Can anyone help me spend $5000?

What Kind of Ram would I have to get for this monster?

And Do you have to have the same amount in each Loctaion ( Per Processor) if that makes any sence..
 
USMC2Hard4U said:
What Kind of Ram would I have to get for this monster?

And Do you have to have the same amount in each Loctaion ( Per Processor) if that makes any sence..
Click to expand...
The board has NUMA so you would require 2 ram chips at least. The absolute least amount of ram I'd put on that thing is 1gb, and thats if you're tight on cash. I'd go with at least 2-4gb.
 
I am seriously Thinking about getting a system with like this... I am planning on a major 5000 - 6000 dollar with monitor, system... as soon as dual core Opterons come out...
 
USMC2Hard4U said:
I am seriously Thinking about getting a system with like this... I am planning on a major 5000 - 6000 dollar with monitor, system... as soon as dual core Opterons come out...
Click to expand...
Big question: can you put it to use?
ATM I cannot use all the processing power of my system, its huge overkill.... I like overkill =)
 
I could put it to good use. If not, I will be future proofing myself and if anything else... in 2 years time frame, I will still have this for a personal File server or something... so It will last me a while... if anything...

What case and PSU would I have to have for that Tyan Mobo?
 
I believe its E-atx mobo, so you'd need an EPS 12v PSU and a case which will take E-atx (most stacker and full towers, also 99% of 4U rackmounts)
 
Remember that my system is coming out slightly above $5000 and that's without a monitor. I hope you're not looking at a new 24" LCD for the price range you're listing.
As for the power supply, since I'm already at 7 harddrives and with room to expand to 5 more, I decided that the Antec 550W does not have enough power. Especially since the 550W assumes a temperature of 25C. Right now I'm looking at the Turbo-Cool 510AG instead which provides 510W at a more normal 40C and up to 650W if you can get it cooler.
 
I'm pretty sure this one points to Intel being a must. Why? Have you guys forgotten that those k8 chips (all of them) have memory controller problems dealing w/ 4 or more double sided sticks? That means you can have as much RAM as you can fit on the motherboard, but it's going to be really expensive and really slow (as if the piss poor latencies of 1gb DDR sticks aren't bad enough on their own, you're going to have to run them at pc2700 speeds).

The new intel chips/chipsets aren't limited to those problems. Yeh, DDR2 started out rough, but if you've payed atentino recently you'd notice that there is really exciting stuff out there. Like this:

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=20-220-038&depa=0

Those are 1024mb sticks....that run 3-2-2-4 at speeds of 266mhz (ddr533). THAT'S A HELL OF A LOT MORE THEN ANY OF THE OLD DDR CAN SAY, AND THIS IS STILL THE BEGINNING. Yeh, DDR2 doesn't suck anymore. Stick 4 of those in an ASUS 955 motherbaord w/ the Dual Core Extreme Edition and you'll be set. Gaming may not be as great as it would be on an fx-55 rig, but it will certainly be better then on one with 4gb of slow ass DDR memory clocked at 166mhz.

*zip*
 
I agree, the P4 EE is just as good as SMP FX's, and probably the same price, but you can run faster RAM and therefore more bandwidth.

On the other side of things, You don't need to fill 4 slots on a Dual AMD board (SMP FX's) because 2x512 per processor is plenty. That's over 2Gb of DDR, with all the seperate peripheral bus's. The bottlenecks now are not RAM related, as much as the bottlenecks are PCI bus related or HD seek/access time related.

I would look at the P4 EE motherboard choices you have though, because nothing is like having all your accessory controllers on the motherboard...

The EDIT: I was looking for something and came across this:

Get 4 of these instead of having freakish 7 hard drives: 500Gb SATA-II
 
I know that Dual Core Extreme Editions arent out yet... but do you think that performance would be better on dual core dual opterons or 1 Extreme Edition with HT?
 
Zxcs said:
The board has NUMA so you would require 2 ram chips at least. The absolute least amount of ram I'd put on that thing is 1gb, and thats if you're tight on cash. I'd go with at least 2-4gb.
Click to expand...

Not true.

Bord will work with ONE dimm, but for BEST prefomrance you want 2 dimms per cpu.
 
Well then you could have 5, instead of a freakish 7. If you wanted to.

I guess it comes down to price per Terabyte... right?
 
Yeah I can help you. Spend about $1500 of it on a kick ass machine and donate the rest to a charity or the Tsunami or something. ;)
 
bountyhunter said:
screw raptors. get hose 16mb cache maxtors. they're just as fast and have 3 to 5 times the capacity
Click to expand...

One of my friends mentioned this too. Any sites out there do tests yet?
 
