New system on its way

[Jeff Mottle]

Well I made the dive and ordered my new system, here she is. Will hopefully get it on Thursday :

 

Dual AMD MP1900+

Asus A7M266-D Motherboard

Dynatron CPU coolers (DC1206BM-L/625)

2 GB PC2100 ECC REG RAM

80 GB WD 7200RPM HD

ASUS GeForce 4 ti4600

SuperMicro SC760 P4 Case

Logitec Cordless KB and Optical Mouse

16X DVD

Aopen MS900 5.1 Speakers

Enermax EG465P-VE Power Supply

Dual Samsung 19" 900NF Monitors

DAT Backup Drive

 

and a few other odds and end, but that's the bulk of it. My first dual CPU and monitor setup. It's like Christmas in April.

 

I'll post some updates when it comes and let you know how it flies and how much ear protection I'll have to wear.

[Cesar R]

Awesome, can I borrow it sometime ?

I am gonna go order a system tomorrow, (and try to sell my P3 on ebay or something)anyway I am going to get Athlon XP 1.4 (is that good?)since Athlons seem to be much better at CG. Then I am gonna hold off until Aug, or maybe Dec for my dual renderslave. (I know I am kind of dreaming, lol) But I want something better than a P3 to use a modeling station. so I am not too sure if should go with a P4 or an Athlon. (I know for sure I want a dual Athlon). Any comments Jeff ?

[anduril]

Thats a sweet system Jeff! I envy you, though hopefully in the summer I'll finally get a chance to upgrade my system. A question, is the WD HD their new 8mb cache model for the 80Gb? And just an experience with the cordless Logitech wireless setup; my friend has it and he had a problem with it not being as accurate or as precise as his old Optical Explorer mouse. A problem since he did alot of Photoshop gfx work but moot now that he purchased a Wacom tablet

[Jeff Mottle]

Hey Cesar,

 

Well I'm not sure, this is my first Dual (at home anyway)and my first AMD ever, so I'm not sure what to expect. I'm just going by the gospel of Greg Hess. I can vouch that duals in my experience have always been MUCH faster to work with though. I currently have a Single PIII 500Mhz with 768MB RAM, and a Quaddro 2, but that will be "donated" to my wife and for me to use as a slave.

 

I'll let you know my first impressions when I get i.t

[Jeff Mottle]

A question, is the WD HD their new 8mb cache model for the 80Gb?

Yup.

[cyclops]

Hi Jeff, hi everybody,

 

I have been using a dual Athlon 1800+ with 1.5 Gb RAM on an Asus motherdoard for a while now. My main rendering sofware is lightwave but I evaluated viz 4 recently. There were absolutly no stability problems (except when viz crashed... Viz worked fine but I am wondering, since you are a lightscape guy, does lightscape support multiprocessing for the radiosity calculations?

Also, Lightwave is the only renderer that I know of to have taken advantage of the P4's SSE2 instructions. Before this happened, Athlon was beating P4 in all rendering benchmarks in an embarassing manner. After the incorporation of sse2 in Lightwave's (7b) rendering engine, things have changed dramaticaly the other way round. I think this is interesting. I don't know if Lightscape and viz will use sse2 or not in the future, but if they did we'll all be looking at a single 2.2ghz p4 beating our duals. Check out tomshardware.com for their benchmarks, and see how things change once sse2 are implemented in a rendering engine.

 

Cy.

[Greg Hess]

Hey Cyclops,

 

Please visit the Dual Athlons in production thread for information on the invalidity of Tomshardware, and their bogus benchmarks. The site has fallen from its prime spot on the web, and is now nothing but a bunch of kids, who don't even know what these 3d applications are used for, let alone how to benchmark using them.

 

Maya 4 has SSE2 heavily built into the renderer, and yet the Athlons still hold the prime performance spots, at 1/2 to 1/4 the price.

 

www.highend3d.com

 

Also check www.3dluvr.com (techzone) max benchmarks. The Dual 2.4 Xeon at the top of the list cost 8,000 USD, and is beaten by a 1900+ MP. (With the 4.26 SSE2 patch)

 

Most of the lightwave tests are not run correctly, and do not truely showcase the performance between an Athlon and P4. With Newteks current situation (Their entire lightwave team split up), It will be extremely hard for me to get a copy to test on.

 

Until then....do also remember that SSE2 dictates SSE instructions, which accelerations both P3's, and MP and XP athlon processors.

 

Oh ya, and the last thing you have to worry about is SSE2, everyone is worried about which app is going to support the 64 bit chips first, and which one is supporting the Operteron (Hammer) code. The 32 bit war is just a sideline now.

 

Greg Hess

[cyclops]

Greg, thank you for your explanations. The truth is that I only saw your posts after posting mine. Sorry.

Anyway, I didn't know that the Lightwave team has split! I recently saw that a company called luxology, http://www.luxology.net, has taken over the development of Lightwave's next versions. Is that bad news or good news?

Also, from all the renderers I know, lightwave looks most FPU intensive. The rendering times depend ONLY on processor's FPU performance. Secondary level cache, memory performance, integer performance and the rest don't matter at all. In other words, instead of doing a lightwave benchmark you may as well do a MFLOPS performance measurement. This is why I thought that an implementation such as SSE2 would have a more dramatic impact.

I am a AMD enthusiast anyway and I don't feel like getting a dual Xeon. I was just afraid that AMD's chances to compete Intel in this market segment were getting short.

In conclusion, you're right, who cares about see2 when 64 bit rendering is about to arrive.

 

All the best.

