|
PureBytes Links
Trading Reference Links
|
Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 12:55:50 -0600
From: Jimmy <jhsnowden@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Last year someone got into really hot motherboards and processors.
I can't find the exact post now in the Purebytes site but one guy
bought a board and dual xeon processors. I'm thinking he got the best
board available. Are you still out there. Anyone know the best
boards both dual processor and single.
Well, last year I did do that and probably mentioned it here. At that
time, the system was one of three available at the top end, but the
info is out-of-date currently. I happened to visit supermicro website
the other day, my board was rather far down the list of products.
The motherboard is a Supermicro X5DA8, which is the version that comes
with dual channel u320 scsi. Supermicro Serverboards are
conservatively setup, so no overclocking etc features are available
(which is what I wanted). Supermicro also included heat sink fan
stacks for the xeons, but I cannot recommend them, they insert with
pushtabs and one is slightly loose. Use a silent cooler, such as
Zalman Quiet CPU Cooler CNPS5100-Cu CPU. I shopped via
pricewatch.com, but didn't choose the cheapest, but the cheapest
reliable distributor. Memory was the fastest possible for the board,
I think that was 533 MHz effective bus speed. I had a $1K budget and
it costed out at $1.1K for motherboard, memory, processors and a power
supply.
Performance wise, I haven't come across anything that the setup cannot
handle. The few times I compared benchmarks, the system was always at
the high end of it's class.
I tracked this system down by visiting websites such as 2cpu.com and
www.firingsquad.com (gamers are manic about performance) and reading
their reviews, then googling, and repeating. The AMD vs Intel
question was decided in favor of Intel, due to the hyperthreading
capabilities and reports that sse2 (Intels answer to AMDs faster
number crunching) capable compilers were in release.
r
|