Should I build a Q6600 system or use Older (and free) Dual Xeon system

[rs2k]

My websites are currently hosted on a dedicated hosted server. I have plans on moving my websites to a server located in my home office.

Our dedicated server rarely uses more than 10% of its processor power and about 40% of its RAM. It is a quad core Q6600 with 2GB of ram.

I have two older IBM Dual 2.8GHz Xeon servers available to use. One with 4GB of RAM and one with 2GB of RAM. I believe they are netburst architecture CPUs.


Which system would be faster? How much faster would that system be?

I assume that even though they are dual processor the Xeon machines are probably slower. The Xeon machines were dirt cheap and I can get more if need be. That is why I am leaning towards using those machines instead of building a server that is similar to our current dedicated hosted server.


Any thoughts would be a great help.

 

[aford10]

What do you want to use them for?

 

[rs2k]

The server will only run PHP and MySQL based websites that run on apache and centos. Nothing else.

It's not a good comparison at all, but XAMPP and windows XP on this dual Xeon machine ran the MySQL queries (and the websites) faster than my last dedicated server which had a dual core P4 and 4 GB of RAM.

 

[Dahak]

In some instances the dual zeons are faster,Being they are installed on a MB that was designed to use 2 processors.The Q6600 is,however,a great cpu for the money.In a test I would say the systems would perform on a similar level on average.

Dahak

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[rs2k]

Thanks for the info. I can get 5 of these dual Xeon servers for the cost of one decent Q6600 server build. I think I'll stick with the dual Xeon servers for now.

 

[rs2k]

After getting CentOS installed onto the server I ran htop and noticed a difference. When the CPUs are under a load in the Q6600 system they all go up at the sam rate (i.e. they all go to 25%). With the dual Xeon system the CPUs are always at different rates. Is this what the motherboard does?