Verdict: No Opteron 2200-series is worth buying these days.

The original Opteron 200-series was extremely successful, allowing AMD to take on Intel in the lucrative workstation and server markets.

The latest revision, the 2200-series, now spans seven major models, plus a few energy-efficient variants for small form factor servers. All the models are based on the Santa Rosa core, so inside each pinless Socket F package are two cores, each with their own Level 1 and Level 2 cache. The Opteron 2200-series' only real advantage over LGA771 Xeons is its support for NUMA, which means that each CPU has access to its own independent allocation of RAM, although it's hard to quantify how much of a performance boost this gives. All the models support 64-bit instructions, SSE3, Enhanced Virus Protection and Cool n Quiet. Two of these CPUs can be run together in one motherboard, or eight if you buy Opteron 8000-series CPUs. The Opteron 2200-series CPUs use registered DDR2, but are made using 90nm transistors, which are far larger and less efficient than the 60nm transistors used in the Xeon 5100 and 5300-series.

The last time we looked at the Opteron 2200-series none of the models fared well against the latest Xeons. One year later, the Opteron 2200-series looks even more turgid. A pair of Opteron 2222s are absolutely annihilated by a pair of similarly priced quad-core Xeon X5365s.

For this reason, AMD recently introduced the Opteron 2300-series, although currently there are only four models, the most expensive of which is clocked at a mere 2GHz. As such, residing at the high-end of the workstation and server markets, all the Opterons are left at the mercy of the far higher-performing Xeon 5100, 5300 and 5400-series CPUs.

• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
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• Audio hardware - 29th February 2008
• Graphics cards - 24th January 2008

• Samsung SATA SSD 32GB - Hard disks / storage
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