Spec ?with a difference? please..

riddlermarc

riddlermarc

riddlermarc

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Joined
15 Nov 2005
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Basingstoke, UK
My project is this - I am building up a decent quad-core system to house a rapidly growing collection of family photos, videos etc and I need to stick something together that takes into account the following points:
  • Quad core (will be chewing plenty of image files etc)
  • 8GB memory (lots of in-memory handling of data)
  • A decent chipset (for the inevitable I/O abuse)
  • NO overclocking
  • NO fancy graphics card, onboard is just fime
  • Sound doesn't matter at all
  • Not too noisy if possible
Basically it has to not wig out at a few people at a time requesting photos and rotating them, watching raw videos etc.
No idea what the going rate for PSU power is but I have a decent 500-600w available and all dvd/cd drives are already taken care of.. I guess what I'm after is a)what cpu and b) what compatible motherboard for the cpu, and c) RAM doesn't need to have lights, fans etc just work reliably and none of this is going to be overclocked AT ALL :)

Can I do these three items for £150-200? My last build was an AM2 4200+, that's how far behind the times I am!
 
The short answer is no to those three items given your requirements unless you get lucky secondhand. The CPU alone is ~£120 new, a decent P35 based motherboard is ~£60 and the Ram is about ~£50 per 4gb. Do you already have a graphics card for the system?

GeIL 4GB (2x2GB) PC2-6400C5 800MHz Black Dragon DDR2 Dual Channel Kit (GB24GB6400C5DC) £41.99
(£49.34) £83.98
(£98.68)
DFI BIP35-T2R "Blood Iron" Intel P35 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £57.99
(£68.14) £57.99
(£68.14)
Intel Core 2 Quad Pro Q6600 "Energy Efficient SLACR 95W Edition" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) - Retail £99.99
(£117.49) £99.99
(£117.49)
Sub Total : £241.96
Shipping cost assumes delivery to UK Mainland with:
City Link Parcel Next Day (Delivered Mon-Fri)
(This can be changed during checkout) Shipping : £8.25
VAT is being charged at 17.5% VAT : £43.79
Total : £294.00
 
^^ Hmm, as I suspected! What are the 3-core Phenoms like? Are they THAT far behind the Intel quads performance wise? If they and the matching motherboard are not going to be that much less performance-wise (bearing in mind no overclocking) they may be sufficient? I just need a little more performance and power than my current AM2 system :) Might have to scale the memory back to 4GB for now then, as well..
 
I'm afraid I'm not sure on the Tri-cores but from a quick look they are significantly down on L2 cache, clock speed and aren't that much cheaper. Of course none of these mean that they won't be quick but for the little price difference I'd still be tempted by the Intel quads I think.
 
The Phenoms are no were near as much cheaper as they are worse components. The Intel Quad is £93+VAT at the moment, the cheapest Tri Core Phenom is £80+VAT. It has one less core and runs at 2.1Ghz rather than 2.4Ghz. Even more damning is that even a 2.4Ghz Quad Phenom (£110+VAT) is considerably slower than the Intel Quad at the same speed.

With 4 GB RAM you will be pretty much dead on £250 and can improve the system at a later date. This is gonna be the best option if you want a noticable upgrade.
 
By the fact your aiming for 8Gb ram I'm guessing your looking at vista, were you hoping to include this in your budget aswell or had you budgeted aside for this?
 
Nearly, it will be running 2008 Server x64 and I already have the MSDN license for it :)

What are the x4 Phenoms like compare to a non-overclocked Intel Quad? I've always been an AMD man and if there's no difference really in stock performance I'd go for one of them - no idea what would be a good chipset/mobo to go for though?
 