[Greg Hess]

Hey Cyclops,

 

If you check under the athlon thread, you'll see I put in a particular benchmark known as arnoldbench, (an unreleased GI/radiosity renderer), which in one of its inconseptions is able to run from a command line, exterior to any application...

 

This gives it the unique position of being able to seperate out all the interface crap, and just show pure performance of whatever cpu its sending data too.

 

Its also extremely simple to reproduce the benchmark, since I just use the same command line.

 

And if you look at those scores the Athlons still have a sizable performance advantage.

 

As for an Athlon/Intel Bias...I have both AMD and Intel systems which I purchased with my own money. The Intel system was much easier to setup, and is extremely stable without any issues or problems...It is however slower then the 1900+ XP system I have sitting next to it, although seems to kick the Athlons ass in OGL performance.

 

Still testing...we'll see .

 

Greg Hess

 

Also, from all the renderers I know, lightwave looks most FPU intensive. The rendering times depend ONLY on processor's FPU performance. Secondary level cache, memory performance, integer performance and the rest don't matter at all. In other words, instead of doing a lightwave benchmark you may as well do a MFLOPS performance measurement.

[Jeff Mottle]

Hi all,

 

Well I picked up my new system last night and holly cr*p it is loud. Can other dual Athlon users attest to this? Have you found a solution to qwell the noise?

 

I suppose it does not help that I have 8 fans in the box either: One on each CPU at 6800RPM a piece. Two in the power supply, two case fans, and two on my video card. Can anybody say 747.

 

Of course the obligatory start up glitches, but I hope to get that all under control soon.

 

Any feedback on the noise bit would be great. I can hear the damn thing one floor down.

 

[ May 01, 2002, 10:02 AM: Message edited by: Jeff Mottle ]

[cyclops]

Hi Jeff,

 

My dual 1800+ is very loud as well and I haven't found a soulution for the noise yet. I guess the best thing would be to change the processor fans because most of the noise comes from them. Fans over 3000rpm are notoriously loud.

I heard you can get some more expensive models which are quieter.

 

Seb

[Paul Griger]

Jeff,

 

Mines coming in next week, I'll let you know then.

[Jeff Mottle]

Hey Paul,

 

What spec is your machine?

[Paul Griger]

Jeff,

 

Here are the specs. It seems that the AMD MP 2000+ are in demand right now and will not be in before the week is over. Also, I was eyeing up the Elsa Synergy 4 Quadro 4 vid card, but I am getting word that Elsa discontinued the card before it was even released, bummer…

 

Case Antec ATX Tower with 420 watt power supply

Mother board Asus A7M266-D

CPU Qty 2 AMD Athlon MP 2000+

Memory Qty 2 DDR 512mb for a total of 1 gig

Hard Drive Western Digital ATA100 [1] 40 G master and [1] 40 slave 7200 RPM

DVD Drive Sony

CDRW 40 X 12 X 48 X LiteOn with burn proof technology

Floppy Disk Drive Mitsumi 3.5”

Iomega 250 MB internal Zip

Video Card – who knows what I’m getting now. The shop will give me a temp GeForce 2 until I find a card that I want

Sound Card Soundblaster 5.1 Live value

Speakers Altec AVS300

Network Card Netgear 10/100

USB Ports 4

Keyboard MS internet

Mouse MS Optical inteli

MS Windows 2000 Pro

Samsung 170T 17” LCD monitor

 

I didn’t spec the fans, so who knows how loud [or hot] it will run.

[Greg Hess]

The way I've found to quell the noise on Athlons is as follows.

 

1) Make sure you pick up some Artic Silver III

 

2) Purchase an extremely high quality heatsink, like a Thermalright AX-7, Coolermaster HHC-001, Volcano 7+, or silverrado.

 

http://www.plycon.com/ax7.htm

 

http://www.plycon.com/cmhhc.htm

 

http://www.plycon.com/vol7plus.

 

http://www.plycon.com/silrado.htm

 

3) The AX-7 uses an 80mm fan mount by default. Pick up some YS-TECH or Enermax adjustable rpm 80mm fans. They go from around 20 CFM to 48-50 CFM, 19-40 DB. You can set them extremely low for zero noise, or adjust them for performance.

 

4) The HHC-001 can take 60-80mm fan adapters and is also available in a LOW noise version. Two 80mm fans is pretty much the max available space over the cpu sockets in a Dual Athlon system.

 

5) The silverrado uses two 8 CFM blowers to cool the heatsink, and produces almost no noise whatsoever. Its called noise control for a reason. (Its also REALLY expensive).

 

6) The Volcano 7+ uses a 70mm fan and comes with a switch to adjust rpm. I haven't tried this one on a dual board yet.

 

By distibuting these fans across the case, combined with an enermax whispher power supply, you can pretty much end up with a virtually silent dual athlon machine.

 

I'm currently running a Coolermaster ATC-110 with 2 front Panflo L1A's, 1 YS-TECH blowhole, 1 YS-Tech Exhaust, and Two Thermalright AX-7's with enermax adjustable rpm fans for cpu cooling.

 

The system is quieter then my ceiling fan.

 

There are also aftermarket noise dampeners on the market you can use to further reduce case noise.

 

http://www.plycon.com/fleece.htm

 

Btw, I've never ordered from plycon before, I just use their site cause they have nice pictures without long url designations

 

Greg Hess

[Guest ghraben]

greg - no mention of watercooling?

 

any particular reason you avioded that?

[Greg Hess]

ghraben,

 

I only post what I know, and one thing I'm not experienced with is water cooling. I'm currently learning and experimenting with different rigs to get more a feel for the type of technology and usability offered by going with water cooled solutions, but at this time I'm not about to make any recommendations until I can stand firmly behind them .