Processor choice - i5 vs AMD x4

[Pate]

Hey all,

Long time since I visited these forums, but been taking a break from the industry of hosting and focusing in webdevelopment instead. Lately a lot of my clients been asking for advices on hosting and thought it was time to get back into business and offer them the full package. Will be exclusive to my clients so it will mostly be smaller WordPress sites with 50-100 visitors per day, so no big resources really needed. Looking to put around 40-50 sites to cover the costs, the idea is to keep the customer close and not really earn money on the hosting. Basically it's around 5000-7000 hits per day in a total and also some email storage.

Anyway - found a few offers which fits my budget and as I'm not really up to date with the hardware parts I thought I'd come here and ask. Found a provider, so basically comparing their different offers. Will use 16GB RAM to start with.

How important are ECC memory these days - Is it a requirement in your opinion?

Would you recommend me to go with an AMD Athlon II 605e Quad Core (4x 2.3 GHz) (which supports ECC, but low processor power) or an Intel Core i5-3550
4x 3.3 GHz (no support for ECC, but high processor power)?

An Intel Xeon™ E3-1220 is like €20 more/month - Would my customers see any benefits from this?

 

[zEitEr]

Hello,

Though I'm not a hardware expert, the only one Intel Xeon™ E3-1220 seems to be of not a desktop processor series, see http://ark.intel.com/products/52269/ And if it fits to your budget, my suggestion would be that you choose it.

 

[chatwizrd]

I would take an intel over an amd any day of the year.

 

[Pate]

Thanks for the comments. Should do some more calculations and see if I can fit some extra sites on the same server to keep the prices down even thou prices for the CPU increases.

Just tempting to go with x4 or I5 as the Xeon adds around 30% to the price for just the CPU.

 

[chatwizrd]

I would look at benchmark stats on them. Maybe a site like: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/ would tell you what cpu is better and by how much.

 

[nobaloney]

I don't know anything about the AMD Athlon; the i5 is definitely a desktop processor as is the i7.

Wikipedia compares the Athlon series with the Intel Pentium III, Pentium 4, and Celeron; that puts it in the Desktop class.

One of my long-term colo clients runs an i7, and for him it's quite good, but since he's been moving from hardcoded sites to LAMP sites I'll be pushing him towards Xeon for his next server.. The difference between desktop processors and server processors is generally stuff like support for ECC, and cache size and speed.

Personally I don't see a lot of ECC at the low end, and I think Memory these days is stable enough not to need it if you don't overclock or overheat, and if you run server quality power supplies.

Definitely do NOT scrimp on the power supply if you're building your own. Especially if you're buying a tower or mini-tower system you may be tempted to save on a power supply, but don't. Power quality affects processor life and memory life, and money spent on the power supply will save your hardware and your uptime.

Jeff