Tom's Hardware > Forum > CPU & Components > CPUs > [Solved] Quadcore vs. Hexacore - Analytics Dbase?

[Solved] Quadcore vs. Hexacore - Analytics Dbase?

Forum CPU & Components : CPUs [Solved] Quadcore vs. Hexacore - Analytics Dbase?

Hi guys,

Was wondering if anyone has an opinion on the value of going for the i7-970 versus saving a few hundred bucks and going with a quad core. I'm building out a high-end workstation on which I want to run some pretty serious data analytics (Oracle dbase with some high-end Excel, Matlab and SAS thrown in).

Any time we run an analysis, we're usually running a number of simultaneous calcs over 50,000 - 100,000 records (e.g. running regressions and looking for correlation data).

Our budget doesn't allow for an industrial-grade server, but we can drop 3,000 - 5,000 and were wondering if the hexa core would make enough difference over a quad core to be worth the upgrade.

Aside from the CPU, we're thinking about 16/32GB RAM and a couple of SSDs, running 64bit Win7.

It's been a while since I've been through the homebuild speccing process. Any other advice on building a data-cranking hog??

Thanks!

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Reply to klinrya

Best answer

klinrya wrote :

Why not look at a dual-socket machine instead? Two Xeon E5620s cost about what one i7 970 does but provide 8 cores and 16 threads as opposed to 6 cores and 12 threads. That ought to be a lot better at heavily multithreaded workstation programs. You also can't use more than 24 GB of RAM in an i7 970 system as i7s can only support six slots of unbuffered memory, which tops out at 4 GB per module right now. The Xeons support up to nine slots of registered memory per CPU, which means you can put up to 144 GB of RAM in the unit (18 registered 8 GB modules.) I'd also give the dual-socket Opteron 6100s a look, since those have even higher core counts, better memory bandwidth, and don't cost as much as Xeons.

------------------------------ Workstation: 2x Opteron 6128, ASUS KGPE-D16, 8x2 GB PC3-10600U ECC
File server: 2x Xeon 5150, MSi MS-91A1, 2x2 GB PC2-5300R FB-DIMMS
HTPC: 2x Xeon LV 2.00 Sossaman, TYAN i7520SD, 2x512 MB PC2-5300R
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