Time to upgrade my desktop...

[quok]

Well, it seems the motherboard in my Athlon64 X2 desktop died. It's been some time since I actually sat at that thing, preferring to use one of my laptops for the most part lately. I noticed a while ago the machine was unresponsive to ping and I shut it off, but I just got around to diagnosing the problem. The motherboard is Socket 939, so pretty obsolete. I even have an old Socket 939 Athlon XP laying around that I threw in there to make sure it wasn't the CPU.

So I guess it's computer upgrade time. I've not kept up to date with the latest and greatest, so I'm hoping for some advice here. I'm looking for at least dual core (but preferably quad core), the ability to throw in at least 8GB of RAM, PCIe 2.0, and if at all possible, EFI. My DVD+-RW DL is still PATA, so that would be nice but I can always upgrade that to SATA if needed, or throw in an old PATA card I'm sure I have laying around somewhere. Onboard audio and gigabit ethernet would also be nice, but aren't required. I'm not at all a gamer anymore, so don't really need SLI support. I only plan on running linux, openbsd, and my own OS on this beast. I'll of course also test other hobbyist OS's, but Windows won't be getting to touch this machine.

The little bit of research I did tonight has me leaning toward the Core i7 over my traditional choice of AMD processors. I also prefer to use hardware that has documentation available for it, but I'm not going to be super stingy on that.

Price does matter, but I've not yet figured out my budget either, so pretty much any suggestions would be welcome. I'm also interested in opinions on vendor/manufacturer as well and any experiences you may have with getting warranty support or otherwise dealing with the vendor or manufacturer.

I don't need to buy anything right away, so I may just end up waiting for the Core i7 to gain MP support as well. Although I figure with Christmas coming and nothing else to put on my wishlist, a couple of parts would at least be something to give the wife something to shop for.

Thanks in advance for all your suggestions!

[01000101]

Well, I am not a gamer either, so I always lean towards server motherboards/processors.

I'd suggest the SUPERMICRO MBD-X7DWE-O Dual LGA 771 Intel 5400 ATX Server Motherboard with a couple of quad-core Xeon's and 4+ gigs of ram. That board will fit a standard mid-size case (unlike most server motherboards as they are E-ATX form factor) and will allow for alot of later upgrading if you don't want to load it up from the start. Comes with 2x gigabit ethernet adapters and an 'OK' video controller (I'd upgrade a bit).

I built a very similar machine recently and loaded it with 2 Xeons and 8 gigs of mem for under $1200. I put a NVIDIA 8400 in mine (PCI card).

[JackScott]

Motherboard Brands: Expensive ASUS boards are quite nice. Cheap ASUS boards are rubbish. Gigabyte are generally great (and are my favourite brand overall). If anybody EVER offers you ANYTHING made by Galaxy, throw it at their head.

In terms of CPU, I'd personally buy a C2Q 9xxx chip. The i7 chips are nowhere near the sweet spot yet. Of course, it depends on how close to bleeding edge you want to be. While AMD chips were nice (back with the socket Athlon FX 64 chips), Intel have a huge lead nowadays. AMD are really going to have to work to gain back that lead.

What I personally would buy right now: C2Q 9650, ATI 4870, Gigabyte GA-EP45T-DS3P, 4GB of RAM. It'll give you 95% of the performace of 'bleeding edge', for a lot less cost.

Since the release of the X58 chipset along with the Core i7 chips, I wouldn't buy DDR2 anymore. A new machine, I'd go DDR3 definitely.

[Owen]

Maybe it's just me - but I find nothing taxes my CPU that much these days. I have one of the older Athlon X2 4600+ (AM2) chips - and very rarely does it reach 100% usage. And thats even when I watch 1080p H.264 (Software decoded) or play one of the (few) games I play. Hell, even compiling rarely reaches 100% (And thats with make -j2) - most of the time these days everything is waiting for my RAID 1 array!

It just seems to me to be a bit worthless spending a fortune on a top of the range processor which will always sit arround idle. And I seriously want to know what you are doing that requires 8 cores and 8GB of RAM. I'm still on 2GB - and, indeed, until a short while ago was running on 1GB. Whil I still intend to stick another 2GB in soon, at 1GB I still had some free most of the time, and at 2GB at least 500mb is being used by Linux as disk cache. My swap partitions (I have two identically sized ones accross the 2 HDs which I have my data RAIDed accross) sit there unused most of the time.

