What Processor Do I Need

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@-Friendlyname- wrote:

Hi,

I am trying to help my son purchase the right computers for his needs for work and for his business. 

HIs work in medical statistics involves reading and writing SAS datasets.  These are read into memory and written out etither to memory or to hard drives. The work also involves numerically intensive computations.  Also,  I/O and rapid memory access and parallel processing would probably be desirable features, but he is not certain..

Can anyone tell me what is the best hardware configuration for this type of work?  That is, does he need a workstation with 2 Zeon processors or a desktop with P4 3.4 Extreme edition with HT and an 800 FSB?

How much and how fast should the memory be?

 

Also, which operating system, Windows or Linux 32 bit would be the best suited to his needs.

Thanks for any help. 

Jane

Message Edited by -Friendlyname- on 05-29-2004 01:16 PM

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for intense numeric calculations and the otherstuff you are talking about, and intel machine would be a mistake.  get a workstation with dual AMD Opteron or a machine with a AMD64 3800+ (if on a budget) and it will be superior to a dual xeon or pentium4 extreme edition.  the extreme edition is extremely expensive and is more suited towards media creation not calculations.