AMD dual dual cores...

[chuck]

I'm planning on building a machine with two dual core opteron's in it.

 

I'm looking at the 270, it's $475. From the rendering times i've seen, it should be a good option. Anyone have comments?

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16819103552

 

I'm a little confused as to why the 275's and 280's are a lot more money.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?N=2010340343+1050706979&Submit=ENE&SubCategory=343

 

Thanks for any input,

 

Chuck

[AJLynn]

The 270 looks like a decent price point. These things fall on a nonlinear curve, that goes up sharply at the high end, and usually the best value is a notch or three down.

 

Of course, given what the rest of the system costs it might be reasonable to drop an extra $400 on 10% more speed.

[Greg Hess]

200 megahertz in a dual core is actually 400 total additional megahertz. Combined with the relatively short pipeline length of the opteron architecture...there is actually a noticable difference in performance between a 2.2 and 2.4.

 

Right now the cpu is the largest bottleneck in terms of graphics performance...the latest string of graphics cards are just waiting around for the cpu to finish feeding them data.

 

http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2006q1/opteron-165-180/index.x?pg=10

 

Take a look at the 165 opteron vs the 3800+ athlon. 1.8 vs 2.0 ghz. (Similar architecture, just less HT links on the AthlonX2) The gain is actually noticable, instead of the Pentium IV line...hell the p4's aren't even on the charts anymore. (Only an extreme edition exists).

 

It's hard to tell yourself this...but a twin dual core system is actually a quad. Processor prices seem high, but just divide them in two, and everything makes alot more sense. Even an opteron 285 at 1k is decently priced as far as top top tier processors go. Two 2.6 ghz speed demons for 500 each.

 

Go back a few years and ask if anyone would have paid 2k for 4 cpu's.

[chuck]

thanks for your input guys...now i have another question.

 

i'm looking at two video cards, the nvidia 6800gt, soft modded to the quadro card running maxtreme drivers, or a 7800gt stock. i'm not sure i want to go through the hassle of soft modding if there isn't a noticable difference.

 

the maxtreme drivers really appeal to me, since there was a noticable difference when i switched my quadro 1300 over. i remember reading on another forum that a 7800gt was faster in max than a 6800gt soft modded with maxtreme drivers...i think.

 

i don't want to spend much more than $300 for a card right now, so that means no quadro. it needs to handle high poly models for animations, trees etc. i'm not worried about game playability at all.

 

any other opinions would be great too, let me know if i'm way off.

 

thanks again,

 

chuck

[Greg Hess]

Chuck,

 

Any reason you aren't considering the 7900GT? It generally benchmarks faster then a 7800 GTX, and costs right around 300 dollars.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?Submit=ENE&N=2010380048+1067920129&Subcategory=48&description=&srchInDesc=&minPrice=&maxPrice=

 

http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2006q1/geforce-7600-7900/index.x?pg=1

[vodka79]

Chuck, how do you softmod a 6800? I'm using a 6600 GT now, is it possible to softmod it to quadro?

[vodka79]

Chuck, how do you softmod a 6800? I'm using a 6600 GT now, is it possible to softmod it to quadro?