Greetings all,

I am going to build a dual-processor workstation. In addition to other
chores, it will be used for lots of mulltimedia work -- video and audio
processing. Gaming is not important; it will run two monitors off a Matrox
G400 Max. This will be a Ultra160 SCSI-based system utilizing SCSI raid with
3 CD-Roms and a CD-RW. Money is not the primary consideration, performance
is.

Many of us know that processor speed is not all; on a clock to clock basis,
the Pentium III's will out-perform the Pentium IV,s. However, the P4's are
now ramped up high enough to compete. Further, I know that L1 and L2 cache
architecture/size are also important, as is the PCI and processor to main
memory bussing schemes.

It doesn't matter to me whether the chipset is I860 with RDRAM, or one of
the dual-interleaved SDRam boards (E7500 or Serverworks) that are now being
made for both Tualatin and P4 Xeon. Supposing that all else is equal,
 amounts of main memory etc.), I wonder what might be the best performing
machine:

1. Tualatin 1.4GHz  (512KB cache) Tualatins, of course, have the full-speed
L2 cache
2. P IV Xeon 2.2GHz (same)
3. P III Xeon 800MHz ( 1MB cache)

Advice, opinions, from SMPers et al please.

Regards,
Glenn Miller esq etc.

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