• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Second-guessing myself on which system...

H

heavyharmonies

n00b
Joined
Jun 16, 2004
Messages
50
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
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top