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Author Topic: Most powerful computer possible for a reasonable price  (Read 16983 times)
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ker2x
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« Reply #15 on: March 22, 2012, 02:44:43 AM »

Oops, i forgot my usual advice about power supply.

Don't buy a cheap power supply, never ! Seriously ... NEVER !
Cheap power supply are dangerous with poor to none protection.
The Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold (with different wattage from 600 to 1200watts) look like a wise choice.

And as a PS : Feel free to avoid SSD. You'll save money and problems. grin
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often times... there are other approaches which are kinda crappy until you put them in the context of parallel machines
(en) http://www.blog-gpgpu.com/ , (fr) http://www.keru.org/ ,
Sysadmin & DBA @ http://www.over-blog.com/
Dinkydau
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« Reply #16 on: March 22, 2012, 03:52:13 AM »

Why do you think intel is better? (interested)
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stardust4ever
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« Reply #17 on: March 22, 2012, 04:10:17 AM »

I currently have a q6700, 4×2,66 GHz. The i7 2600 is owned by a friend of me who did benchmark tests for me. The time I have posted are using the q6700. The i7 2600 is 1,7 times faster than the q6600, your fx-8150 is 2,7 faster than the q6700, not the i7 2600. Sorry, this messes up the calculations. There's still an advantage. Without overclock, your CPU is 3,6 GHz, so to get the original speed, we have to multiply by
3,6/4,2 = 0,857~
I have fixed this info in the Benchmark thread. I had thought it seemed a little slow at first, but I posted anyway. I had a hunch the Bulldozer might beat the Sandy Bridge, but I didn't think it would be that significant. My main reason for insisting on going with AMD processors isn't just the performance, but price as well. A high-end AMD processor is far less expensive than a high-end Intel, so even if Intel's greatest offering beats it, you're still getting more bang per buck.

I think you could very well be right on that. For a moment I had been thinking of buying magny-cours 12-core CPUs. But then I saw the prices. Here's the interlagos 6272 which I want to buy, 16 cores at 2,1 GHz:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113036
And here's the magny-cours 12-core equivalent:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819105264
Yikes! That's a huge price difference. You'd think the latest and greatest would be more expensive, rather than twice as cheap! but considering that the Intel i7s got up to nearly a thousand dollars, you may actually have a deal on your hands with the new Opterons.

Thanks for the suggestion. Thus far I was having a look at this case:
http://www.coolermaster.nl/product.php?product_id=5363
It's probably very unprofessional to take the looks into consideration, but the case you suggest looks awesome, what a monster of a machine. That thing will impress more than the toy in the link above. I'll have to find more information on cases, see which is the best deal here. Money is very important.
Hey, thanks! Yeah, The one you were looking at seems nice as well. With as many fans as it's got, you could probably wire them up to 5V instead of 12V to stay quiet, and still have plenty of cooling. I also have a red LED fan in my drive bay, although you can't really see the glow from it when the lid is closed. Beware, the case weighs a lot, almost 50 pounds; that's like 22Kg! So it's a pain when I have to pull it from under the table to tinker with it, but it's extremely sturdy, and does have a sleek, professional feel to it, or at least it did before I sprayed the Ms Pacman stencil on there! grin

Your story really sounds like a waste of money, no drivers and not the operating system you need.

I had just received a lot of inheritance money from my dad's passing, cry and invested half of it in annuities. The other half, well let's just say I was naive and stupid. I made a number of dumb purchases that year. hurt

Thank you very much for your extremely long post, I really appreciate it.
You're welcome!
« Last Edit: March 22, 2012, 04:12:50 AM by stardust4ever » Logged
ker2x
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« Reply #18 on: March 22, 2012, 05:15:10 AM »

Why do you think intel is better? (interested)

Well... all our servers at works are Intel (and we have a lot of them, mostly high-end Xeon) and we're happy with them.
Very good documentation and tools/library/software for intel stuff. (that's why i like NVidia too)

