Video Card

[Elliot]

Hello,

 

I am looking at building a new system this week. I am looking at a Dual Xeon 3.6ghz with 1 mb L3 cache on a Supermicro motherboard X6GA8-G2. Any comments on this motherboard...? Do they have a 3.6 ghz Xeon with 2 mb L3 cache?

 

Is the nvidia quadro fx 4400 available? Is it any good?

 

Is the 7552 chipset any good?

 

Is the DDR-2 the fastest memory I could get?

 

I called Supermicro and they told me they are coming out with something new that mimics Hyperthreading and the motherboard will have 4 CPU. Does Viz or Max can make use of 4 processors?

 

 

Thanks

Elliot

[Elliot]

Hello,

 

More questions..... Is the PCI express better than AGP8 is there problems with this technology?

 

Are the SCCI hardrives better than SATA. On paper they look better. Is that the case? Is a raid with 4 drives any good?

 

Should I put a 700 watt power supply for an accessory loaded box?

 

Thanks Again

Elliot

[Elliot]

Alex

 

Thanks for the information. I look at some ready made boxes and they want over 6,000 for similar performance. That seem awfully over expensive.

 

I am not too sure I understood your explanations. What is a GPU renderer....?

 

I think the Quadro FX4400 was just anounced I don't even know how much it cost. However, they describe it as the next thing to an outer space trip.... Is that the same hyper of two years ago with the Wildcat cards..... Nobody seem to talk anymore about the Wildcat video cards. By the way I had an old one and my video gamer card does the same job. Hi Hi.... for a lot less money....!

 

The SCSI...... You think I should have a SATA drive to boot from but a SCSI Raid to run my applications. The existing machine I am upgrading already has four 15,000 RPM SCSI Seagates with a 320 Adaptec controller. They are very fast.... I used two boot from and the other two are for storage. Should I put the 4 drives under the RAID in order to run faster... What is the RAID configuration I should use to make them super fast?

 

What about the Chipset Intel 7520 vs Intel 7525.... or is this a lot of smoke too?

 

The motherboard I am looking at, the Supermicro X6DA8-G2 requires DDR2 memory at 400, is this any good. I am planning to put 2 gygabytes, should I use more.

 

Does anybody has a suggestion for the Power Supply. BoXX uses a 700 watts Power Supply on a similar configuration. SUpermicro suggest a 550 watts PS.

 

The Supermicro tech support specialist I talk with last afternoon, (Good Guy with lots of knowledge) suggested to use the 3.6Ghz. He told me they have run a lot of tests and the 3.6Ghz is very fast. He gave me some specific figures that look very good. However, I agree with you about the expense.

 

Thanks for your information. You seem to understand this jargon a lot better than me. On the last big box I put together I spent about 6K and it remain usable for a long while. In fact I can still use and it outperform a Dell 1 year old.

 

I use these machines for renderings and mechanical drawings. The premade machines are too expensive. I think I can save a lot and come out with a better machine by placing them together. By the way it is also therapeutic to put them together.

 

Thanks

Elliot

[Elliot]

Alex

 

Thanks for all the very usefull information. I am upgrading a very complex machine that already has a lot of very recent accesories like the four SCSI 15,000 RPMs. The hit is not going to be that steep.

 

Thanks for your advice

Gracias

Elliot

[isagreg]

RE: "never go by the numbers, you can have more performance with a dual XEON 2.6 Ghz and 4 gb RAM than a dual Xeon 3.6 and 2 GB Ram"

 

I don't agree here. GHz is GHz. The processor speed is measured in Hz. There is no way 2.6GHz can beat 3.6GHz even with 12Gb of memory.

With more than 2Gb of memory you can only multitask heavier than usual. Currently WinXP (32 bit) supports no more than 2GB per process by default (of course you can mod the boot.ini to make WinXP support 3Gb per process)

MAX/VIZ will crash after memory usage reaches 1.8gb.

BUT

if you want to use all 4gb (or more) run 2 instances of MAX. In this case the rendering will be much slower.

[Elliot]

Isa,

 

Thanks for the information. I have heard the same thing you say about the ram usage. Windows only allow 2 gig window.

 

I am still looking at the 3.6 ghz with 1mb L3. I look at the iIntel site. They have the same processor with 2 mb L3 but will not work with the PCI expresss. I also found the the Quadro FX 3400 works with PCI Express and they have lowered the price of the card since they anounced the the FX 4400.

 

Do you recommend I keep the ram at 2 gig or should I put the 4 gig I was originally planning.

 

Thanks

Elliot

[Elliot]

Alex,

 

I read on the Intel site that the new 3.6 ghz XEON is the same as the 64 bit CPU. Is that the same as the AMD 64 bit processor. Like the Intel Ithalon or something like that. Please remember that I am an old guy Hi HI I may mix the names.....

 

Question, when they come with the new window for 64 bit. Are these Xeons capable of running the new windows.

 

Thanks

Elliot

[Elliot]

Alex,

 

I think I got the awnser, they come with the extensions. However, they are not a true 64 bit processor. They are capable of reading a software written for 64 bits. They are not processing the data on chunks of 64 bits.

