, but not even a +1 insightful. RMN ~~~

LRSeriesIII Aspiring Rocket Scientist Posts: 1128 Joined: 2002-08-29

#32103 Posted on: 10/06/2004 02:39 AM Originally posted by arock LRSeriesIII - do you think THG is biased and unreliable? If you have reason to be skeptical of THG, let's hear it. Right now, though, it sounds like you're just asking the other people here to remind you what your opinion should be. I have no idea whether Tom's Hardware is biased or unreliable. There are far too many hardware review sites for me to thoroughly read through many reviews on each one, looking for biases and variations from the general consensus. Reading one review on a site does not give you enough information to decide whether or not it is biased, especially when you remember that good journalism should cause you to question your own views every now and then (otherwise, there is no real point in reading it, other than to confirm that indeed you are right). As a consequence, it is (often) useful to use the opinions of others to guide me towards those review sites that are at least worth investigating, and to guide me away from those which are generally biased or otherwise not worth the effort of reading. I thought I vaguely remembered seeing a number of people question Tom's Hardware's integrity and/or reliability in the past, but was not sure, so I decided to ask. What is wrong with that? ->Computers ->Folding for team 3074

arock SMP Newbie Posts: 7 Joined: 2003-01-20

#32104 Posted on: 10/06/2004 08:23 AM There's nothing wrong with asking other people's opinion, of course. Everything you said in your reply is valid, and I'm glad to hear that you have a healthy skepticism. I only question how you were asking for the opinion. When you ask a question like that, you're introducing a bias by encoding the expected answer into the question itself.

stmok23 Registered User Posts: 798 Joined: 2002-02-02

#32105 Posted on: 10/06/2004 08:50 AM Originally posted by rmn Biased, sometimes, unreliable, quite frequently, but mainly just clueless. They don't seem to understand which benchmarks make sense in which case, so they kept writing ridiculous articles (comparing professional CAD cards by running Doom, etc.). They still seem to be pretty clueless, but since now they run about 500 different benchmarks, some of them end up making some sense (although, in few notable cases, their results were completely different from everyone else's). Nice place to see lots of bar graphs, not such a nice place to read the reviews. To use the Slashdot scale, it's a +3 interesting and a +2 informative, but not even a +1 insightful. RMN ~~~ Pretty much nailed it. Since Tom himself rarely does reviews nowadays, most of his subordinates don't have a clue what they're doing. (With the exception of the networking part, at least the reviewer there has some clue). I hate it when they aren't upfront about their setups/methods in some of their reviews. (They sometimes leave things out). Compared to where other sites tell you pretty much what they did, and this is what you likely expect if you bought the product. I don't rely on Tom's Hardware, I use other sites to see if they all review the same product, and the overall result is consistent. (such as they all show one product is slightly faster than another). Sempron (Socket 754): 2x Abit NF8-V (nForce3 250Gb) and ASRock K8SLI-eSATA2 (ULi M1697) Dual CPU love: Supermicro P6DBE (i440BX), PIIIDRE (i840), 2x PIIIDR3 (i840), 4x ASUS P3C-D (i820), and ACorp 6A815EPD1 (i815EP) OSs?: Linux, Solaris and BSDs.

Occupant Registered User Posts: 2421 Joined: 2002-03-04

#32106 Posted on: 10/06/2004 09:41 AM Originally posted by LRSeriesIII Wasn't Tom's Hardware considered somewhat biased and unreliable in the past? Or am I mixing things up? No, you're not confused, Tom's reviews are generally considered to be biased, inconsistant, and inaccurate... I didnt bother to delve into the details of the article, as there are probably numerous errors, but he did arrive at the right conclusion. which was balanced, and seemed fair, from the bits Ive read of the review.

rmn oh my, it's huge! Posts: 6013 Joined: 2002-01-26

#32107 Posted on: 10/06/2004 09:43 AM The fact that Herr Pabst doesn't do any reviews himself actually increases the quality of the site. THG was pretty decent when it started - things started going downhill when Tom "fired" Van Smith. After that it turned into a sausage factory, where some of the sausages were made to order. RMN ~~~

Pontius Aspiring Duallie Posts: 70 Joined: 2004-04-20

#32108 Posted on: 10/08/2004 12:55 AM I am confused about this review. They stated in the Test Setup section that they used a Nocona on a Super Micro E7525 and on an Asus NCCH-DL. But I don't see that listed in the benchmark results. I see it say 3.6GHz Xeon (DDR2-400). That would lead me to believe they didn't use the Asus board at all since it doesn't take DDR2, right? I'm confused. I would like to see a comparison of how the Nocona performs on the different boards/chipsets.

2CPU.com » News » October 2004 » Opteron 250 vs 3.6ghz Nocona @ THG