System Setup and Notes
Hardware
| System | Armari Magnetar X-Series Paxville Demonstrator | Armari Gravistar XRS Comparison System |
|---|---|---|
| Processor(s) | 2 x Intel Xeon DP 'Paxville', 2800MHz, dual-core 200MHz bus, 2MiB L2 per core, Socket 604 |
2 x AMD Opteron 280, 2400MHz, dual-core 2000MT/s bus, 1MiB L2 per core, Socket 940 |
| Memories | 2 x 2GiB DDR2-400, Registered, ECC 3-2-2-8 @ 200MHz |
4 x 1GiB DDR2-400, Registered, ECC 2 DIMMs per processor, 3-4-4-8 @ 200MHz |
| Mainboard | Supermicro X6DA3-G2 | Supermicro H8DCE |
| Graphics | PNY Quadro FX 3450, 256MiB, PCI Express NVIDIA NV41GL, 425/500 |
2 x PNY Quadro FX 3450, 256MiB, PCI Express NVIDIA NV41GL, 425/500, SLI |
| Audio | Supermicro X6DA3-G2 on-board AC'97 | Supermicro H8DCE on-board AC'97 |
| Fixed Disks | 2 x Seagate 250GB SATA w/NCQ Adaptec AIC-9410W RAID0 |
4 x Seagate 250GB SATA w/NCQ nForce4 PRO RAID0+1 |
| Optical Disks | Sony DRU-810A dual-layer DVD writer IDE, ICH5R |
Sony DRU-810A dual-layer DVD writer IDE, nForce4 PRO |
| Chassis | Supermicro SuperServer 743T-645W 645W PSU, 8 SATA hot-swap bays |
|
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional 64-bit Service Pack 2 |
|
Notes
Anticipating that the Paxville system wouldn't arrive with a second Quadro FX 3450 (basically a workstation GeForce 6800 GS), all the testing conducted on the Opteron system was done with and without SLI. With nForce4 PRO supplying 16 PCIe lanes to each slot, simply removing the 2nd board and the connecting bridge was all that was needed to satisfy that requirement. The results without SLI are the ones reported, although it rarely matters in the majority of the tests, since they don't rely too much on the graphics subsystem.Windows XP Profession 64-bit was used throughout, and native 64-bit binaries were used wherever possible. The binary setup is noted on every graph. Software ranges from a selection of our usual platform tests, right through to professional tools used in the content creation and CAD/CAM industries, including Maya 7, mental ray Standalone 64-bit, and Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 2.0.
On the Paxville system, results were obtained both with and without HyperThreading enabled. Those results are marked as such and discussed on the benchmark pages. On the graphs the Paxville system is represented by the blue and green bars, the Opteron system by the red bars. If you have any comments or questions about how we do our testing here at HEXUS, drop by the HEXUS.community.
The Coolest (and maybe daftest?) Thing About Paxville DP is.....this is just a bit of fun, for all the geeks with a sense of humour
Two CPU sockets, four CPU cores, four additional logical HyperThreaded CPUs......8 CPU USAGE GRAPHICS IN TASK MANAGER!!!!!!!111. This is clearly the best thing about Paxville DP, regardless of how it performs in any way.