 

See you

Elliot

[isagreg]

If I was you I'd get 2 X 3.6GHz Xeons, 3GB RAM (mod the boot.ini in WinXP), Quadro FX 1300 PCI Express (1400 coming soon) or if you want to spend more get 3400. You got SCSI hard drives already. If you want to stripe the drives put them in RAID 0 (fastest type of RAID). Also get couple of good monitors (the bigger the better- 20-23"). Don't forget about a good power supply (550-700W) and DVD burner. And you'll get superfast workstation...

Currently Xeons are faster in 32 bit applications (talking about rendering in MAX). Also they support hyper-threading.

I'd not buy Opterons only because they're 64 bit capable. By the time 64 bit Windows is out there will be even faster processors and your top-of-the-line Opterons will be outdated. 64 bit Windows will be out not earlier than next year. But when 64 bit capable MAX/VIZ will be out?... 2 years?

[Elliot]

Isa and Alex,

 

Thanks to both of you for the comments and suggestions. I think I am narrowing this down to:

 

1 Supermicro Motherboard X6DA8-G2

 

2 3.6 ghz XEONS

 

4 1 Gig Ram DDR2 400 - 4 gig. (The motherboard only take the sticks in pairs)

 

1 Quadro FX 3400

 

1 SCSI Raid (I already have the 4 hardisk at 15,000 rpm) The moderboard has a builtin Adaptec card. Should I consider and external one. There is a version of the board without the Adaptec controller

 

1 SATA Big drive for storage purposes

 

1 PW 700 watts or more

 

2 Nice monitors

 

The usual stuff like DVD CDRW, Nice Sound Card, extra USB 2.0 Adaptec Card.

1 Lan NIC 1000.

 

One of the questions I still have is about the RAID. One of my computers has Two 10,000 RPM's hardisks and I have everything on this RAID system. Another computer I have has one main drive where I just put the applications and another drive for just the files I am working on. The last one provides the best performance. Now, how can I take advantage of the Adaptec controller to place two drives for just the applications (one is a mirror of the other one) and the other two for storage (one a mirror of the other one). What kind of Raid configuration will do that. I still will have some kind of large SATA just for doing backups. Interesting point, my big computer has the Raid, and one large Western drive for backup storage. The 15,000 RPM's are noisy so I thought they would be the first ones to go. Well, wrong, the Western went out after only 5 months of use. About a month later I lost one of the 15,000 rpm drives. A hardisk recovery company wanted 2 thousand dollars to recover the data from the Western. Thanks to the raid I was able to recover almost everything. The Seagates are noisy and hot.

 

This brings the other point I am concerned. How do I cool these CPU's I understand they run very hot. My big computer is a noisy animal, it is anoying and very distracting to work on it. How can I bring the enviroment noise down... Should I get a special case with special cooling and noise suppresion capabilities. I can not go through life with another noisy computer. Hi Hi

 

The configuration above when I go to Boxx it runs at about 9,000.00. After I price out everything through the diffrent suppliers I come out to about 5,600.00. Does this sound right......?

 

Thanks

Elliot

[Elliot]

Alex

 

Thanks once more for the information. The raid is something I am kind of confused. The last 3 machines I put together had Raid.... somebody told me that the Raid 0,1 I used is not the fastest configuration.

 

The last time I bought the components from Accubyte, they were very good. One of the CPU's came with a broken pin. They sent two more to keep the matching. I understand that matching is not needed any more. Unfortunately they seem to be out of business. The drives I got from PC Connection. They were expensive, but at the time they were the only ones that had the 15,000 RPM's. Those Seagates are fast.....!

 

This time I have been looking at pricewatch.com. The best prices I have been getting are from a compnay in Texas call Next Computers. Here in Atlanta there is a fellow that specializes in selling components for people doing high end video editing and 3D machines. He has all kind of video cards in stock. He narrowly specializes in video cards for the TV broadcast industry. The name of his company is http://www.the3dshop.com He is from Taiwan and all the chaps in his shop are oriental too. I don't understand them sometimes, but they are great. I go there and talk with the people putting the machines together. They have a lot of tricks. I also live in Montreal part of the year. Our IT guy is a big gamer and he takes me to a shop in Laval, Quebec that has very god prices. I don't remember the name, but they are very well know for the game stuff.

 

I hope this thing ends up being fast.....

 

Thanks

Elliot

[Elliot]

Hello,

 

As I am moving along with this project I come along with the issue of cooling. Everybody, including Intel, are telling me that these 3.6 ghz Xeon produce an overwhelming amount of heat. Cooling is critical, including the cooling of the 4 1 gig DDR-2 memory. The last machine I built sounds like a Tornado approaching a full steam train on a head on collision..... with huricane on the side.... Noisy.....!!!!

 

Supermicro is remoending to use one of their tower chasis. However, they already warned me that they are noisy. Does anybody here knows of a quiet case with enough power 700 watts or higher and a lot of CFM of cooling breeze.

 

Supermicro put in touch with an application engineer. This guy is recommending I do as much RAM as possible.... What is the take on this. I always thought there was a limit to the maximun usable memory. Is that a software limitation by Discreet or is it a limitation from Windows. This application engineer suggested that perhaps I should use a Windows 2003 Server OS. He said it may be more efficient to run the 3D software.

 

Thanks

Elliot