the only thing i know is i have seen the hardware department building Xeon servers at work. they have large blocks of solid foam in the case, apparently it is heat insulation to keep the more sensitive components at a safe temperature!

in terms of performance, these machines are built to run UNIX and service 15 or more users at a time. so, i have no idea how suitable they would be for "normal" home use.

my understanding is for winFX the graphics card and its drivers are key, not the processor. a good ATI Radion seems to be a good recormendation, which is what i am going to get soon to replace my %&$@*@* nvidia card.

Yeah I thought from what I read of Xeon chips they were for servers or lagre datbase systems.

And its funny you mention Dell because I plan on getting a Dell and I wanted a workstation because of all the high calulation intense (like 3D lighting, architectural drawing, apps, sql type stuff). When I saw the Xeon I was thinking to myself, "...isn't that for servers????"

I can't wait to get it!!! I will be so happy. And many thanks to feline because of here questions I know what to get (like the graphics card thing... when I explain that to other people I am just as baffled about why one card doesn't work and othr do when it is designed on standards and its doing mostly one thing... graphics!)

Anyway, thanks for your help! I really needed it. Now I can move on to other choices.

But doesn't having more cache good for memory?

Anyway, I am going for the Pentiums. I might get a dual processor, but even then I don't think that will help much soooo... just one pentium for me please.

Now to figure out what else this system needs to have.

Oh and this is what I'll be running on it; short list

Photoshop
Illistrator
After Effects
3D studio Max 3
Premiere
Win FX
Desktop X
AutoCAD 2000
IIS
Test running some Oracle scripts (PL/SQL)
Test running some php
and on the other drive some MySQL
...hmmmm I might host my own site, but it is not likely. I really don't want to by a T-1 line just to make sure people can get to my site
Some games... low end mostly, nothing like Warcraft or anything (I want to play Train Simulator)

hmmmm... now I am lost again. Why is this so hard?

bith

damn laptop keyboard. I meant Both...

The above post was BTW IMHO

Don't the Xeon's usually come with SCSI drivers (which makes them cost
more)?  I'm not really sure if they are useful on a consumer side. 
you would probably be better off spending the money on a high end video card and
RAM.

AutoCAD (atleast 2k4) has SMP support.

The new Xeon chips are alot like the P4's but have 'hyperthreading' that makes one physical cpu appear as two logical cpus.

correction... P4 does have hyperthreading as well....

ah ha...

I know enough now to see that I should just stick with the Pentium 4 and get a good graphics card and enough ram (and bus as well) should allow me to do what I need to do.

My AutoCad drawings can get a little complex. Even in 99 on AutoCad 14 I had a whole housing complex, 4 blocks around it with buildings, sidewalks, cars and trees. The main designed buildings had interiors (furniture, chairs beds) and all sorts of details to transport to 3D studio for animation and rendered drawings.

I haven't tried AutoCad 2004 to know is uses (or can use) 2 processors but that would be nice knowing how much calculations go into some drawings. Sounds cool.


hmmmm... I don't plan on using this computer as a server in any way. (I would just get a server for that ) But I do se me needing a workstation more than a regular computer... and I want to play games too... but nothing to complex like Warcraft or something. (Save that for the Playstation)

OK
After typing all of this I feel like it would be nice to have dula processors (but most if not all the programs I know don't have anything in the software that takes advantage of the ability... except not AutoCAD )


AND!!!

I really like the name Xeon Processor



Anyway, Pentium for me. Dual hardrive (no RIAD) with Magic Partition areas with Linux running on part of the other harddrive.

Ohhhhhh I can't wait to get this thing!

Your bottle neck will be ram, ram and more ram, oh and maybe disk space. Serial Drives would probably be a good adition if not the Seagates, also a 9800 filled to the brim

I though the bottle neck would be the bus? Not the SCSI bus, the computer BUS (like front side bus.. the thing that the data goes through... right)

Oh and thanks for the link stonecipher