Building new system.

[Adolfo Rozenfeld 0]

You may find this article on building ur own MacPro equivalent interesting:You may find this article on building ur own MacPro equivalent interesting:

 

What a shameless piece of misinformation, from start to finish. Anybody who makes a comparison using Apple RAM and hard drive prices is intentionally deforming reality to make it fit into a prejudice (evidently, "Macs are expensive").

 

Everybody knows Apple's pricing for extra RAM and hard drives are ridiculous. Just by not buying the extra RAM and HD from them the prices will fall enormously.

[monovich 0]

good point, although I was more interested in the specific hardware he used than the comparison to apple.

[the_Monkey 8]

Why on earth would anybody overclock a work machine?

 

-m

[Adolfo Rozenfeld 0]

Why on earth would anybody overclock a work machine?

 

-m

 

If it's reasonably cooled and overall stability is not affected, I don't see why not.

[Phil 0]

The list below may help as a starting point. My good chum ollie sent me his parts spec of a 8 core machine he was planning last year.

He's built dual cpu machines before and I respect his opinion on all things geek...

 

£802 2x Intel Xeon X5355 2.66GHz, FSB 1333MHz,

£221.44 Supermicro X7DAL-E, Intel 5000X, LGA 771, DDR2 FBD, SATA, SATA RAID, ATX 1

£239.98 4GB Corsair Server, DDR2 PC2-5300 (667), ECC Registered/Fullybuffered,

£84.89 Akasa Mirage-62 V2 Midi Tower Case

£249.88 768MB ScanFX 8800GTX, PCI-E (x16),

£76.79 700W Coolermaster Real Power M700 with PCI-E, SATA 1

£16.49 2u AKASA AK-384 Xeon Cooler

 

 

(the prices are 5 months out of date)

[Adolfo Rozenfeld 0]

good point, although I was more interested in the specific hardware he used than the comparison to apple.

 

Agreed.

But the computer industry, stupid as it may be, is largely based in the notion that the latest, highest processor costs twice as much as the one below it.

 

So, building an octo-core or quad-core with the 2.4 or 2.66 ones can make complete sense, no doubt about it, but the Mac Pros are actually amazingly affordable (and this is why that article is very dishonest). I believe the cost for end users for the top Xeon processors *alone* is about $1500-1800.

 

The article is also very dishonest because it pretends that the SSE4.1 instruction set in the newer processors supposedly makes them 50 per cent faster (a claim Mac users know very well from the Altivec days). These special instructions take years to be taken advantage of, and only provide such performance boosts under ideal conditions.

 

Anyway, the important thing is yes, you can buy/build an amazingly powerful computer for not so much.

 

I personally can't wait for quad-core laptops

Edited March 14, 2008 by Adolfo Rozenfeld

[monovich 0]

alright guys. thanks again for the info. here is where I landed. Decided to go 4 core upgrade instead of getting an all-new system. There was a pretty big price hit to go 8 core, so I stayed conservative (ya know: with investment banks failing, gas going 4+, and wheat prices tripling, you never can be too cautious).

 

I'm going to gut one of my renderboxes and throw this stuff in there. I'll stay with my 7800GTX for video, its been great. I bought the drive to throw old projects on and the RAID card because this new mobo only has 4 hookups and I've got quite a few internal drives. I was going to go Vista 64, but I think I'll move one of my XP64 seats to it and see if I'm happy.

 

If you like, let me know if anything looks weird.

 

thanks!