Workstation CPU: X5560 Nehalem OR E5620 Westmere

[wagonist]

I have a budget of around 1500 for a good used 1 or 2 year old workstation. I'm considering an HP Z600 or Z800, but I do not know if I should go for the X5560 Nehalem (2009 high end 45nm) or E5620 Westmere (2010 middle grade 32nm) CPU.

the x5560 benches higher but I've been reading that newer CPU's perform exponentially better.

Any advice?

 

[iceclock]

id get the e5620 as its got newer architecture and less old.

 

[wagonist]

Here is the 2 CPU's compared to eachother:

http://ark.intel.com/compare/37109,47925

the x5560 wins on Clock Speed, Max Turbo Frequency, Bus/Core Ratio, System Bus, Max Memory Bandwidth

whereas the E5620 wins on Cache, Max Memory Size, Intel® Trusted Execution Technology

 

[iceclock]

well its up to u but i prefer to have a newer architecture than older.

 

[k1114]

The x5560 is better, doesn't matter if it's older. Westmere was just a die shrink of nehalem and there wasn't much of a performance increase. Infact these tests show next to nil. (Look at the i7 970 westmere vs i7 960 nehalem. Although take into account it is 6 core westmere vs 4 core nehalem.) http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-performance-comparison,3370-15.html Even giving it a 20% performance increase per clock (which it wasn't), it still would not make up for the lower speed.

 

[iceclock]

interesting well my experience with xeons is limited, good arguments k1

+1

 

[BuddiLuva]

I would have also went with iceclock saying that newer architecture would have been better.

As I do not know much about Xeons.

 

[iceclock]

thanks for ur kind words buddi

 

[wagonist]

after some research I decided that the processing power of my Thinkastation D10 with dual x5482 (harpertown / Penryn architecture) still outbenches a single x5560 or e5620 on both cinebench and cpumark.

I think I'm going to wait maybe another year and save up another grand and get a dual x5680 system (2x 6 core westmere), which truly is over 2x faster then my current system.

Thanks for all the great advice guys! for now I just spent a few hundred (gotta love ebay!) on a quadro 4800 (currently have a 4600) and 32gb ram to hold me over