10000 rpm > 7200 rpm

8more MB of cache is not as appealing as lower response times and spindle speeds
 
Exactly, USMC2Hard4U has a point that I agree with. Although I want a couple of those Maxtors. Much 4 ur $$$
 
whatever you do, click the ad at the top, and then buy all from Newegg. They have great prices, superfast shipping (assuming you're in the US, I forgot to check) and great service. And if you use the ad, [H] gets to keep operating.
 
Just some advice -- if you really want dual, you simply can't go wrong with a Tyan motherboard. These things are bricks, they simply don't die. I've had maybe one defective unit, and that was replaced by RMA (wasn't even a terrible problem -- through some Machine Check errors every once in a while but the ECC usually caught and corrected them). Could have just kept on running but it's usually a good idea (especially with servers) to replace potentially faulty hardware.

You may be able to get a dual board for under $250 but it's not going to have PCI-X or PCI-E. PCI-X is widely used for high performance Gigabit network cards and storage controllers (SATA / SCSI). There are also some PCI-E X8 storage controllers but it's probably a waste of a slot that you could use for SLI :D

Think of it this way:

Regular PCI (on cheap boards)
130 MB / s

PCI-X
1000 MB / s

PCI-E X8 / X16
Ridiculously Fast

A typical consumer grade board will have a single PCI bus for all cards. That means your LAN, storage, and sound are all sharing 130 MB / s

Tyan boards with the 8131 chipset have 2 PCI-X busses.
Usually the LAN and integrated storage will be on one, and the slots will be on another. This is about 2 GB / s of total throughput. Certainly better than thatn 130 MB / s no?

Finally PCI-E has a huge amount of throughput (honestly I do't know the numbers but it's MASSIVE) dedicated to each port. I think it's around 16 GB / s but i'm not certain.

So does the availability of 2 PCI-X busses and 2 PCI-X ports seem worth $200?

Also someone mentioned something about P4 having 533MHz FSB. The Opteron platform actually does not have an FSB in the typical sense. Each chip has it's own essentially zero-latency direct link to the RAM so FSB is a null-factor. What it does have is HyperTransport links between chips and motherboard devices (Opteron 2xx series has 2 HyperTransport links per chip). These are rated for something like 6 GB / s each. The total aggregate memory bandwidth of a fast Quad opteron machine is similar to what is in many high-end video cards. And an 8-way (not available in mainstream yet) is double that.

There are 4-way opteron boards (Tyan makes them) but they are explicity for server -- no AGP or PCI-E.

EDIT: Not to mention the Opteron 8xx series needed to run in Quad configuratin start at around $700 each for 1.4GHz!
 
Maybe i am just being stupid, but you might want to consider buying only 'one cheap' operton now and leaving the second CPU socket open, then upgrade to DP opterons later to get 4 cores !?
 
USMC2Hard4U said:
10000 rpm > 7200 rpm

8more MB of cache is not as appealing as lower response times and spindle speeds
Click to expand...

Sorry folks, but those 16MB Maxtors will be at least even with a 36GB Raptors and be close to a 73GB. Want proof? This despite the 5ms lower average read services time on a Raptor. Why? Because seek times, spindle speeds, and tranfer rates don't tell the whole story of hard drive performance. Maxtor obviously put a lot of effort into the firmware design, caching stategy, and other facets of hard drive logic to turn MaxLineIII into a pretty beastly hard drive. There's a lot more that goes into designing a hard drive than fast spindle and powerful actuator, and there are many firmware level tweaks that can substantially raise single user performance on a 7200RPM drive. This SR performance comaprison shows 3 10K drives (admittedly of the last generation) going down in defeat to a 7200 RPM Hitachi 7K250 in single user performance, despite the fact that the 10K drives take all of the synthetic tests. So, no 10,000 is not ncessarily > 7200RPM. Lower seek time is not necessarily equal to greater performance. That was one of my main points in the 'Truth about RAID' debate, but is nevertheless something that many people contine to erroneously believe.

My advice? Don't fool with SCSI. Any commercially available drive that is faster than WD740GD and MaxLineIII is going to be prohibiitvely expensive or off EBay. If you can wedge Windows and all of your programs into ~70GB, get a 73GB Raptor, otherwise get the MaxLines. For large volume storage, Hitachi 7K250 is the only way to fly, unless you want the 5 year warranty from Seagate or near silence of Samsung SpinPoint P80. All of this (and more) is in the sticky 'Buyer's Guide' at the top of the disk storage systems forum.
 
According to those tests, you're right about the 36Gb Raptors vs. MaxLineIII, but close is not the Yellow Jersey when 74Gb Raptors are running.

Live Strong
 
Close there is a relative term. MaxLineIII is much closer to the Raptor in the single user performance tests than the synthetic test results would have one believe, which was my 'angle' on it. You will note that I recommended the Raptor as the faster drive assuming he could wedge everything into the ~70GB formatted space. After that, MaxLineIII runs away with a fairly important stat - cost per GB.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top