And, as far as i know, Intel are better than AMD for raw number crushing power and watts per GFlops (which is more important than the cost of the CPU itself when you're in a datacenter)
An example of article of AMD vs Intel : http://www.pcworld.com/article/225324/can_amd_ever_beat_intel.html
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often times... there are other approaches which are kinda crappy until you put them in the context of parallel machines
(en) http://www.blog-gpgpu.com/ , (fr) http://www.keru.org/ ,
Sysadmin & DBA @ http://www.over-blog.com/
Dinkydau
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« Reply #19 on: March 22, 2012, 07:04:37 PM »

The only real alternative for dual interlagos is dual xeon, which is damn expensive. Intel seems to win at almost everything, but the prices are high. Amd is not too expensive and performs well, especially at high precision.
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stardust4ever
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« Reply #20 on: March 22, 2012, 07:22:51 PM »

Why do you think intel is better? (interested)
That is one debate that has been around as long as Methuselah. Ask twenty different people, and you will get twenty different answers. I myself am in the AMD camp, and apparently, so is Adolf Hitler. Here's a hilarious video I found regarding Hitler's reaction to the Bulldozer/ Sandy Bridge fiasco:
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/SArxcnpXStE&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/SArxcnpXStE&rel=1&fs=1&hd=1</a>

And, as far as i know, Intel are better than AMD for raw number crushing power and watts per GFlops (which is more important than the cost of the CPU itself when you're in a datacenter)
An example of article of AMD vs Intel : http://www.pcworld.com/article/225324/can_amd_ever_beat_intel.html
. For the home user, I'd say performance per dollar is the deciding factor. My overclocked FX-8150 used to heat up the room about ten degrees hotter than it normally was. It was winter time, and I though shutting the door and shutting the vent would help, but it did the opposite. Now spring is here, and I opened the vents to the room and placed a personal 9" fan under the table and set it on "low". My problems with the computer room being hot, are gone now. Also, in Louisiana, our coal power plants only charge us about 4 US cents per Kilowatt hour, because coal is cheap in the south. Out in California, the price of electricity is much much higher (they also have different rates for day versus night), and in Europe, it is more than double California's rates.

On a side note, some of the classrooms at school have over 20 PCs in them. I can imagine that if they all had overclocked bulldozers running night and day at 100% load, a person could probably suffocate in there...
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Dinkydau
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« Reply #21 on: March 22, 2012, 08:34:15 PM »

If you had read the comments on that video you would have seen me trolling the anti-bulldozer people there.  cheesy I don't want to consider myself intel- or amd-fanboy, I'll just buy what's best (just like Hitler did after all). I do hope amd will get bigger but that's only because I think it's important to have competition.

What, 4 cents!? That's like 3 cents in euros. Here it's about 21 cents / kWh. That's a huge difference. I wish it was that cheap here.
« Last Edit: March 22, 2012, 08:36:46 PM by Dinkydau » Logged

stardust4ever
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« Reply #22 on: March 22, 2012, 08:57:42 PM »

If you had read the comments on that video you would have seen me trolling the anti-bulldozer people there.  cheesy I don't want to consider myself intel- or amd-fanboy, I'll just buy what's best (just like Hitler did after all). I do hope amd will get bigger but that's only because I think it's important to have competition.
LOL! I read your comment about the benchmark performing 35% better on the Buldozer. wink Competition is always good, but it is true that Intel is becoming more of an industry bully as of late. I also view Microsoft as an evil giant that everyone has to put up with. Apple is a good operating system, but there's hardly a decent selection of software written for it. Plus, their computers are somewhat overpriced. And no offense to Linux fans, but the OS is pretty hard to use, and has almost zero support outside of the open-sourced software market. tongue stuck out

What, 4 cents!? That's like 3 cents in euros. Here it's about 21 cents / kWh. That's a huge difference. I wish it was that cheap here.
One of the problems though with cheap energy, is that if energy is cheap, why bother investing in green technology? Green tech is kind if a luxury here where in the US where rich people can sit around doing squat and boast that they are helping the environment by spending tons of money on alternative energy and zero-emmisions, etc. It's especially a really big fad out west in California. As long as there is cheap coal and oil, the common people will will not invest in "green" energy, because the existing "black" energy from fossil fuels is much cheaper. It will be a slow process as fuel costs rise, making "green" energy more economical in the long run. I wish people would do more now rather than waiting on the infrastructure that we have been using the past hundred years to ultimately fail. I'm studying to be an electrical engineering technologist, but unless I move to California or up north somewhere, I'll probably end up staying in Louisiana, and my first job will likely be working in one of those smog plants. undecided
« Last Edit: March 22, 2012, 09:13:05 PM by stardust4ever » Logged
Dinkydau
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« Reply #23 on: March 23, 2012, 12:05:00 AM »

