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Bit of a double question


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What's the general consensus between dual amds (Barton) chips and Xeons ? Bang for buck and general oomph. I'm looking to build a new development server that will have to do a lot of number crunching.

 

 

2nd , TFT's I'm planning on going from 2 iiYama Pro510 to 3 TFTs $900-£500 a piece, any recommendations of the kinds of things I should be looking for ? I do a lot of textual work (coding) and am looking to get back into lightwave for leisure purposes.

 

 

Thanks :)

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If your into lightwave, I'd stick to either a Dual Xeon, or a Dual Opteron system.

 

The Athlon MP's, although fast, do not hold a candle to Xeon's in lightwave rendering.

 

The Opterons however, include SSE2 instructions, and are NEARLY as fast as the Xeon's. In some situations they are as fast, if not faster. (And this is in 32 bit operations, in a 32 bit OS).

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I would recommend dual Opteron with Win64 over Xeon at this point. Looking forward the memory addressing will become a bigger and bigger part of the analysis. Win32 and the Xeons are limited to 4GB ram technically, 3GB optimally, and generally 2GB specifically. A year from now 2GB will be nothing...

 

I would advise Supercache from Superspeed software with any high powered system. I typically get 30% better rendering performance with it. Their XP 64 version will be out any time.

 

I was particularily pleased with my Nvidia Quadro with native dual support. I was running dual 1920x1600 for a total of 3800x3200 desktop and it was fast. Of course, their newer stuff would be even better. Never spend over $800 for a video card and never less than $500. That is generally the sweet spot for price and performance.

 

Another big boost would be dual bridged Gigabit networking with full duplex. That would give network speed of 4,000 Megabit/sec. It is amazing the performance boost you can get with an optimized network.

 

Good Luck!

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