Architecture Student - Advice on Final Workstation Configuration

[EricPoehlsen]

sorry that i will not give you constructrive comment on your content but on the title:

You will never have the final workstation configuration you will have to get a new one every now and then :)

[thephalinx]

Obviously. This is Final decision on what I"m gonna buy this week.

[Simon]

Get the sata drive. Sata cables are much smaller than ide and the interface is much faster.

[lots]

Motherboard (~$236)
-Tyan Tiger k8w (picked over the k8t Master2 FAR because that board will void the opeteron warranties due to the heatsink and fan situation.)

Memory (~$208)
-Corsaid 1gb(512x2) ECC Registered DDR PC-3200 (must be registered memory, will buy another 1g asap. Not to worried about having all 4 DIMM slots filled since this mother board doesn't really take advantage of the 128bit buffer and even if it did it wouldn't give me that great a performance increase from what I see)

Hard Drive (~120)
-200GB Western Digital 7200 (Haven't yet decided if SATA or IDE, I don't know lots about SATA, I'm a bit out of the loop lately)
-Existing 250GB External Maxtor HD (which rocks)

Case (~$160)
-Thermatake ATX Full Tower (7 fans with fronts side fan and temp control, 420w Power Supply)

Motherboard: Its a good board, but maybe you should opt for Tyans upcoming board based on the Nforce4 Pro 2200+2050 the Thunder K8WE? I know its about double the price, but on the plus side you get SCSI and SLI ;) Not to mention a much better feature set and performance out of the Nforce4, as opposed to the AMD8000 chipset found on the Tiger K8W.

Another option is IWill's DK8N, which is based on the Nforce3 Pro, features AGP insted of PCIe, if the PCIe video card selection is priced a bit too steep. It is also quite a bit better in terms of features and performance than the TIger K8W, but it falls into a similar price range as the Thunder K8WE, which means if this is too pricy for you, you're out of luck.

RAM: I think you're a little confused.. All Opterons are dual channel capable. This has nothing to do with the motherboard, well aside from having the leads. This is because the memory controller resides on the Opteron its self and not the motherboard. Thus why any Opteron board can use dual channel and needs to have Registered DIMMS (ignoring that Abit board for the time being :P). So you should be able to get dual channel from the Tiger, but you will not get NUMA support, which may or may not be a big problem. It really depends on the types of apps and calculations you use.

Hard Drive: If SCSI is out of your price range, go for SATA. Go for a second generation Raptor (The 74Gig version) or something that uses NCQ. No real point in sticking with the IDE stuff since its all about the same price, plus you get some benifit from having those small cables and cooling. SATA wont bring you any speed benifits if it does not have NCQ or faster RPMs than the IDE drives. In most cases the "cheap" SATA drives are just the IDE drives with the SATA plug slapped on the back. This doesnt bring any speed boosts in most cases.

Case: I'd be careful with that powersupply. This is a higher class board than what you find in your average joe's machine. You are also trying to power two CPUs and a high end video card. And just from the pictures of the motherboard on newegg, you probably will need an EPS12V PSU that has an 8pin connector. Which means that measily ATX PSU that comes with the case will not cut it. Plus it is better to put money into a good quality PSU than to have a bad one blow your entire system. Which would probably cost more in the end ;)

I'd recommend something like the PC Power and Cooling Turbo-Cool 510 AG or 510 XE. Both of which are $200 :P.

[thephalinx]

Thanks for the tips

Good to know about the SATA also. I was wondering why there wasn't a real price difference between some of the SATA and IDE drives.

As for the power supply, the Tyan Tiger K8W motherboard can connect to both a standard PSU and EPS12v PSU as long as you have a 20-pin ATX and a 4-pin +12v connector. I'll check out those more powerful ones though.

As for the RAM, on the Tyan Tiger K8W each processor doesn't not have direct access to its own memory bank. The first processor has a dual channel interface with the system memory, but the second processor requests memory through the first processors bus. One of the downsides of getting the cheaper board, but I won't really need that kind of bandwidth for what I'll be doing, so I think it's worth it to get the cheaper board for now, seeing as the budget is very tight for this.

Thanks again.

[lots]

Well thats what I was refering to with the NUMA stuff about the RAM. CPU1 will have to use CPU0's memory controller to access RAM, thus you get a performance hit due to the extra step on the second CPU. Though in practice this generally doesnt hurt too many things, plus you'd need an OS with NUMA support anyway.

NUMA definately helps out in the server/data base market tho :)


PSUs: I'm just not sure I would trust ThermalTake power supplies. I would definately invest in a PSU with a better reputation, seeing as how this will probably be a fairly expencive system. You do want to protect that investment with a quality PSU :)

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