Dual xeons or dual core?

[Barry]

I run game servers and right now I have a dual 3.0 Xeon box thats not used to its max, would there be any diffrence in a dual core Opteron 165/Pentium D 920 to a dual xeon 3.0?

[kalniel]

Are your Xeons hyperthreading? If so you'll have four logical processors which may or may not be handy depending on how many things you've got going on at once (you could have just game process and I/O, or you could have game process, database process, I/O and a spare process for running a development server/testing purposes/diagnostics).

In anycase a pentium D is no improvement - the cores are still communicating over FSB so it's no different to the Xeon, just uses less power. An Opteron on the other hand communicates between cores via a crossbar rather than having to go out into the system FSB, and the onboard memory controller also helps speed games up, so is a faster choice anyway, especially in games.

Finally if your Xeons are using ccNUMA they might have a memory bandwidth advantage, however this isn't actually going to make any difference in games.

In conclusion, the opteron 165 will be an increase in performance for game serving most likely, unless you are in a situation when the hyper threading of the Xeons gains you an advantage.

[Barry]

hyperthreading is disabled, the servers I run do not support it