I recently upgraded my main rig - now dual Xeon!

[spikegifted]

I don't know where to put this as there isn't a SMP-only section... So I thought overclocking is probably the only place to go.

I recently replace some parts of my main rig with the following:

Iwill DH800
Xeon 3.06 512kb 533MHz SL6VP
Swiftech MCX-603 Rev. 2 x 2
Tagan TG480-U01 EPS12V PSU
Kingston HyperX PC3500 CL2.0 512MB x 4

Due to the recent hot weather, I have to back off the overclocking a bit and my main aim is to get as high a FSB as possible and lower the multiplier when it becomes absolutely necessary to keep the rig stable... I haven't done any benchmarks yet, but these are some screen shots of CPUz:






Once I get some benchmarks done I'll post the screen captures.

Comments welcome...

[Bindibadgi]

No offence but your case looks mofo ugly What the hell do you use all that stuff for?? That's a mean setup mind

[r1zeek]

Dual Xeons, nice. What you use it for?
Coz thats pretty powerful as Bindibadgi says

[nakajima]

how much did you spend on that rig? Must have cost a bunch!

[Nemeliza]

Nice....Why do u have 3 CD drives?

[spikegifted]

The parts that I mentioned: CPUs, mobo, RAM, PSU and HSFs are all that have been changed - the rest of them are carried over from my previous setup up (which was TigerMPX, dual MP2600+, 1.5Gb Reg ECC PC2100, Enhance 480W PSU and GlobalWin CAK4-88...)

What do I use it for? I do a number of things with it:
3d Studio Max
Maya 4/5
VB5/VC++5
FrontPage/Office
Photoshop/Pagemaker
Director/Flash
DivX
etc...

I do rendering for some friends and 'clients' (I tried to setup a render farm business last year, but not got anywhere...) and I do some development work myself.

The picture is a little dated - trust me, I've tidied up the rig some what, so now it's just like a junk yard rather than after a battle!

The reason I've 3 optical drives in there is because I always used to have SCSI CD-ROM and CD-RW and then I add a SCSI DVD-ROM drive which is rather convenient - I can keep my MSDN CD in one of the drives and still use the others to copy, backup, etc when I need to search for stuff or look up reference. I won't know the pleasure of not having to swap CD is like until you try it for a while.

The RAID5 is a bit of a luxury, I know... but I want speed and reliability and I've been hurt really bad when a RAID0 failed before, I didn't want to risk it again... When the array fails, I just rebuild it and all the data and stuff is still there. The RAID1 is there for one reason and one reason only - redundancy. I regularly (7-10 days) backup to a directory another HDD and in longer interval (around 1-1.5 month) onto CD-R, which make my data relatively secure and I can always back track.

[Butuz]

Nice setup - particulary the Raid. I Feel your Raid0 pain for it is also in my mind

Xeons dont impress me anymore though, they used to be special but now they are just P4's with the SMP switch turned on and a price doublement. Your gonna have to find a Quad athlon64 board to really impress me

Butuz

[Kezzer]

Woah, someone's got more money than sense

[spazman]

Jeebus thats 1 hell of a PC

[spikegifted]

Woah, someone's got more money than sense

Huh... I felt that way when I first setup my rig (particluarly the RAID parts) back in 2001. However, since I'm only spending around £1,250 on the new parts, I pretty much have a new rig... I know it's hard to justify sometimes, but then again, I do feel that there's some justification in this upgrade.

[spikegifted]

Xeons dont impress me anymore though, they used to be special but now they are just P4's with the SMP switch turned on and a price doublement. Your gonna have to find a Quad athlon64 board to really impress me

Thanks for your comments...

Regarding Xeons, it is 'quad' processing on the cheap... Of course, I know better than to fool myself that I'm quad processing. However, it does help in some applications that like hyperthreading. Moreover, not all SMP applications like hyperthreading - think of ones that are particularly FP or integer intensive but not both - like rendering... Hyperthreading doesn't bring that much benefits to the table, but real SMP does... So in Xeons I think I've the best of both worlds.

With regards to owning a real quad physical CPU rig... I wish I'm that rich! Tyan actually has a couple of quad Opteron boards, but their own very nature, quad boards are not built for my rather average e-ATX box and I can't afford the processors! Last but not least, even if someone give me such a rig, I doubt I can afford the electricity bill in the long run...

[Swafe]

isnt there a 8 way opteron board? hmmmm new rig ideas...

[nakajima]

well i guess from the list of things you do with your com it seems reasonable to be using such a powerful rig

[spikegifted]

isnt there a 8 way opteron board?

Hmmm... I don't think so. Although the Opteron 8xx series are capable of 4-way and 8-way operations, there isn't a platform to flex its muscules, yet. However, you should bear in mind that even quad Opteron boards are not going to be available for retail (or at least very unlikely), so 8-way board will probably never show up in the retail channels.

[Swafe]

who said buy it from a retail channel

[Lexeus]

Yea, just nick it from a commercial channel