hello! my old workstation died yesterday, an i am looking to buy a new system on monday or tuesday. i dont have enough liquid money right now, so. i'll be buying only the mobo, procs, RAM, PSU and one HDD - just enough to get the system up and running for now. ove the next few months, i'll be adding other HDDs, gfx cards, building the chasis, and getting dual 21/23 inch CRTs. as of now, i have shortlisted these components to be on the system. i would dearly appreciate if you could comment on the architecture. MotherBoard - Intel Server Board - S-5000-PSL-ROMB http://serverconfigurator.intel.com/details.aspx?id=1449 3*PCI Express x8 1*PCI Express x4 2*PCI x-64 100/133 Processor - Intel Quad Xeon two choices: X5450 - http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SLASB X5460 - http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SLANP RAM: i have simply no idea. i really dont have any need for ECC or registers, but the mobo doesnt support unbuffered RAM. so i am being forced to go in for fully buffered DDR2-667 RAMs can you recommend any good RAMs? i will put in 2 sticks of 2 gb for now, and more of the same later when money permits. PSU: zebronics is the only supplier of high end PSUs in india, though i will look around a bit more into this. will 650 watts be enough? HDD: i selected Seagate ST250032AS but it has a bad rep on the market. can you guys recommend a >500 GB sata drive that is cheap with >= 5 years warranty? waiting for you to hit the reply button, Ark!
That looks okay to me, not sure if the PSU will do the job - but it doesn't sound like you really have a choice. I think there's nothing wrong with that hard drive - it doesn't have a bad rep here. I don't know much about ECC RAM, I guess you'll just need to get whatever fits - probably FB-Dimms for that board. Do you need a workstation class computer? You could get a very similarly-specced consumer Quad-core for a lot less money (e.g. Q9450).
5 year warrentys are overrated imo, in 5 years time are you going to care about a 500gb harddrive, do you care about the drive you bought 5 years ago now
thank you for the replies! @oasked: i got leads to a dual redundant IBM PSU i dont have any info about them, but i'll get to see them tomorrow. i only know that it is 600*2 watts with internal interconnect. about the HDD, many people here in India told me that there were problems. i told my vendor to get me details of available 500 GBs and 750 GBs he would get back to me with specsheets and proice data tomorrow. i'll post as soon as i lay my paws on them. but holy cow! they are quite cheap! this system will be primarily be: a workstation running either win s2003 / vista / 8 - still scratching my head and occasionaly a server running fedora core there are data mining apps, a very large MySQL database and a organic molecule virtualizing application all of which are massively multithreaded - and very memory hungry. that is the reason i wish to have a xeon based system. @woodstock: well, it all in the mindset, i think. the western culture believes on a use and throw policy. we indians prefer to use and reuse and reuse. if you would believe me, i still have an old fully working 80386 with 8 mb of ram running DOS 6.22 that is used for data entry i do not mean to offend you in any way, just that i would really rest a bit easier if there is a fat warranty on the hardware... most of the components are having 3,5,7 years warranty. i expect the life of this system to be about 9-12 years, before it is canniballised and a new system put in its place. will come back tomorrow, and thanx again for all the replies! Ark!
ok fair point, if you realistically expect to be using the system that long, having thought about it with in 4 years you went to seagate with a 500gb drive i wouldnt be surprised if they replaced it with something a lil more in line with drives then, personally ill try find a use for an old computer even if its just fiddiling for s**ts and giggles
i went to seagate with a 4 gb drive which had a 7 year warranty, after about 5.5 years of owning it. they said they didnt have a 4 gb drive on stoick and replaced it with a 20 gb drive, and i had to pay only the shipping charge which was only about INR 200 (at the exchange rate of that time, about 4 USD) seagate, large warranty and me are made for each other! Ark!
time for a little update. i was running around the whole place getting prices for the mobo and the procs. very frankly, they are too high for my budget range. so the xeon way is out for the time being - i may visit that way in 2-3 years time - but not now. oasked, you were right, i was wrong. going the consumer desktop processor way is far cheaper (with only a little reduction in performance). feel free to bash my head a coupla times! i found that core 2 quad extremes were more or less okay. do you guys know of any mobos that are dual socketed? help! Ark!
Non-Xeon processors will not work in a dual socket board. Xeons have extra circuitry that allows two DP Xeons or many MP Xeons to coexist in a system. I have many dual Xeon systems. In my experience Kingston RAM is dependable - I've never had a problem. Also remember with the Intel server board you're considering, graphics cards are going to be problematic. If you want a modern fast graphics card, you need a PCI Express x16 slot. It's possible to use a x8 slot with a x8 to x16 adapter for a x16 graphics card, but of course the bandwidth is halved. You may want to consider a workstation board rather than a pure server board. Tyan, ASUS and others make such boards. I've used both Tyan and ASUS with no problems.
@okapi: do you mean to say that there are no dual socketed motherboards for the pentium socket 775's?? Kingston is available here. i am wanting to go in for a workstation board, but my application has 7 threads (one control thread and 6 worker threads), so i am wishing for a 8 core system. 2 quad cores will solve that. but xeons is too procey and is out for the time being. can you recommend anything other than xeons?
You could look for a cheaper 2nd hand 5300 Xeon barebones or if you don't go for Xeons, AMD Opterons, specifically in a Tyan 2927 board. It's ATX and supports 16x PCI-E and SLI. What's your budget?
for that app you're doing it sounds like CUDA is a perfect fit if the application you're using has an interface for it. (or simply write one) with that you could build a desktop system with a budget processor and get a geforce 9 series and have that do the heavy lifting. you might want to look at older opteron systems. they still give good multicore performace, at a much lower price point than absolute cutting edge xeon systems. (now wait while I hit myself for suggesting AMD) really its all about your research. as long as you research your choices thoroughly, you'll do just fine.
