PIIIXeon or a really fast PIII?

[SoopaStar]

Okay, I am going to be building a system for my office so we can run Windows 2000 server and have it also run Terminal Server with 3 or 4 connections from that (and about 10 from the inter-office network). The program that will be run on the terminal server will use about 8mb of memory per instance, then you have the CPU cylcles and memory taken by the rest of the stuff.
I was looking at the following CPU's:
PII 450 XEON with 2mb cache
PIII 650-700 (NOT a XEON)
PIII Xeon 500 with 512kb cache
I am looking for the best performance possible with the load I will be getting.
I will NOT be over clocking (sorry OC-ers), and will not consider a dual celery config. I will be using a 10000 rpm seagate cheatah drive on an adaptec scsi card.

Thanks,
Paul C

[hd581]

Firing Squad did a review of the P3 Xeon 500 (http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/p3xeon500/) last year. Firing squad usually reviews hardware from a gamers perspective but in this case they included business marks and all.

In sum, the article seemed to imply that Xeon's were just a tad (just a tad) faster than their P3 counterparts, yet cost exorbitantly more. If you're scaling (multiple processors), however, people tend think Xeon's are well suited for that job.

I say get the normal P3 and use the extra money on RAM. I'd rather have 256 more MB of RAM than 2 MB cache on chip, no matter how fast they say it is.

//edit for spacing

[This message has been edited by hd581 (edited 05-31-2000).]