Hydra/Hydro

OK, I've been asked to come up with a build for work. We do lots of computational electromagnetics and although we're only a smallish company, we need a lot of bang for our buck. The software does not support hyperthreading.

I was told to look at dual Xeons, but they're obviously very expensive. I've got a £2k budget and I've found that about the best I could afford would be dual Xeon E5620s, which are 2.4 GHz quad core. If I stuck with a single CPU then I could easily afford an i7 990X which runs at 3.46 GHz and is hex core.

Obviously with the Xeons you'd get two more cores, but I'm struggling to see how they would outperform the single i7. If I had top of the range Xeons I could understand it, but there's no way I could afford it.
 
If the software supports multiple cores then it should support hyperthreading as HT identifies itself as additional cores, I'd be inclined to say the 990x is quicker if this is the case with HT
 
I might be bias but have you considered AMD, dual socket G34 boards are about £450 and some of the 12 core chips can be had for £550-600 each.

As long as the application supports threading well this is an option and gives an upgrade path to 16 core bulldozer/interlagos later.

As for the choice between 990x and xeon ,if the application supports many threads the xeon might work out better but its marginal at best.
If it works better on instructions per clock then the 990 is a better choice.

Difficult to tell without knowing the specific software package.
 
Sounds single threaded to me, sounds even more like it won't benefit at all by having multiple cores or even multiple processors. Only unknown is whether it needs floating point performance more or integer. Either way you will probably want the fastest performing single core processor you can get, or failing that one that clocks a single core as high as it can go automatically.

As Baba said unless we know more about the software or you can find out more from the developers its hard to advise.

These days everyone says more faster cores or threads because thats what todays software is written to take advantage of, unfortunately it doesn't sound like your software is written in that way.
 
frozennova said:
If the software supports multiple cores then it should support hyperthreading as HT identifies itself as additional cores, I'd be inclined to say the 990x is quicker if this is the case with HT
Click to expand...

It does support multiple cores but only runs on the physical cores. It sounds a bit odd, I know, but this is definitely the case.
 
If you could let us know what the software package is called maybe we could advise better:)

What are you doing ,waveguide ,flat plate antenna wall current simulations or somthing along these lines?
 
Hydra now at 2.6 putting in 5.40 frame times on 6901's:)

Aiming for sub 5 min frame times with better ram and more overclocking:D
 
baba , how do you like the g34 water blocks?

the website always shows out of stock. how long did it take for you to get them delivered.
 
Sorry didnt see this post for so long, the water blocks are good but the mounting kit was not great for my motherboard.

I ended up taking the screws and springs off the air coolers i had and opening up the holes in the mounting brackets to take them.

Temps are about 53C at 2.9Ghz in a warm room, hope this helps.

Fastest 6901 I have done at this speed ran at 4.57 and over 550k.:)
 
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They say AMD engineering on the top with an id code ZS210800TCE25 this says 12 core server g34 2.1Ghz if read properly.

They crop up from time to time on the bay of e but you will probably have to be looking at .com and be quick;)
 
Frame times dropped from just over 9 mins on win2008 to 6.30 with ubuntu and the Kraken (with 6176se's on 6900).

Since then ive fitted faster ram overclocked to 2.9 and overclocked the northbridge to 2200, if i cool the vrms better (in the works) past 3Ghz is on the cards:)
 
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