Take the 2-minute tour ×  One of our dedicated machines we use
for hosting in London has exceeded the CPU usage, so I contacted
the datacenter last week for a quote on an upgrade. We are
hosting game servers, and most of these are single core
applications.  Our current processor is the Q9550. They are
offering us the Q9650 for 230$/mo or the i7-870 for 250$/mo.
Since our customers are pushing the machine to nearly 100% CPU
usage at peak times, which machine would we be better off going
with? The Q9650 is a 3GHZ and the i7-870 is 2.93ghz. The Q9650
has a nice fat 12MB L2 Cache, and the i7 has a smaller 8MB L3
Cache.  I doubt either one is going to be much of a difference
at all from the other, but would the i7-870 be worth it for
hosting game servers?  share|improve this question The Q9650
should be better all around. It might depend on the utilization
profile, but I doubt it. –  Chris S Jul 10 '11 at 18:00 add
comment  1 Answer  up vote 3 down vote accepted  On cpu
benchmarks the overal performance of the i7