Upgrading bertha

[lenagh]

Hi all,

Just looking for some advice as I've been out of the loop so long (this unit was built in 2006 and has been topped up in between). I don't think there is much that can be salvaged but would love to know peoples thoughts.

Budget wise not really looking to set limits but I am a tight wad I'd like something that is fit for purpose rather than necessarily setting the world on fire. The rig can be built over a period of several months as well. I think the critical area to get right is the mobo, CPU and ram at this point.

Gaming will not be on the list of requirements. Purpose of the machine at the moment is to run esx, workstation and a ton of virtual machines. I also use it to maintain and run a business from which requires a lot of basic video editing. Its more volume than quality.

Current equipment is as follows

MSI N1996 AM2 board with a lowly x2 5600+
4GB PC2-6400 ram
2 x 320GB Hitachi deathstars in RAID 0
1 x 500GB seagate as a data drive
Backing up to an external USB drive currently.
EVGA 8800GTS card its the cut down version with 768mb from memory
The power supply might be salvagable ? its a hiper type-m 670W
The case is made out of Meccanno and best forgotten.

Screen, keyboard etc I can carry over also.

Many thanks in advance, appreciate she is old but in all honesty she's only just starting to show her age and mainly in the speed of the CPU and disk access. (running multiple vm's batters storage )

 

[hybrid572]

It sounds like you're right in that you need a CPU, mobo and RAM, plus I would get a decent couple of hard drives to cope with all that storage. Stop RAID0'ing mechanical drives, as it's the shortest path to kill both your hard drives with everything on them.

The following is the best value build I can come up with on your budget:



YOUR BASKET
1 x AMD Phenom II X6 Six Core 1055T 2.80GHz (Socket AM3) - Retail £131.99
2 x Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9) £89.99 x2 = £179.98
1 x Asus M4A78LT-M 760G (Socket AM3) DDR3 Motherboard £44.99
1 x Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM (HD103SJ) £41.99
1 x Coolermaster Elite 335 Case - Black £29.99
Total : £442.43 (includes shipping : £11.25).

Money left over would be well spent on additional hard drives, or an SSD if you can afford one. The F3 1TB is a very fast mechanical drive for the amount of money it costs.

 

[Hagar]

I would suggest for your usage, following the AMD route either a quad or hex core CPU the 1055T Thuban hexcore would be a good solution with an 890 chipset motherboard and 4 or 8Gb of 1600MHz DDR3. Within three or four months the bulldozer eight core will be out, but price currently unavailable. The above suggestion would come in at £300 to £350 for the mobo, CPU and ram.

From Intel you could get a sandybridge i5 CPU (quad core) and a P67 or H67 B3 chipset motherboard with similar ram for about £50 more £350-400.

An i7 quad with hyperthreading may be an additional £80-100 over the i5.

I have not specified exact kit as I think you should look around, I assume you will be running at stock speeds so you will not need the k series CPU which overclocks.

I use the kit shown in my sig which is similar to that recommended and also run virtual machines.

cheers, andy.

 

[lenagh]

Thanks hybrid, I'll be honest and admit I had no idea there are longevity issues with drives in RAID0 ? luckily only the OS and some unimportant bits sit on that drive, the vm's are kept separately and are backed up.

SSD was something I was looking into, however only the intel elmcrest tickles my interest at the moment so it would be a secondary purchase I suspect a few months down the line. I would be interested to hear if my assumption re: this unit being rather good is ill informed however.

The 1055t does indeed seem to be the best value option out there with the hex core for workstation. Thanks for the input

 

[lenagh]

Re: the motherboard, clockers state its a 6GB version on sata but everywhere else in the world intimates its 3GB could anyone confirm

 

[Hagar]

Re: the motherboard, clockers state its a 6GB version on sata but everywhere else in the world intimates its 3GB could anyone confirm

From ASUS site.
SB710 Chipset
1 xUltraDMA 133/100
6 xSATA 3 Gb/s ports with Support RAID 0,1,10,JBOD

The 760 chipset is not a new one, you would be better off with an 8 series chipset which does have the sata III ports.

AMD Phenom II X6 Six Core 1055T 2.80GHz (Socket AM3) - Retail £131.99
(£109.99) £131.99
(£109.99)
Gigabyte GA-890FXA-UD5 AMD 890FX (Socket AM3) DDR3 Motherboard £129.98
(£108.32) £129.98
(£108.32)
GeIL 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz VALUE PLUS Dual Channel (GVP38GB1600C9DC) £89.99
(£74.99) £89.99
(£74.99)
Sub Total : £293.30
Shipping cost assumes delivery to UK Mainland with:
DPD Next Day Parcel
(This can be changed during checkout) Shipping : £9.50
VAT is being charged at 20.00% VAT : £60.56
Total : £363.36


andy.

 

[lenagh]

Thank you nkata appreciate it

 

[pv123]

It sounds like you're right in that you need a CPU, mobo and RAM, plus I would get a decent couple of hard drives to cope with all that storage. Stop RAID0'ing mechanical drives, as it's the shortest path to kill both your hard drives with everything on them.

The following is the best value build I can come up with on your budget:



YOUR BASKET
1 x AMD Phenom II X6 Six Core 1055T 2.80GHz (Socket AM3) - Retail £131.99
2 x Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9) £89.99 x2 = £179.98
1 x Asus M4A78LT-M 760G (Socket AM3) DDR3 Motherboard £44.99
1 x Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM (HD103SJ) £41.99
1 x Coolermaster Elite 335 Case - Black £29.99
Total : £442.43 (includes shipping : £11.25).

Money left over would be well spent on additional hard drives, or an SSD if you can afford one. The F3 1TB is a very fast mechanical drive for the amount of money it costs.

Looks good, but would take cheaper ram.

 

[hybrid572]

The issues to do with RAID0 are simple: it is set up such that if either drive fails, both drives fail and become unusable. That, and the fact that many studies show performance increases under RAID0 to be not as high as often stated, mean one may as well simply use separate drives.

pv123: I put in the cheapest available set of 16GB of RAM, because VMs eat RAM like nothing else. Obviously, if the OP knows how much RAM his system actually needs, he should downgrade to however much that is.

 

[lenagh]

The issues to do with RAID0 are simple: it is set up such that if either drive fails, both drives fail and become unusable. That, and the fact that many studies show performance increases under RAID0 to be not as high as often stated, mean one may as well simply use separate drives.

Ah sorry understand your point now, yep took raid 0 specifically for the speed increase it yielded back in 2006 Raid 10 or 50 one day when I get a lotto win it did yield great results at the time must confess with the obvious trade off being resilience.

I'm going to aim for 8GB across 2 sticks and leave two spare for future expansion. ESXi's hypervisor is very good at memory management so if I'm running that many machines I'll be doing it through that rather than workstation. I tend to use workstation for trialling individual machines rather than for running an environment.

 

[lenagh]

I seem to have narrowed it down to grabbing a 95W edition of the 1055t which will allow some room for clocking to boost performance.

Motherboard wise I'm impressed with this MSI unit

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-134-MS

Anyone got an opinion ? also with the vengeance ram is there likely to be an issue with the raised heat spreaders fouling against an A50 cooler? just aware of this little pit fall from a previous build in work on a video editing machine I did. Ooops...