Operon Vs Xeon

Posts moved from car comparo

trying to salvage this somewhat....

neutrino,
opteron or xeon?
i've been toying with the idea of getting myself a dual xeon set-up for work purposes
(if i can afford it, a quad set-up would be nice and probably set me up pc wise for the next few years....).
typical use for 3DSmax, Premiere, Autocad, Microstation, Photoshop, Illustrator.
i still keep hearing nothing but praises for the xeon.
I also have no idea what constitutes a decent graphics card these days.
the thing i'm using now is a Ti4600 with 256.

of course i could fall foul to fashion and get the latest G5 mac......
(but that would mean losing my beloved 3DSmax...)

any recommendations?

Well I respect intel but I'm a pureblood AMD fanboy. Fact is intel went the wrong way with their long pipelines that required faster and faster clock speeds. Now they got stuck so they have to change their entire architecture and basically follow up AMD's lead.

For the programs you plan a multi proc system will make a huge difference. I know photoshop has support for multiple procs and probably the rest do too. Most serious profesional multimedia will take advantage of that feature since they can run multiple treads simultanuiusly.

Now to get to the hardware this is what what I would recomend:

for a quad opteron board:

http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8qspro.html
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8qs.html

the two boads are similar I belive the only diff is that one can take 20 GB of men and the other 32

they are loaded to the max: 4 pci express slots and looking at their size none if that wusy 1x version. 2 gigabites ethernet controllers, sata with raid, even optional scsi raid.

those boards should be around 1800 USD. I can find an exact price if you would like. The catch with those is that 800 series opterons designed for 4-8 proc work are quite pricy.

Probably the best deal is to go with a dual opteron system.

http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8w.html

that dual car will be around 400-500 USD and its also super loaded 4 pci express, 1 agp 8x, 1 gb lan, sata with raid option, firewire, up to 16gb mem

and the 200 series (1-2 procs) are much cheaper an opteron 242 will cost 250 USD retail(you can find it even cheaper.

This is an overview. If you like more details just ask.

Also don't go with a G5 i can show you benchmarks where a dual G5 got killed by single pentium 4 EE and a athlon fx33. They only use a "borowed" CPU from IBM.

Note for the other mods. Don't close this thread, i'll leave it open till midnight for gilamman to clear his name then all the computer posts will be moved to the computer section.
........................

.....hey, thanks for the info.
i'm in the uk so the prices you find might not be that relevant but i guess they'll still be a good guide
(and well, mail order exists....)

i've seen some benchmark tests that put the dual xeons at being slightly faster than a dual opteron, especially for 3DSmax renders, which is my main graphics rendering program.
admittedly only by about 4-5 seconds but as the object/system count goes up, those seconds rack up.....
(i once had to wait for 30+hours to render a 5 minute scene that had maybe 10 too many water fountains....)

hmm, thanks again.
always good to get another opinion on things.


and i never knew there was a computor forum here.....

.....hey, thanks for the info.
i'm in the uk so the prices you find might not be that relevant but i guess they'll still be a good guide
(and well, mail order exists....)

i've seen some benchmark tests that put the dual xeons at being slightly faster than a dual opteron, especially for 3DSmax renders, which is my main graphics rendering program.
admittedly only by about 4-5 seconds but as the object/system count goes up, those seconds rack up.....
(i once had to wait for 30+hours to render a 5 minute scene that had maybe 10 too many water fountains....)

hmm, thanks again.
always good to get another opinion on things.


and i never knew there was a computor forum here.....

quick question those 3-4 sec gained by the xeons were over what period of time?

if i recall correctly it was a 1024x768 scene (don't remember the frame count or number of frames)
dual xeon 3.06GHZ.
time for xeon render was 50-60 secs.

i can't really remember the exact figures but the gist was that the dual opterons were running at a slower clock speed but wasn't that much slower.

i should say though, that this must've been near the beginning of this year......
i'm not really a pc person and don't really keep track of things.
i've only recently thinking about a new pc cos workload is increasing and i might have to bring a lot of it home.

the other option is to get two pcs and have one purely for running renders while i construct/model on the other one.

the most annoying thing is having the pc tied up on a long render when i also need to get some plans/sections drawn up.

if i recall correctly it was a 1024x768 scene (don't remember the frame count or number of frames)
dual xeon 3.06GHZ.
time for xeon render was 50-60 secs.

i can't really remember the exact figures but the gist was that the dual opterons were running at a slower clock speed but wasn't that much slower.

i should say though, that this must've been near the beginning of this year......
i'm not really a pc person and don't really keep track of things.
i've only recently thinking about a new pc cos workload is increasing and i might have to bring a lot of it home.

the other option is to get two pcs and have one purely for running renders while i construct/model on the other one.

the most annoying thing is having the pc tied up on a long render when i also need to get some plans/sections drawn up.


If your work requires big rendering projects then a high capacity system is a must. Make sure you custom build it, those "brand name" computers often use the lowest price components and those that don't like alienware are too expensive.


Before choosing to go with either a xeon or opteron based system you might want to contact the sofware company that does your main rendering sofware and ask them if they have optimised they program for one brand or another, also ask them if their sofware can take advantage of a multi cpu environment.

Also create a striped RAID array with SATA or if you can afford it with SCSI drives. If you're going to use more than 3 drives in the array don't use a PCI raid card since 3 drives will max out the PCI bus.

Also make sure to use low latency memory something like 2-2-2-5 since that will make a huge performance difference.


Multiple cpus with raid 0 and low latency mem should cut significantly your rendering time.