If green energy was produced on a large scale, it could be just as cheap. I think it's the job of the governments to do something about these problems. Unfortunately the world is nowhere near good yet. Things don't function like they should.
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ker2x
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« Reply #24 on: March 23, 2012, 07:31:59 AM »

Feel free to buy an AMD thingy smiley
But to the best of my knowledge, Intel CPU are better  grin
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often times... there are other approaches which are kinda crappy until you put them in the context of parallel machines
(en) http://www.blog-gpgpu.com/ , (fr) http://www.keru.org/ ,
Sysadmin & DBA @ http://www.over-blog.com/
hobold
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« Reply #25 on: March 23, 2012, 10:38:55 AM »

The quantity "processing speed" is not a single scalar number. There is more than one kind of data processing. One machine might excel at one kind of task, while another machine is better at some other task. If you know in advance what the machine is going to be used for, then measure exactly that.

The fact that Intel's newest processors are almost guaranteed to be faster in any computational benchmark does not contradict the possibility of Bulldozer being faster in bignum arithmetic. Bulldozer simply has more and faster integer multiplier hardware than a Core i-Something at a competing price point.


Ultimately the decision is between two equally expensive machines, where

- one computes very deeply zoomed fractals 30% to 50% faster,

- and the other machine is 30% to 50% faster for everything else.

So it all depends on how much time this machine will spend computing fractals as opposed to doing anything else.
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Dinkydau
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« Reply #26 on: March 23, 2012, 12:06:11 PM »

I'm going to click a button now that's gonna make me have to use the opteron 6272, unless there are unexpected problems at the shop. Thanks for the input. I will of course post benchmarks when everything is ready.
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stardust4ever
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« Reply #27 on: March 23, 2012, 02:50:25 PM »

I'm going to click a button now...
Do it! evil

Other thoughts: The 16-core Opteron 6272 is basically like having two FX-8150s clocked at 2.1Ghz. My FX-8150 is currently clocked at 4.2Ghz, so you should theoretically get about the same performance as my desktop system with 1 CPU. You will get considerable gains though using 2 or 4 processors, but if you want to use 4 sockets, you'll have to deal with Windows Server Edition. Also be aware that it is impossible to manually change the multiplier on these things, even if your motherboard supports it, since AMD does not manufacture Black Edition server processors.
« Last Edit: March 23, 2012, 03:25:01 PM by stardust4ever » Logged
Dinkydau
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« Reply #28 on: March 23, 2012, 03:32:23 PM »

The opteron 6272 can go 2,4 GHz turbo on all cores, and 3 GHz turbo on some cores. Windows server is no problem if required, software is free. wink For this, windows 7 is good enough.
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stardust4ever
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« Reply #29 on: March 24, 2012, 09:56:25 AM »

The opteron 6272 can go 2,4 GHz turbo on all cores, and 3 GHz turbo on some cores.
But can you make the processor stay there? On  mine, I had to change the multiplier under Bios so that the processor would always run max turbo. I imagine the Opteron will throttle itself. Even when I maunally set the multiplier to 21x to lock the processor at 4.2Ghz, my FX-8150 intermittently throttled down to a 3.3Ghz underclock during maximum load, until I disabled "Advanced Power Management" (APM) in BIOS, and it required a BIOS update in order to access this setting on my board. Of course you can always try to run AMD Overdrive if you can't tamper with it in BIOS. Good luck either way. Whatever speed it operates at, with two of them running, it will likely best mine by a lot. A score of sub <1 minute on my bench would be epic!

Another question: Are the Opterons set up for quad-channel memory? It seems like with 32 cores, the Hyper transport and memory bandwidth could use some headroom, although I doubt a deep precision program such as streamlined as Fractal Extreme would ever max out your memory or HT bandwidth.
« Last Edit: March 24, 2012, 10:07:31 AM by stardust4ever » Logged
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