Techies question: Which IIS server is more powerful?

[farmerEd]

Ex-techie here and things keep changing faster than I care to keep up...question for those of you "still in the know".

Which of these two ($249) servers is "better/faster/more powerful". I'll be using it to host some pet projects of mine and also running SQL Server 2005 on it at the same time. Traffic will be low, so I know either one would work, but since they are the same price I might as well pick the better of the two.




http://www.serverintellect.com/dedicated/

[BigMoneyJim]

In case not every reader notices, that price is per month as this is a dedicated server rental deal.

I'm not 100% up on the current processers, either, but I searched and read a bit and don't see a major difference between the two. Each has a dual core processor with 2MB per core L2 cache. Xeons are more geared toward servers, so I would probably go with the Xeon even if I'm not immediately sure why it might be better.

The Pentium D option above has a faster clock speed, but you're almost never CPU-bound on a web server. And under SQL server you'll hit RAM issues before hitting CPU issues.

That reminds me, I'm not sure but I'm betting the Xeon can go over 4 GB of RAM if you have the option of upgrading in the future where the Pentium D probably can't. I'm basing this on the AMD processor lines where none of the Athlon 64 motherboards support > 4GB but the Opteron motherboards generally do.

[wabmester]

As BMJ sez, both of them have way more CPU bandwidth than any web server needs. Xeon gives you HyperThreading(TM), so it'll probably be a bit better for a multithreaded web server environment, but it's really a toss up.

Check out www.ev1servers.net for some cheap dedicated prices and good service (I've used them for a few years now with very little downtime). I'm a Linux d00d, so I know nothing about their MS offerings.

[BigMoneyJim]

I didn't notice the Hyperthreading. Honestly I'd turn it off. I've heard of problems with Hyperthreading and some applications and specifically SQL Server. I believe the problem is rooted in having two instruction queues working off of one L2 cache and the resulting dueling cache misses and flushes. I've had some anecdotal increases in perceived performance on workstations after turning off HT.

If it were me, as long as the datacenter people say they can and will turn off HT I'd still go with the Xeon of the above choices. If not I'd seriously consider the HT-less Pentium D above.

And as far as what I said above about RAM limitations, nevermind. I just looked at a few Pentium D motherboards and several can go over 4GB. (But that doesn't necessarily mean either of the above two options can.)