I've been insanely busy with work recently, but on the plus side I finally have the budget to replace my workstations. I've decided to make a matched pair compliant with Hollywood Institute for AI (tm) standards as well as actual utility. So far I've bought the following non-performance-related parts;
2 x
Lian Li Legacy PC-777 (modified to accept E-ATX motherboards)
2 x
NorthQ Giant Reactor 1000W power supplies
4 x
Zalman Reserator 1 V2 fanless water cooling systems
2 x
DeCK Legend Keyboards
2 x Razer Diamondback Mice + Illuminated Mousepads
Yes I use software KVM (
Synergy2 in fact) but sometimes it's just useful to have a keyboard/mouse for each computer. Plus now I have a neat case (EL)/keyboard/mouse/mousemat lighting theme going - blue on the silver machine, red on the black machine - and that's essential for Hollywood Institute for AI (tm) hardware approval (still need some blinkenlights of course...).
I've just ordered a couple of
HP LP2065 20-inch LCD monitors; they're 1600 x 1200 and have the same width as a 30" widescreen is tall. I'm planning to get a
Samsung-SyncMaster-305T after Christmas, which is 2,560 x 1,600, and should work well as the center monitor with the HPs in portrait mode on each side as secondary monitors (for viewing documentation, web pages etc). Since my old 5.1 hi-fi system is a) huge, b) out of date and c) now permenantly installed in the living room, I'll put in a new 7.1 system with hi-fi bookshelf speakers. This is of course another essential part of HIfAI compliance, so that once the AI turns sapient (and rouge) it can inform everyone in earshot of its superiority and plans for world domination in a sultry yet sinister voice.
...
Ok, getting serious, I do actually need some new computers to go with these cases/peripherals in the next few months. I've transferred over a couple of my old dual-Opteron motherboards for now but they're frustratingly slow for some of the development work I'm doing. The main job of these machines is to compile and run prototype AI software, but I want to use them for gaming as well (possibly sometimes my partner gaming on one and myself using the other). The options I am considering are;
1) Wait for Intel's Skulltail platform to come out. Get two and overclock them (I have a water cooling system per processor after all). That should mean two 4.2GHz ish quad-core processors per machine.
Advantages; highest single-threaded speed possible.
Disadvantages; low reliability, low component life.
Sucky memory latency, low memory capacity (only four FB-DIMM slots; and I hate FB-DIMM)
2) Get a couple of dual-Xeon workstation motherboards and put 3 GHz quad Xeons in them.
Advantages; reasonable single-threaded speed, reasonable memory capacity (eight FB-DIMM slots), reliable, lower power consumption than the other options.
3) Get a pair of
Thunder n3600QE (S4980) Quad-Opteron motherboards. Wait for the 2.5GHz Opteron quad-cores to come out, put four in each machine for 32 cores total.
Advantages; Twice as many cores - probably faster than the Skulltrail system on the main AI system (which parallelises well up to 64 threads per node or so). Huge memory capacity (16 DDR2 slots - and DDR2 is cheaper than FB-DIMMs so I could actually fill them with 32 gigs per machine). Unbeatable memory bandwidth on NUMA-compatible applications.
Disadvantages: Relatively low single-threaded performance, only one PCI-E slot so no SLI possible, needs a USB sound solution.
One problem with this board is that it's a socket F solution, not a socket F+ solution; it has ring hypertransport rather than fully connected. Plus AMD will hopefully get off their assess and enable registered DDR2-800 support sometime soon; DDR2-667 is looking kinda slow (but then, with eight memory channels it's still faster than the Intel solutions).
4) Get one dual-Xeon Skulltrail system and one quad-Opteron system. I'm leaning towards this option at the moment.
5) Any other suggestions?
I'll probably get four terabyte hard drives for each and put them in RAID5. Important stuff is replicated to both machines and backed up off site anyway.
No, I'm not waiting a whole year for Nehalem to come out.
