New PC: biggest bang for the buck?

[Nigel Ball]

Hi all

My new PC arrived yesterday 

Niall suggested I post the spec of the machine in this thread as I announced it's arrival yesterday on another thread I had started on Windows 64

Hardware is

DELL Optiplex 980
6Gb RAM
i7 processor 860 @ 2.80GHz (8 cores)
Windows 7 64 bit OS

and below the picture that made me smile with contentment yesterday

[Carlos Milovic]

Hi guys

Since by budget is a bit low, I think I'll buy AMD (also I like them more, as company... but this is another story). This are the main components I'm considering. Suggestions are highly wellcome.

CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1055T AM3
MB: Asus AMD M4A785TD-V EVO A/L/V (AM3) (with ATI Radeon HD 4200, which I think will work fine for my dual monitor setup)
HDD: Seagate Sata2 1 Tb 7200 rpm
RAM: Kingston DDR3 HyperX LOVO 4Gb 1600MHz PC3-12800 (2Gbx2) (maybe two of these, for 8Gb total).
Tower: Spektra ATX 550w Shinobi Black

What do you think?

[Carlos Milovic]

Just to make an update This was the final setup I builded:

CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1055T AM3 (~$260)
MB: Asus AMD M4A89GTD PRO (with ATI Radeon HD 4290) (~$200)
HDD: Western Digital Sata3 1 Tb 7200 rpm - 64Mb cache (~$120)
RAM: Corsair XMS3 DDR3 2x2Gb 1600MHz PC3-12800 (~$120)
Tower: Cooler Master Elite (~$60)
Power: Cooler Master eXtreme 550W (~$80)

Total: ~$840
A bit more expensive than in USA or EU, but still a good trade between price and quality. I have not yet tweaked the MB to perform overclocking, but it is pretty easy to achieve. Toying a bit with the automatic configurations, yielded a improvement of nearly 400Mhz on each processor, while all 6 are enabled, and almost 1000MHz with only 3 of them (AMD uses a technology that boosts the clock speed of the first processors if the other are not currently used, dynamically). So, I'm quite happy with it as it is right now

[georg.viehoever]

...Toying a bit with the automatic configurations, yielded a improvement of nearly 400Mhz on each processor, while all 6 are enabled, and almost 1000MHz with only 3 of them (AMD uses a technology that boosts the clock speed of the first processors if the other are not currently used, dynamically). So, I'm quite happy with it as it is right now

maybe you could try Vicent's benchmark http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=1052.msg10478#msg10478 and report the numbers.

Georg

[Carlos Milovic]

Thanks for the link

Just for testing, this was at work (university, biomedical imaging center):

Intel Core 2Quad 2.40GHz - 4Gb RAM
Results
- Benchmark: 43.77s
- Parallel B. : 26.63s
(average of three)

Standard console behavior

[Carlos Milovic]

Ok, here are the numbers for my current setup, no overclocking (X6@2.8GHZ-RAM@1.6GHz):

- Benchmark: 18.273s
- Parallel B.: 7.877s

Again, mean of three, and standard console. Other programs running as in normal usage.

[Nigel Ball]

And mine

Benchmark  19.9s
Benchmark Parallel 7.8s

DELL Optiplex 980
6Gb RAM
i7 processor 860 @ 2.80GHz (8 cores)
Windows 7 64 bit OS

[NKV]

My new box i7-950 24Gb-1333 2xSSD.
Performance is good. 8)

[Nocturnal]

24 Gb? Only 3 GB? I'd get a little more 

Seriously assuming you meant 24 GB that's an insane amount of memory. Why so much? Do you intend to run lots of VMs? That's why I recently upgraded from 6 to 12 GB. Without VMs I never got over 4 GB of memory used. Add a 2 GB Linux VM and memory was getting tight.

[NKV]

Without VMs I never got over 4 GB of memory used.

Without VMs I have got over 17 GB of memory used.

[Nocturnal]

Well clearly if you need the memory you need the memory

[MikeP]

New PC is now assembled and working.  Quite similar spec to Carlos, so I have borrowed his format:

CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1075T 3.2GHz
MB: Asus AMD M4A89GTD PRO/USB3
HDD: 3 x Western Digital Sata3 Caviar Green 500Gb 7200 rpm - 32Mb cache
RAM: G.Skill Ripjaw DDR3 4x2Gb
Tower: Cooler Master Elite 335
Power: Novatech Powerstation 600W
OS: Windows 7 Professional 64 bit

One of the disks contains the operating system, installed programs and their various hardwired data storage requirements.  The other two are set up under RAID 1 using Windows 7's inbuilt capabilities and I use it / them for everything else.

It is significantly faster than my old machine but anything up-to-date would be anyway.  Microsoft seemed to have made the OS much more friendly and helpful.  For example, I'd bought two new Wireless N cards one of which I'd installed in the new PC - during the install of Windows 7 I set up wireless networking by accepting the SID from a list and entering my key - and job done.  When I swapped out my old card from my old XP machine, it was a 30 minute job to get the drivers updated and the configuration done - not hard, just messy by comparison.

Slightly off topic, my old Netgear router had gone on the blink a while ago and I'd replaced it with the BT Home Hub I was given as part of my broadband package.  That has now been replaced with a Billion router.  Sadly, its wireless range does not seem much better but its throughput .... two nights ago, I set a new record for me of 600+ Kb/sec downloading - about 3 times faster than my previous best.

I've just asked for a Windows 7 64 bit trial version of PI so I can be sure there are no problems and I'll be sending some euros to Juan and his team.  Absolutely cracking piece of software.  Just wish I could learn to use it better 

Mike

[RobF2]

Hopefully I've run the Benchmarking PSM correctly on the RGB.fit image:

Intel Qual Q6600 @2.726mHz (slight overclock)
Win XP 32 Home
4GB DDR2 RAM 800 MHz
9.7s (console open)

[Harry page]

Hi

Ok after running the bench mark on my laptop and got 35.2 sec I think its time to upgrade

Is the i7 the wat to go 

Harry

[georg.viehoever]

Yes, i7-2xxx is probably the way to go. I read that the Sandy Bridge generation also give some nice performance boosts compared to the previous i7 generation. Only, you'll have to wait for another month or so until Intel as fixed the problem with the chips set.

Georg