Introduction

While we here at TweakTown have in the past leaned more towards the desktop and end-user market segments, today we have spread our wings out further and started to embrace the server market, after all, this market makes up quite a large percentage of the overall computer market.

You may not think of it but servers run just about everything in our lives based on technology - Banks, Traffic Lights, Telecommunication systems and even the computer bringing you this review are all servers. Servers often get overlooked as we tend not to think of them as important as our desktops or notebooks, but without these machines we don't tend to get any of our daily chores down.

Today we are taking a look at Intel's Xeon 3GHz CPU based on the Noccona core as well as the ASUS NCL-DS server motherboard. While this is a two part review, we will mostly be focusing on the Intel Xeon Noccona CPU comparing it to the AMD Athlon 64 on the 754 architecture as well as the Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition.

The reason we are dealing with only the Athlon 64 754 is due to the fact we were not able to get our hands on either the Opteron or the 939 series CPU. AMD has had many issues with supply problems of samples to web and print media in Australia, so I guess we will make do with what we have at hand.

For the Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition CPU, we choose this due to the core design. The Pentium 4 Extreme Edition is simply the Xeon Gallatin core only designed for the desktop market. Here we will be putting the Noccona against the others in both Single CPU and Dual CPU operations.

Before we get into the testing, let's take a look at the Xeon line from Gallatin to the latest Noccona core just to see what has been happening.

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