AMD's Opteron 250 vs. Intel's Xeon 3.6 GHz in a Workstation Duel of the Elite

Xeon Board: Supermicro X6DAE-G2 For Nocona

The X6DAE-G2 with E7525-chipset is the flagship of Supermicro.

For the new Xeon Nocona with 200 MHz FSB (FSB800), the X6DAE-G2 motherboard, based on the E7525-chipset from Supermicro, arrived at our lab complete with RAM shortly after the introduction of the processors.

Xeon-Board With 875P: Asus NCCH-DL

The Asus NCCH-DL based on Intel's 875 chipset.

As the memory interface of the Canterwood/875P offers noticeably better performance than that of Tumwater/E7525, Asus developed the NCCH-DL board. This motherboard is considerably cheaper, but it does not offer features such as support for DDR2 and PCI Express, and so takes its place at the low end of the workstation sector. A PCI Express model from NVIDIA, which was specially developed for the workstation market, currently costs around $1,300. Iwill and MSI also have similar boards in their portfolio.