# Core-i7 860 v Xeon X3430 - opinions

## jeffk

Apologies for the off-topic post, but I trust Gentoo users to a) have an informed opinion, and b) be open-minded about the speed of desktop vs. server CPUs.

 *Quote:*   

> tl;dr: at roughly the same system price point, would you favor a Core-i7 860 v Xeon X3430 for a small office file, qemu-kvm, email and web app server. Each would config (from HP) have 16 GB DDR3.

 

I have a server to deploy in October. It will serve a small windows network as a Samba domain controller. I don't expect this job to tax the system in the slightest. The meatier tasks are 1 or 2 Windows XP virtual machines for some legacy software that ran on the outgoing windows server, and web-based applications we might deploy or write, mostly issue trackers and Django stuff. 

I can configure an HPE350t i7-860 16GB DDR3, 1TB HD for about the same price as a HP ProLiant ML110 G6 with aftermarket RAM and HDD to the same spec.

I've never bought a Xeon, but since the price points are equivalent here, I should overcome my bias and ask for opinions on the performance equivalence in this workload profile.

Core-i7-860: http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=41316

Xeon X3430: http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=42927

Thanks for any advice.

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## Manko10

I can't say very much about Xeon vs i7 but let me quickly explain some basics: Xeon is a processor for Intel's professional business market and constructed to run in server machines for long-term usage. It's build for stability and reliability whereas Core i7 is intended for use in Desktop PCs which run many multi-threading applications, image editing software, multi media and so on.

There is also one big  technology Intel introduced with Xeon and the adapted for Pentium 4 and i7 and that's Hyper Threading. This is hardware-based support for multi-threading and shall improve performance but as you might see your version of Xeon does not support Hyper Threading (and therefore has only 4 virtual core, not 8 as your i7 has). But before you now prefer i7 to Xeon you should carefully inform you about HT. In my experience HT is a great technology for Desktop PCs which run many multi-threading applications but it's not always the best for servers which often need a better support for multi-processing than for multi-threading. Some experts even say that HT may slow down your server system since not all server applications can handle HT well.

I can't say more about the difference between Xeon and i7 and I can't suggest you one of these, that's up to you and your needs but you should be aware of the above mentioned facts (and maybe some more I forgot or even don't know about).

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