Looking for a new system

[JHalton]

Hiya,

 

What do you think of this setup?

 

Asus NCCH-DL Dual Xeon (Nacoma) - £175.96

x2 2.8 Xeon processors - £302.14

A Stick of DDR400 1Gb - £98.11

 

I have all the other bits from the machine I have at the moment. Prices above are scan.co.uk

 

Do you think this set up is a waste of time... can this sort of set up be done alot cheaper than what I have found here. Intel do a 3.0 Pentium 4 530 for £128. Is there anyway to dual these prescotts up?

 

Thanks Guys

[JamesTaylor]

check out http://www.overclockers.co.uk i always find them good on price. howabout going for the dual core amd chips?

[JHalton]

check out http://www.overclockers.co.uk i always find them good on price. howabout going for the dual core amd chips?

 

I was gonna go for those duals but apparently they are not as fast, and you need to buy a really good motherboard to get this from them, plus not all software makes use of them.

[JamesTaylor]

we've just had one in at work to test. its an AMD dual core 2.4ghz version 2gig Ram and its been twice as quick on render times as our 3ghz HT intel 4 machines with 2gig ram.

[Tony]

I just puchased two AMD 4200 x2 and they always out perform my dual XEON 2.8's. For the money versus the performance, they can't be beat for rendering. The motherboard is the ASUS A8N-E. It's not an expensive board and it performs very well. I haven't OC'd them yet, but it's supposed to be very easy and stable to get them to perform at the 4800 level, which cost twice as much.

 

Tony

[vizwhiz]

Dan

 

i am looking to get something like what Tony mentioned

a dual dual-core AMD Athlon64 x2 4200+ (something like That)

 

from what i have being reading (i Think i posted some review links)

This is a good speed/price combination, There are faster but more

 

expensive possibilities (just my .002 euros worth) what is a euro??

 

Tony

 

what kind of video card did you get?

 

how much ram and what kind of configuration did you go for?

my casa re-financing is official (now i got to spend it wisely)?

 

a 4200+ has 512 cache (i Think)

a 4400+ has 1024 (but the difference is so small)

 

as you mentioned the over-clocking at the lower end can give good results

 

Randy

[Tony]

Randy

 

I bought one BFG 6600 PCI-Express because of the board and another cheap PCI card. The BFG card seems to work fine with max and vray. I purchased parts to build two machines. The boards each have 2 gig of ram and are for my render farm. The BFG card was probably overkill because it wont get used that much but I figured if I swithed this machine with my main work machine I'd be ready to go.

 

So far I'm very pleased with the performance of both and my render times have dropped dramatically! I had three AMD 3000's before I added these.

 

I built a box similiar to a render cube and have four of my computers in one box. The temp for the x2's runs about 36C and 40c under full load. Thats ten degrees cooler than the 3000's. Sweet! And thats with the stock fan and heatsink!

 

I plan to overclock these as soon as I figure out how. Never overclocked a computer before, but these are supposed to be very stable when you do.

 

The cache doesn't seem to make a big difference for rendering from the test reports I've seen on the web. So why spend the extra money. Also, these x2's are for single cpu slot boards only. You can't use them on a dual cpu board. Only the opteron version can do that.

 

Tony