Okay, in the interests of future proofing (and I just want something cool!) I'm thinking:

Product Name Qty Price Line Total
Gigabyte GA-P31-DS3L Intel P31 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard Gigabyte GA-P31-DS3L Intel P31 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £41.99
(£49.34) £41.99
(£49.34)
GeIL 4GB (2x2GB) PC2-6400C5 800MHz Black Dragon DDR2 Dual Channel Kit (GB24GB6400C5DC) GeIL 4GB (2x2GB) PC2-6400C5 800MHz Black Dragon DDR2 Dual Channel Kit (GB24GB6400C5DC) £41.99
(£49.34) £83.98
(£98.68)
Intel Core 2 Quad Pro Q6600 "Energy Efficient SLACR 95W Edition" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) - Retail Intel Core 2 Quad Pro Q6600 "Energy Efficient SLACR 95W Edition" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) - Retail £99.99
(£117.49) £99.99
(£117.49)
Sub Total : £225.96
Shipping cost based on delivery to Credit/debit card billing address, RG224DN with:
FREE SHIPPING (City LinkNext Day)
(This can be changed during checkout) Shipping : FREE
VAT is being charged at 17.50% VAT : £39.54
Total : £265.50


Free delivery :)

Switched the DFI BIP35-T2R "Blood Iron" Intel P35 that s-pw suggested for the Gigabyte GA-P31-DS3L Intel P31, £15 cheaper and it seems it isn't a worse mobo, semi-pro waster? No I don't have a graphics card as such, as it's going to be a headless server I am looking at sticking in an old 2MB PCI card

Would this run okay from my old Antec 430w PSU with probably three SATA drives and the rarely used dvd-rw?
antec_psu.jpg
 
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The P31 chipset isn't quite as fully featured but for a headless server I doubt it will make much odds at all although it might well have less in the way of SATA ports but you can sort that with an add-in card.
 
semi-pro waster said:
The P31 chipset isn't quite as fully featured but for a headless server I doubt it will make much odds at all although it might well have less in the way of SATA ports but you can sort that with an add-in card.
Click to expand...
Looks like it has four SATA ports, should be plenty enough to at least start with I suppose.. then again the P31 doesn't have RAID capabilities it seems, something that may indeed come in useful as/when..
 
That seems a very high spec PC for what seems basic server duties

What's the resolution and format of the videos that you intend to stream?

Even a basic low end dual core AMD will chew that up easily.

The biggest bottle neck is likely to be the network interface. With gigabit you should get 20-30MB in general usage. Wifi can be a serious constraint, even the new wireless 'N' can get bogged down with multiple streams.

Also the HDD will struggle with random access if you try to stream multiple video's from different parts of the platter.


I have an x2 3800 with 1GB running XP. It records 3 digital mpeg streams (Freeview), plays back to the connected TV through the onboard 720p and also streams to 2 MVP's (playback of TV) and hosts the music / photo / video collection not to mention the three security cameras it monitors and records in response to motion detection (mpeg 4 real time compression)

Just remembered .. also an apache web server with php and occasionally hosts a Quake 4 server.

XP is a little flaky, needs a weekly reboot to keep it sweet but otherwise I don't see any slowdown or hassles with it.

I'd look more at hard disk access, raid etc and network throughput than lots of ram and a beefy processor unless you're expecting it to do work that you've not listed above.

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decto said:
That seems a very high spec PC for what seems basic server duties
<snip..>
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Click to expand...
Thanks for your comments, much appreciated :)

Other duties it is going to perform is some Virtualization testing (hence 2008 Server x64 OS) which needs some beef to get it working acceptably.

Video wise, I have a whole box of Digital 8 tapes that need digitising without compressing which is going to take ages, any time I can shed doing this will increase my quality of life tbh!

Also I am a programmer in .NET, a decent spec build server is always a good thing otherwise you are waiting hours for projects to build/complete etc.. the way I'm looking at it is future-proofing myself and having decent box that should handle everything I want to throw at it.

Regarding the disk access, that's what is the main issue now in my mind and hence my comments on the RAID capabilities of the mobos I have been looking at.
 
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