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Originally Posted by red-beard
What do the Xeon processors have that the other Quad Core Intel processors don't have? I've always wondered why these processors were/are much more expensive?
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One theory is that Intel charges that much because they can. They have to raise the money for the slush funds to keep the manufacturers not shipping AMD chips somehow...
One rumor is that all the Quad Xeons are actually the same core within the same processor family - e.g. that Intel don't make any "slow" Xeons and it's only the packaging - e.g. the links on the package that "tell" the mobo what the chip is - that determines what FSB speed and multiplier to run.
I know for a $15 investment in a circuit writer pen I "told" my Xeon 5420's that they wanted to run at 1600MHz FSB - so, as the multiplier is locked, they obliged by running @ 3.0 Ghz instead of ~2.6 - and they've been rock-solid ever since, for months. And all accesses to memory/peripherals are also at 1600Mhz FSB speeds as well.
You do need RAM and motherboard/BIOS capable of supporting that.