Advice?

[Zedadiah]

Just inherited a task from a 'downsized' coworker. Wondering if anyone has some real world time spec'ing and building performance systems to do intense, flat file processing tasks--like updating a couple million rows of data? What mobo/cpu would you pick--assuming a couple gigs RAM, SATA RAID-0 using those big Raptors?

 

[fishmahn]

Honestly, I think any reasonably fast cpu will do the task well. Faster will be better, but in a massive flat-file task like you said, I think the system will be I/O limited more than CPU limited. More than that, software and data structure are going to play a bigger factor than choosing a P4, Athlon, AMD64, Xeon, or whatever other cpu...

Just my opinion, however.

Mike