Second-guessing myself on which system...

H

heavyharmonies

n00b
Joined
Jun 16, 2004
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Ya know, the sheer amount of information to wade through right now when choosing a system to buy/build is daunting. Add to that the fact that the choices are not clear cut: Intel vs. AMD, XP vs. 64 vs. FX, Xeon vs. Opteron vs. MP... a lot of conflicting reports as well.

I initially thought I would opt for a dually system, either dual Xeon 3.06s or dual Opteron 246s. A barebones system with either would run in the $1500 range. Opterons are probably a better bet as far as upgrade path (dual-core Opterons down the road) but now enter the 800fsb Xeons. What about those? Augh!

Now I'm wondering:

In terms of overall system responsiveness, instead of a dually rig would I be better served by something like a single AMD 64 (3400+ or 3700+) and putting the extra money into:

  • more RAM (2GB instead of 1GB) and
  • a better hard drive subsystem? I'm thinking either:
    1. 74GB Raptor boot/system drive + dual raptors in RAID 0 for data [not doing RAID for performance, but rather to create a larger drive] + 160GB SATA drive as a backup for the RAID, or
    2. venture into SCSI. My experience with SCSI is limited to SCSI as implemented on the Macintosh back in the mid-1990s. I do know that things can get real expensive real quick, especially when you're talking 15K vs. 10K drives, and SCSI RAID cards.

I don't do anything earth-shattering with my box, but I tend to have a lot of windows open and doing a bunch of stuff at once. Minimal gaming. Lots of working in Photoshop, scanning, MP3 encoding, DTP.

I'm having a hard time nailing down a clear-cut "right choice" and what will give me the most spry system... :(

-Dan
 
A 64 system will do you better than the dule rig and probably give you less problems. The raptor from what i've read is an awsome drive. Just make sure you get a HDD cooler, it seems they get toasty. I was going to say 2gb ram was overkill, however I read on and you said you did alot of photo shop. More ram is allways a good thing with that. Lokks good to me, and with the money that your spending a wise choice.
 
IIRC, the Pentium 4 still trumps the Athlon when doing multimedia encoding. That, and enabling Hyper-Threading on a dual 800FSB Xeon box would allow you to run 4 instances of F@H, and we would love you for that :D
 
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