dual xenon x5550 productivity over i5 4690

[codetoeternity]

hello, im building a system that will be mainly used for software development (asp.net, android, WinForms and such) and sometimes for photoshop (very rarely) and little bit of gaming. two options.

1. i5 4690k, Gigabyte H97, 8gb hyperx 1866mhz. 600watt psu and chassis, costs me 46k.
2. Dell precision T7400 with dual xenon x5550, 8gb ddr3 1333mhz, 875watt psu, chassis, costs me 26k.

obviously the precision is cheaper and older and used, but i have a gut feeling it will be better in non-gaming productivity than i5 4690. i want a system that will be able to perform well for atleast next 4 years. will t7400 with dual x5550 actually be a better performer here in productivity? thanks.

 

[DubbleClick]

As I said in the other thread you started, the I5 will come out on top in the majority of applications while dual xeon's will be stronger in the case of using more than 8 threads. Not sure if you're using an IDE and how large projects you are actually compiling. If you work on a million+++ lines of code you may see a good performance increase with the xeons, given you tell the compiler to use all available logical cores.

 

[codetoeternity]

As I said in the other thread you started, the I5 will come out on top in the majority of applications while dual xeon's will be stronger in the case of using more than 8 threads. Not sure if you're using an IDE and how large projects you are actually compiling. If you work on a million+++ lines of code you may see a good performance increase with the xeons, given you tell the compiler to use all available logical cores.

well im glad i found a programmer here. now, thanks for ur replies in both threads but im still not very clear on this. i will try to explain what im thinking.
suppose i am playing two HD videos simultaneously on two monitors. and am working on photoshop on 3rd monitor. now i know how threads and processes work. but im a little confused about how the workload will be distributed among different processors. will all of this run on a single processor if im running windows 8.1? or will the running threads (suppose each vlc instance makes 2 threads) be split among processors like 1 processor handling 4 threads of videos and the other handling photoshop and windows tasks and such. do such things happen? and if this happens, and i run the same number of apps simultaneously on i5 4690 what will be the approximate performance difference? i think i5 will bottleneck.

 

[DubbleClick]

I would actually suspect the "unused" process threads to idle. Aside of that, it comes down to how windows scheduler handles this. In case your windows 8.1 version supports two physical cpu's.

Let's say threads #1-#8 belong to cpu one and threads #9-#16 belong to cpu 2, #1+2/#3+4 one core each. Threads/Cores $1-$4 from the I5.

We have a total of say 6 threads.

Time frame 1: #1-6 are processing, #7-#16 do background tasks. $1, $2 do media player, $3-4 photoshop render.
Time frame 2: #1, #7, #9-13 do media player and photoshop, others do background stuff. $1-3 do photoshop, $4 background stuff.
Time frame 3: #5-6, #13-16 do said work, rest inactive. $1 photoshop, $2 media, $3 idle, $4 photoshop.
Tine frame 4: #1-#16 idle, $1-3 idle, $4 media player.
Etc, etc, etc. Above is of course not exact and actually not even true, since theres a lot more to account for (I5 executions more instructions per time frame than xeon, both a lot though). But it should give you an idea: it's "random". We can't know what exactly happens. When a thread is working, it's regarding core is at 100% load by the way. There is no "45% load". It just means that 45% of the measured time frames the core executes, the other 55% it does nothing.

For above scenario, you wouldn't really notice any difference between I5 and xeon. The I5 would do faster, but not to the extend you'd notice. Things are clearer when you run an application that demands a lot of execution time on say 4 threads, like a game. You'll see the I5 doing about 40% better here. Or compiling a project in VS and building boost at the same time, the dual xeons will do faster here by roughly 60%.

Edit: and with compiling a project in VS I mean something HUGE. So huge that it takes minutes to compile over 8 used threads. More like an hour.

 

[codetoeternity]

I would actually suspect the "unused" process threads to idle. Aside of that, it comes down to how windows scheduler handles this. In case your windows 8.1 version supports two physical cpu's.

Let's say threads #1-#8 belong to cpu one and threads #9-#16 belong to cpu 2, #1+2/#3+4 one core each. Threads/Cores $1-$4 from the I5.

We have a total of say 6 threads.

Time frame 1: #1-6 are processing, #7-#16 do background tasks. $1, $2 do media player, $3-4 photoshop render.
Time frame 2: #1, #7, #9-13 do media player and photoshop, others do background stuff. $1-3 do photoshop, $4 background stuff.
Time frame 3: #5-6, #13-16 do said work, rest inactive. $1 photoshop, $2 media, $3 idle, $4 photoshop.
Tine frame 4: #1-#16 idle, $1-3 idle, $4 media player.
Etc, etc, etc. Above is of course not exact and actually not even true, since theres a lot more to account for (I5 executions more instructions per time frame than xeon, both a lot though). But it should give you an idea: it's "random". We can't know what exactly happens. When a thread is working, it's regarding core is at 100% load by the way. There is no "45% load". It just means that 45% of the measured time frames the core executes, the other 55% it does nothing.

For above scenario, you wouldn't really notice any difference between I5 and xeon. The I5 would do faster, but not to the extend you'd notice. Things are clearer when you run an application that demands a lot of execution time on say 4 threads, like a game. You'll see the I5 doing about 40% better here. Or compiling a project in VS and building boost at the same time, the dual xeons will do faster here by roughly 60%.

Edit: and with compiling a project in VS I mean something HUGE. So huge that it takes minutes to compile over 8 used threads. More like an hour.

so it all comes to this, (i think 😛 ) two xeons x5550 will perform better in most cases other than gaming ofcourse. right?

 

[DubbleClick]

Well, yes and no. My typical pc usage is coding stuff in VS/Eclipse, listening to music, googling windows function, sometimes editing little video parts and sometimes letting a game run in the background. Then I'm compiling code snippets or test them in small and when I think they work I'll add them to the project, compile that to test and while that goes just browsing the web or keep editing the video. When that's done I let the video render and look how my code snippet works in the project. The I5 would fare better at basically anything other than compiling the project and rendering the video. The xeons would fare better at those. If you do it like me, chain the things you do and use the compile or render time for low demand tasks or just get a sandwich, the I5 will be better. if you test your new code in projects and compile them often in a row, the xeons will be much better.
Both will do what you throw at them. So if current price is a concern, but overall price (power consumption) isn't, go for the xeons.

 

[codetoeternity]

Well, yes and no. My typical pc usage is coding stuff in VS/Eclipse, listening to music, googling windows function, sometimes editing little video parts and sometimes letting a game run in the background. Then I'm compiling code snippets or test them in small and when I think they work I'll add them to the project, compile that to test and while that goes just browsing the web or keep editing the video. When that's done I let the video render and look how my code snippet works in the project. The I5 would fare better at basically anything other than compiling the project and rendering the video. The xeons would fare better at those. If you do it like me, chain the things you do and use the compile or render time for low demand tasks or just get a sandwich, the I5 will be better. if you test your new code in projects and compile them often in a row, the xeons will be much better.
Both will do what you throw at them. So if current price is a concern, but overall price (power consumption) isn't, go for the xeons.

yes power consumption is a thing for me. now this will be my last question, what is the powerconsumption ratio of dual xeon x5550 as compared to an i5 4690? i mean like almost double?

 

[DubbleClick]

I5 has about an average power draw of 60w under load, the xeons about 180w.