SGI Tezro: Quad 800 MHz with 4MB cash vs Quad 700 MHz with 8MB cash

[Irinikus]

I bought a Tezro about a month ago and have only had time to look at it now.

I stripped the machine down completely and cleaned it thoroughly.

The machine turned out to be a dual 700 MHz machine with V12 graphics and 7GB of RAM. (crappy configuration!)

I happened to have a spare Origin 350 node board lying around, so I fitted it to the machine in place of the node board that it came with, in order to beef it up a bit.

The standard quad 700 MHz node board for a tezro only has 4MB of cash per CPU, and the board that I fitted has 8MB of cash per CPU.

My question is: Does anybody know how this configuration will compare to the standard Quad 800 MHz with 4MB of cash per CPU that these machines usually come with from a performance point of view?

How does the drop of 100MHz, but doubling the cash size affect the overall performance?

The system seems to be nice and nippy, quite a bit more nippy than my other machines appear to be!

I have included a picture of the rear of the machine to show the option cards that are installed.

[jan-jaap]

8MB cache was mostly used in HPC applications with large datasets (O3K etc). That's probably not the original CPU board of that Tezro. In a typical desktop application you will not notice the difference with 4MB. I'd go with the 800MHz board. For some applications, the 800MHz board was even faster than the 1GHz board, has something to do with the clock of the L2 cache (400MHz for the 800MHz board, 333MHz for the 1GHz board).

[Irinikus]

Thanks for the info, it seems to be a very nice machine!

I will definitely look at upgrading it in the future to see what I can get out of it!