building a new rig quad xeon????

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Soldato
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well guys i fancy building a new rig cheap as possible for the sole purpose of playing FM2006 :) as such i have no need whatsoever for flashy whistley light up 3d cards :)

i was thinking along the lines of a quad or dual xeon motherboard from an auction site along with some appropriate processors seeing as a pair of 2.8 ghz xeons can be had for under 200 notes it got me thinking in terms of raw number crunching whats my best option?

all i need is some major grunt and a shed load of ram

feel free to slap me for being stupid but for what i need it seems an option
 
If you want it as cheap as possible for one game then why bother with dual or quad CPUs? Why not just get one fast CPU and a lot of Ram unless FM2006 supports multiple CPUs in which case I still think it is overkill but nevermind :)
 
what about going for AMD, and getting 2 of the dual core 275's slapped in a dual mobo. pick em up on auction sites for about £800 thats with two CPU's dual mobo and 2gb of ram
 
yup fm2006 does support multiple cpu's i'm just thinking about the xeons as there cheap as chips at auction
 
I would have thought that dual or quad xeons would be a tad overkill for fm2006, but if you can afford it and feel its worth it to play that then i would go for it and have fun!
 
You can definitely do dual Xeons for less than almost anything else out there. get a pair of D1 stepping 1.6LV Xeons (Prestonia core). These are the clockers. Get a gig or two of DDR400 and an Asus PC-DL Deluxe. There is an extremely easy wire mod that you can do to raise the CPU voltage from 1.3v to 1.6v. This will allow you to swap a jumper on the mobo enabling a 200 MHz FSB (quad pumped to 800 MHz). That is good for 3.21 GHz per chip. Snag a pair of the Intel stock IWT (Intel wind tunnel) copper heatsinks. Add drives (the mobo has sockets for 6 ATA and/or 8 SATA), PSU (at least 30A 12v+), and case. Season with the Graphics card of your choice.

I built one of those last fall for my new CAD workstation. It's performance is incredible for the money I spent. All said it ended up costing (all prices in USD) around $80 for both the CPUs, $100 for the 550W EPS12V PSU, $200 for the mobo, and $170 for 2 gigs RAM. I dare anyone with an X2, P4EE, or similar rig to beat this one in terms of total processing power/price.
 
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The only drawback of my setup is that the PC-DL (and its fancier, DDR2 cousin, the NCCH-DL) do not have PCI-Express slots. I'm limited to AGP Pro 8x graphics cards. Moving into PCI-E workstation boards makes them a lot more expensive (think at least twice as much).

BTW both the Asus boards mentioned are standard ATX compliant. I house mine in an ATX mid case. There's no reason to have to buy a huge and expensive WTX case for these machines.
 
Dual / Quad Xeon setup would be very nice indeed. Think of the amount of Folding a beast like that could do! :D

Just make sure you get a compatible motherboard and a 'supported' PSU (I think Xeon boards use the 8-pin EPS(?) power connector instead of the 4pin P4 connector).
 
Dunky said:
Dual / Quad Xeon setup would be very nice indeed. Think of the amount of Folding a beast like that could do! :D
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Bingo! That's exactly why I built mine. CAD work be damned! :D

Dunky said:
Just make sure you get a compatible motherboard and a 'supported' PSU (I think Xeon boards use the 8-pin EPS(?) power connector instead of the 4pin P4 connector).
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The Asus boards I mentioned will take a standard 20 pin PSU just as long as you've got an adaptor feeding it through the 8 pin secondary connector. If you're overclocking Xeons you'll need to be sure to have a TON of amperage on the 12v line. They're hungry suckers...
 
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