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Which setup is best

i am about to purchase a server

i have been offered 2 deals in my budget that sound good but i do not know which is the better option.

either a quad MB with 4 2.0ghz xeon processos or a dual MB with 2 3.4xeon processors

the rest should be mostly the same with
2x 36gb 15000rpm HDD
3x 72gb 15000rpm HDD
8gb Ram

it is purley for counting millions of records on an SQL SERVER 2000 database

which would be fastest?

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MarkDozier

A great deal of what will help with the decision is weather or not the programs have dual processor ability. In other words can you tell task A to use cpu B, and task B to use CPU A.

Siice it will be a SQL 20000 DB sever the 2 processor should be more then enouogh. If I am not mistaken you can use one cpu to count and another running a different set of prcoesses maked it more effiecent. Al though SQL2K and efficent is an oxymoron.

sr1xxon

hi marcusw,

You won't be able to use all the ram - i386/windows has a 3Gb allocation limit to a single process - but even this needs to be enabled by adding a /3Gb switch to the end of the selection line in boot.ini.
thus 4Gb of physical RAM should be heaps.

I would opt for the quad processors then allocate 3 processors to SQL server for SMP.. one processor left for system / kernel processes.. should be fine for what you want.

hth..

rustyrpage

I agree with sr1xxon.....as long as your database will give you the option to allocating to another processor, then I would get the quad processor so that you can have it doing various tasks at the same time. I have seen this live & you should be impressed.