Elliot Posted June 25, 2006 Share Posted June 25, 2006 I just finished upgrading my workstation. Two Opteron 285's Dual Core on a Supermicro motherboard H8DC8 with 4gb of ram. The whole upgrade including a new hard drive and a new video card comes up to about $3,500.00. The old system was on a Tyan 2885 revision A, with the TWO Single Core Opterons 250 and the same low latency memory from Corsair. I like more the Tyan motherboard. The speed difference between this system and the one with the two single Opterons 250's is a minor one...... very small increase. In some cases I actually see no speed gain. I see no incentive in spending money on their marketing pitch. If you have a high speed single core.... the dual core story is questionable... Regards Elliot PD The old computer had a SCSI Raid and for back up a SATA RAID both on stripping. Now I just place two single Western Digital 10,000 rpms and I feel they are almost faster than the SCSI. Interesting. The SCSI and the Adaptec controller was almost 2,000.00. These Westerns do the same for about 270.00 each. Another fringe benefit.... it is a lot easier to install the Western vs the Adapted SCSI Raid. One positive thing.... it boots up faster.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted June 25, 2006 Share Posted June 25, 2006 This depends a lot on what you're using it for. You have twice as many CPUs but the difference in speed of the individual CPUs (2.4GHz to 2.6GHz) is small. Processes that are multithreaded efficiently should be twice as fast now, processes that aren't should have little to no noticeable gain. The most noticeable effect should be on your render times - if you use an engine that does efficient multithreading it should be twice as fast, if it isn't there's some problem that keeping it from using all your CPU power. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manta Posted June 25, 2006 Share Posted June 25, 2006 Well that stinks, you should be getting at least an 85% speed boost especially when rendering, have you clocked it against some actual scenes you had previously rendered... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Elliot Posted June 25, 2006 Author Share Posted June 25, 2006 William and Andrew Yes there is an improvement in rendering. No question about it.... The whole reason for the update was that I made a movie with Viz and then edited it with Premier and After Effects. The whole process took about 18 hour on my 3.6ghz Dell Inspiron XPS laptop. About 14 hours on the dual Single Opteron... I decided to cut this production time and went and got the new Opteron dual core 285 CPU's and Motherboard. The new motherboard doesn't have AGP so I had to get another Quadro 1500. Now I can do the same movie in 13 hours... from top to bottom... Five hours is 5 hours.... but I don't do this movies every day. What is the difference.... I can just dedicate the Opterons 250 for rendering and keep working on the dual Xeon's. On any other work program there is almost no difference in speed. I see so many people on this forum dreaming about a new machine in hopes that it will make their life easier. I think they should be aware that improvement is not there. I have built over 20 of these computers, it is kind of a hobby. The components I have on this box are the fastest I could get... The memory from Corsair is 2,3,2,6 latency and the bios on the machine have been adjusted to make use of the memory. I have been watching the voltage to the memory chips and it is 2.67 vdc which is very close to the recomended voltage by Corsair. The CPU's are running at 35 degrees which I think is a good temp. At the end, what I am trying to say is that the technology has not really improved that much since the high end single core.... Yes, there is an improvement but for most of the guys in the forum that improvement is at the expense of a significant amount of money. Budget vs Reality..... If I would have known all these details I would have waited or just build another dual single core CPU machine. An Opteron 250 ( I paid 750.00 1.5 years ago) is running for about 330.00. A modest motherboard with the two CPU's, PS, memory and the few other accesories could be built for less than $1,500.00. I could have built two high end single core boxes and add them to the farm for less money than invested on the upgrade. Regards Elliot Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manta Posted June 25, 2006 Share Posted June 25, 2006 Ya, I'm afraid that more CPU's are only going to speed up your rendering and to a large extent your multitasking, it won't do anything for your workflow in apps such as Premiere and AE, unless you were previously waiting for your computer to catch up to you, if it takes 10 hrs. to edit the video, it takes 10 hrs. to edit the video, rendering or encoding the video is another story, you should get at least a 30% boost there I would think... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ihabkal Posted June 25, 2006 Share Posted June 25, 2006 the benefit of going with dual core cpus is seen if you use software that supports it. Vray, Brazil, Maxwell, mental ray and the scanline renderer all use the 4 cores especially for large scenes, which cuts rendering times in 1/2 compared with a regular dual. I bought the dual dual core 275 as soon as it came out last year and I took it with me from the US to Lebanon, costed $500 in shipping and $1000 in customs , and it saved me 1/2 my rendering time for those dozens of previews I do every day. it pays for itself in time savings. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Elliot Posted June 26, 2006 Author Share Posted June 26, 2006 Guys, I was really surprised. I took the single core opterons and placed them on another cabinet with a power supply and fire them up. To render a movie of 800 x 600 pixel with 600 frames: Two Dual Core Opteron 285 1 hour 40 minutes Two Single Core Opteron 250 2 hours 20 minutes One 3.6 Intel Pentium IV 5hours 51 minutes Tomorrow I will try on the 2 ghz Dual Xeons As far as the rendering on Premier the Single cores took 18 minutes and the Dual Core took 14 minutes. I feel a little bit better...... Regards Elliot Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pailhead Posted June 26, 2006 Share Posted June 26, 2006 Were you generally saying "Don't buy four cpus instead of two, it's not faster". It's as same as advising against buying a ferrari in favor of a ford focus, because you couldn't find the 5th and the 6th gear in your ferrari. Try downloading a vray demo, and try some benchmark scene, you'll get at least an 80% increase. Buying a dual single core cpu nowadays doesn't make sense, since you can get a much cheaper single dualcore cpu config, (cheaper mobo, cheaper ram, cheaper power supply) which would run as fast, or even faster. 280-285 opterons, cost a lot of money, and unless you are using it as a workstation where you do a lot of preview renders, i don't think it makes much sense. You are better off buying a bunch of new dualcore pentiums or 939 dualcore opterons and setting them up as render slaves. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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