Balancing Power, Price, and Performance in the Server CPU World

Our last comprehensive server and server CPU review focused on some of the best and fastest x86 servers on the market. This time, we focus on more humble servers. Performance is not necessarily priority one for many businesses; chances are that low power and budget are higher on the list. So we did our best to get the most interesting power sipping and inexpensive CPUs in the lab.

We selected three AMD Opterons and two Intel Xeons. On the Intel platform we test with the older but very cheap Xeon E5506 and the newer but more expensive low power Xeon L5630. AMD sent us three different Opterons: the low power Opteron 4162 EE, the performance/watt balancing Opteron 4170 HE, and the ultra cheap Opteron 4122. Read on to find out which of the five CPUs make sense in which situation. As always we use very realistisic benchmarking and power measurments to find out.

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