Time for a new God Box. Suggestions?

[rhys]

December is here, which means not so much holidays as the last
opportunity to incur business expenses. This means I should think
about my next graphics-oriented workstation. My current rig is four
years old and is comprised of the following:

ASUS CUVX-D mobo.
2 PIII 1 GHz processors,
3 x 512 Meg. RAM modules.
ATI Radeon 8500 video card
3 EIDE drives with 10 partitions totalling about 140 gigs of space.
Currently it's about 50% full.

I have a more recent Viewsonic 19" LCD and various routers and
peripherals and UPSes that are current, so I am needing only to
replace the rig. The rig itself is only recently showing signs of age,
particularly since I installed Adobe InDesign CS 2 and continued to
run five or so applications alongside.

Here's my RFP parameters:

New rig must be ROBUST. This is not a gaming/ 3-D video editing
machine, but a business/graphics workstation. Consequently, I can get
slightly less than leading edge processors because I will almost
certainly max out the RAM.

New rig must be FLEXIBLE. My replacement cycle is typically four
years. This machine must be able to run the next generation of Windows
64-bit OS (I would prefer Linux, but current drivers and compiles of
my main apps don't deal well outside of Apple and Windoze) without
sluggishness until 2009-10. This means if I have to spend more today,
I don't care.

New rig must be QUIET. The old rig is noisy and despite changing the
fans out and despite it running at normal clock speed and generally
cool (under 50 C), it is a bare bones tower that's way too loud. I
will pay to get a quiet case, but I will likely need a 400-450w PSU.
My current UPS monitoring software says I draw a steady 175 watts,
rising to 225 when I'm going full tilt.

I think there's a price premium for dual core that is not reflected in
performance. Also, if a dual core blows, you are dead, whereas if one
of two discrete processors blow, you can soldier on at a slower rate.
Consequently, I am gravitating toward top-end Opterons. I believe ASUS
doesn't make AMD-compatible boards, so I would next choose Tyan.

I would stick with ATI for a fast 2-D vid card. I like ATI and they're
local to me.

So, given those broad parameters, how would the high foreheads here
spec out my next rig? Budget is (relatively) open. Getting it robust
and right at the end of 2005 for use until the end of 2009 is
essentially, as far as that is possible. Current rig will become a
file server.

Thanks!

R.

 

[Marc]

New rig must be QUIET. The old rig is noisy and despite changing the
fans out and despite it running at normal clock speed and generally
cool (under 50 C), it is a bare bones tower that's way too loud. I
will pay to get a quiet case, but I will likely need a 400-450w PSU.
My current UPS monitoring software says I draw a steady 175 watts,
rising to 225 when I'm going full tilt.

If you want a silent case, take a look at big towers like the
Coolermaster Stacker. It has room for large fans, and large fans make
little noise. Also: replace the stock cooler by an Artic Freezer 64 Pro,
and take a Zalman, or even fanless PSU.

I think there's a price premium for dual core that is not reflected in
performance. Also, if a dual core blows, you are dead, whereas if one
of two discrete processors blow, you can soldier on at a slower rate.
Consequently, I am gravitating toward top-end Opterons. I believe ASUS
doesn't make AMD-compatible boards, so I would next choose Tyan.

Asus makes quite a lot of S939 AMD motherboards, but their S940
motherboards are outnumberd by Tyan.

You don't have to choose between Dual-Core and Dual-Processor: AMD has
dualcore Opterons, so you could make a rig with four cores. That might
be a good idea anyways since more and more software becomes multithreaded.

I would stick with ATI for a fast 2-D vid card. I like ATI and they're
local to me.

Nvidia does have better cards at the moment, and even ATI's newest
series can't beat those.
That is in 3D though, I believe Matrox makes good 2D cards.

These are just a few suggestions: there are still several things you
need to decide for yourself, like how many processors you want, what you
want on your motherboard and what graphics card you want

Marc

 

[John Doe]

You don't have to choose between Dual-Core and Dual-Processor: AMD
has dualcore Opterons, so you could make a rig with four cores.
That might be a good idea anyways since more and more software
becomes multithreaded.

I think that multithreading is a common current programming practice
which is effective on ordinary current processors.

 

[Marc]

I think that multithreading is a common current programming practice
which is effective on ordinary current processors.

Most software still uses one thread, so it doesn't benefit from
dualcore. Since dualcore processors are becoming more and more popular,
programmers are starting to make software multithreaded.
Using multithreaded software when you only have one core will slow the
software down because the processor has to switch between threads all
the time.

Marc

 

[John Doe]

Most software still uses one thread,

I would like to see a citation for that. Maybe most software you or
I would write uses only one thread, but most commercial software of
any complexity probably uses more than one thread intended to be run
on single core processors.

Using multithreaded software when you only have one core will slow
the software down

I think it is more complex than that.

because the processor has to switch between threads all
the time.

The Framework does lots of switching.

Currently my single core CPU system has 33 processes and 430
threads.

It's a good/interesting question IMO. I could be wrong, but I doubt
that the relationship between multithreading and multiple core CPUs
is as strong as you think it is. Or maybe the material you are
familiar with doesn't well enough explain multithreading on single
core CPUs.

 

[rhys]

It's a good/interesting question IMO. I could be wrong, but I doubt
that the relationship between multithreading and multiple core CPUs
is as strong as you think it is. Or maybe the material you are
familiar with doesn't well enough explain multithreading on single
core CPUs.

Well, while I appreciate the debate, I would love to hear of some
anecdotal or benchmark recommendations for particular Tyan or other
boards capable of taking dual Opterons. My reasons for running dual is
that I've always run multi-processor-aware OSes and have frequently
used software (Photoshop, Illustrator, PageMaker, InDesign) capable of
making use of such architectures. Also, I have yet to hear a cogent
argument that puts dual-cores over dual processors, other than power
consumption. Certainly, there's a price premium in dual core CPUs that
I don't see gives such a huge performance kick, and my mandate is
robustness and expandability and quiet, anyway, over raw speed.

So can anyone critique or expand on my shopping list? Or tell me why I
should stick with Intel over AMD at this stage?

Thanks,
R.