Two Processors, any benefit?

[srhutch]

I'm looking to buy a Dell dual Xeon Workstation to act as my GBPVR server.

Is there any benefit of dual processor, is should I save my money and buy a sinlg processor box.

[TonyXL]

Two separate processors, or a single dual-core processor? A single dual core processor should be fine, unless you are going to do a lot of simultaneous recordings with some heavy post processing. Spend the $$$ on extra hard drive space.

[liteswap]

Yeah - agree. I run mine on a notebook-oriented 1.87GHz Pentium M (for low heat/power draw), and the main bottleneck is the disk, not the CPU. srhutch's spec sounds like overkill...

[martint123]

I've had multiple recordings running on my old server without any problems.
It may be different if you want it to be a client for HD recordings though, but as a server disc throughput is more important.

[srhutch]

I have two SATA 200GB HDD running raid 0 to increase speed, which through benchmarking seem pretty fast and also give nearly 400GB of usable space.

Problems is sometimes my CPU is running at 100% every 10 second or so, and it's very annoying as the recornings pause for a split second.

Whats the best way of logging CPU activity and tracing the CPU load, the performance monitor in Windows Task Manager doesnt really seem that helpful, unless you are looking at it there and then.

Ideally I want a quiet cheap to run PC, so if my existing one works then I am happy, but the Mrs. is getting frustrated with the dodgy recordings.

[JonnyCam]

you can use process explorer. (from sysinternals / microsoft) When viewing the cpy graph, if you mouseover the spikes it will telll you which process is causing it.

[wtg]

Yeah, focus on what is causing the spikes. The CPU shouldn't show much activity at all during the recording process. I used to record 2 shows at once while watching another on a simple 1.1 GHz Celeron.

Good luck!

[gazoo]

If you are going to view content on the server, and it's going to be HD, then I would say DEFINITELY yes!

If it's a headless server for record only, then I would say maybe depending on how many simultaneous recordings, comskipping, transcoding, etc. will be going on.

AMD dual core chips are so crazy cheap now that it's not worth even thinking about it - just get it (unless you are using spare existing hardware or something.)

[martint123]

AMD dual core chips are so crazy cheap now that it's not worth even thinking about it - just get it (unless you are using spare existing hardware or something.)

But his proposed CPU's aren't so cheap as I recall

Dell dual Xeon Workstation

[gazoo]

True, I didn't catch that about the Xenons...but why would u want xenons? Anywho, regular dual cores are cheap is my point and quite effective.