And I still don't understand peoples love of quad cores - absolutely nothing uses them. Hell, the only reason dual cores are useful is that you can be doing useful stuff on one core and have the background tasks on the other. More cores just means less memory bandwidth - a very precious comodity - per core. And thats if they can find something useful to do.

Massive numbers of cores really only works well for servers - which run lots of tasks in parallel anyway - or if you have it organized like the Cell does, where they act as high performance math coprocessors which access memory in large DMA bursts (The bursts being far more efficient than normal random access with DRAM).

Basically, my suggestion is evaluate what you do with your PC, and pick what gives you the performance you need at the best price. Fortunately for them, AMD still hold the cheap end of the market.

[AJ]

And I seriously want to know what you are doing that requires 8 cores and 8GB of RAM.

Virtualisation, here we come! Great for both servers (as you say) and OS testing

And I still don't understand peoples love of quad cores - absolutely nothing uses them.

If you're heavily in to video editing, there are more and more programs around that make use of multithreading now. In fact, I'm writing several utilities in C# at the moment that heavily rely on multithreading (very useful for indexing content in the background while the user still has a responsive UI to play with!).

IMHO, the more cores (and RAM), the merrier. Certainly with the cost of DDR2 as it is at the moment, there's no reason not to go for 8GB of RAM if you're running a 64 bit OS. The cost of DDR3 is still a bit limiting at the moment. If you have the budget and like top end kit though, why not?

Cheers,
Adam

[01000101]

And I still don't understand peoples love of quad cores - absolutely nothing uses them.

uhm... my OS uses them. It actually is designed for them. Also, I max them out when packet flooding (using multi-threaded generators), compiling large apps, using BOINC, playing high-end games, virtualizing multiple guests and generating network traffic, and the list goes on.

Basically, my suggestion is evaluate what you do with your PC, and pick what gives you the performance you need at the best price. Fortunately for them, AMD still hold the cheap end of the market.

You get what you pay for.

[quok]

Basically, my suggestion is evaluate what you do with your PC, and pick what gives you the performance you need at the best price. Fortunately for them, AMD still hold the cheap end of the market.

Yup, that's what I did, and that's why I said I'd prefer dual core, and the ability to throw in 8GB of RAM.

I really didn't think I'd need to explain why I'm looking to build such a beast of a machine. Well, perhaps it's not a beast, just something modern. I plan on using quite a bit of virtualization, perhaps even running MythTV in a VM. My wife also does a lot of video editing, so I may end up throwing Windows on there after all so she can do that. I'll also probably take my old fileserver and turn that in to a VM running on the thing as well. Then there's the OS testing I'm going to do, and the development of my own OS project as well as the other dev projects of mine.

So I think a quad core with plenty of RAM is quite well justified here. Even on my MacBook Pro I find myself waiting on the CPU a lot more often than I'd like.

[Combuster]

I tend to agree on not needing high-end equipment. All hardware I ever bought was always under €50 a piece (processor, ram, GPU, mobo). When I buy something I get something that's in performance one year behind the current state of the art. That means I pay one-third of the price and still be able to do anything that's currently out there. And in a few years, I can give the computer a second round by updating the graphics card and processor, and that way I can enjoy a computer for three years for €400 without having something that's truly dated. If I'd buy a high end I'd be done for the same amount of years, but I'd have to pay €800 for that. (saves money for 8 good games so that you can actually use what you got )

For those who want to complain: good games don't require high-end equipment, tasks that require quad-core performance take a long time anyway, and in any case you'll be doing something else in the meantime which doesn't mind taking another 15 minutes.

$.02

[JackScott]

Then, just to screw things around a bit, there's people like me who put water cooling on old Pentium IIIs.

[01000101]

I have water cooled somewhat dated hardware just to test its overclocking abilities. I've pumped alot of power out of older cpu's.

[Steve the Pirate]

Cheap ASUS boards are rubbish. Gigabyte are generally great (and are my favourite brand overall).

I completely agree - I've built a computer with an Asus board that has had heaps of problems with the motherboard, but the two computers that I built with cheaper Gigabyte boards have been rock solid.

[01000101]

And I've had the exact opposite experience, so I don't think that should hold weight as an argument.