Athlon MP vs. Xeon - Same Price but Which to Choose?

I've configured two servers online, the first based on dual Athlon MP 2000+ processors (real MP's perish the thought) and Tyan Thunder K7X Pro motherboard and the second based on dual Xeon 2Ghz processors and Tyan Tiger i7500 motherboard. If curious or more information needed, both configurations have 2Gb (4 x 512Mb) PC2100 Reg’d ECC DDR SDRAM, LSI Logic MegaRAID 1600 controller with 128Mb cache memory, and four Maxtor Atlas 10K III hard drives (RAID 10).

As for the Athlon XP/MP being bad for a server environment, I've ran Athlon systems myself and worked for a company last year with at least four 2U dual Athlon XP servers without any problems so I'm not worried about heat related issues. Plus, I'll be using a 2U chassis with four 80mm fans so I don't have much to worry about.

Both configurations practically price out the same, with a $4 (yes FOUR dollars) difference in favor of the Athlon MP config – big whoop. My question is simply which config performs the best and obviously which to buy?

The server will serve as little as 15 to as much as 50 small to medium sized sites. PHP, MySQL, Perl, POP Accounts/ SMTP (i.e. no separate mail server), Ensim Control Panel, and all that good stuff included.

 

 

 

 

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