what is the fastest pc i could build if my budget was unlimted

[leejsmith]

I am in the process of selling my flat for a tidy profit of £40,000.(finger crossed and everything else)

i thought about the most powerfull pc i could build.

option 1.

2x xeon 3gig
workstation type motherboard
as much ram as it could take
ultra scsi raid or serial ata raid
fasted fx ultra or radeon i can find.

until i can find the motherboard that i am sure i can overclock it looks like this will be stock settings with ddr 2100 ram running in pairs.

depending on how i can overclock this setup i could go for water cooled with 2x cascade or a phase change system (or systems)

option 2.
2x athlon mp

i am not upto speed with multi cpu althon boards can i get nforce ones that will let me use ddr 3500 and overclock the hell out of the amd cpu's

is there anyway i can mod the xp3200+ cpu for multi cpu motherboards.

same for the water cooling or phase change

eitherway it needs to be as silent as possible and i was thinking of a cube server case and getting it chrome plated or a large Lian-Li full tower case. then i could get one of the half size cases for the phase change coolers.

i would also go for twin 19inch lcd screens or even better 42inch plasma screen.

anyway what what would you do if you had a very large budget and wanted the fastest pc you could get.

Do you think it is the wrong time to spend this sort of money when there are some many new cpu's (prescot , althon64 , opteron) coming in the not to distant future.

[jaydee]

I assume you mean "Desktop" computer. If so wait for the Dual Opteron/Athlon64 boards to come out. No reason to piss away money now when the next level of computer parts is so near.

[leejsmith]

yep desktop / workstation / small server that will run windows.

[jaydee]

Originally posted by jaydee116
I assume you mean "Desktop" computer. If so wait for the Dual Opteron/Athlon64 boards to come out. No reason to piss away money now when the next level of computer parts is so near.

On second thought, if you wait untill the next level of parts start coming out you should be able to build one hell of a comp from todays parts as they will be cheaper. Barton 3200+'s, P4/5's, ect... maybe even what you had there with the Xeon's. I would really consider the Opteron though if your going to dump a lot of money on something as they are 64/32bit compatible. But by the time 64bit really becomes needed there will be much faster parts on the market anyway. Just about any of the top of the line Comps today is way faster than needed for just about anything so you really can't loose to much no matter what way you go. Investing in the most current comp parts is probably one of the worst investments one can make though as the resale value drops to nothing in 6 months. Spend $4,000 today and that $4,000 with be worth $1000 in 6 months and less in a year. better off buying a CNC mill!

[bigben2k]

The first question for me is: what are you going to do with it?

There's no sense in getting all that if it's going to exceed your purpose.:shrug:

[leejsmith]

Originally posted by jaydee116
On second thought, if you wait untill the next level of parts start coming out you should be able to build one hell of a comp from todays parts as they will be cheaper. Barton 3200+'s, P4/5's, ect... maybe even what you had there with the Xeon's. I would really consider the Opteron though if your going to dump a lot of money on something as they are 64/32bit compatible. But by the time 64bit really becomes needed there will be much faster parts on the market anyway. Just about any of the top of the line Comps today is way faster than needed for just about anything so you really can't loose to much no matter what way you go. Investing in the most current comp parts is probably one of the worst investments one can make though as the resale value drops to nothing in 6 months. Spend $4,000 today and that $4,000 with be worth $1000 in 6 months and less in a year. better off buying a CNC mill!

i think the dual athlon's when the athlon64/opteron's are selling would be a good choice. the top end althon xp's should drop in price to make the newer chips more attractive.

Dont think the xeons will drop much unless they feel the opterons are going to take a bite out of the server market.

can you use the xp3200+ in multi cpu boards ? whould they need a mod or one of those socket things that unlock the amd cpu's.

i like the idea of the cnc mill might add that to the ever growing list.

[leejsmith]

Originally posted by bigben2k
The first question for me is: what are you going to do with it?

There's no sense in getting all that if it's going to exceed your purpose.:shrug:

i dont know ben but it was the first thing i thought of followed by a holiday and a car that works for more than 2 weeks between trips to the garage.

maybee if i have the fastest there is i will stop playing with the computer compenents and actually use the pc for something instead of wanting it faster , cooler and quieter

[bigben2k]

Originally posted by leejsmith
...maybee if i have the fastest there is i will stop playing with the computer compenents and actually use the pc for something instead of wanting it faster , cooler and quieter

But isn't it too slow anyways, after a year or two?

I'd just hate to see you spend all that money for something that you're not going to fully use, that's all.

[airspirit]

The AMD64 chips you will want are of the 90nm variety, and they won't be available until Q1-Q2 next year. I'm afraid the current crop from AMD in their AMD64 line won't quite be the best chips on the block ... the package shrink and migration to actual socket standards (which they SHOULD be doing now) will make a huge difference in performance to affordability.

I concur: if you are going for the god box, try waiting 5-6 months and you'll be able to get much more for the same cost. MUCH more. When you consider that PCI-Express will also be released in that time frame and SATA will have matured fully ... yeah, it would be best to hold your horses and wait ... as hard as that may be for the more compulsive of us (and is there any worse at that than me?).

[Boli]

If you had all that money to spend, and you have a pernament place to live I would seriously consider more than one computer.

One, a main one that you can upgrade and upgrade as and when to keep just behnd the main market. I would also make it to be almost silent as well. this shouldn't cost that much really I recon you could get one together for about £800, more if you plan on water cooling it or something. This would include a pretty good sound system, graphics capabilities etc. buy things sensibly and just under the wave of new products and you don't need to spend that much - it will also be more stable.

Unforntualty its your HDs I have allways worried about in buying a new computer, they DO cost a lot so you'll want just a single fast SILENT but not large one that just holds your apps and store everything else on your second computer.

The second you can leave all your noisy high capasity drives that serves your internet connection, and you can leave on all the time. This would be the main expense you are so keen on but this computer will not be ot of date so quickly, in fact I think the only upgarde you'll be planning on doing to your server would be higher capasity drives more PCI RAID cards to get larger and larger arrays .

In fact I recon the server baring any huge tecnolgical leaps forward would be perectly satisfactory for ten years or so. Where as you can upgarde your other computer every 6 months or so gaining an extra 50% speed boost for about £300 (baring getting myself watercooled this is what I have done for a couple of years, new motherboard/RAM/CPU), and more importantly you can upgrade and kee your old noisy drives out of the case (the bane of my life)

The upshot of this is you can build small PCs for next to nothing connect to the LAN and create music centres that play all of your MP3s in a separate room, using a flash drive large heatsinks and slowish CPUS that don't need fans to run it fanless and complely silent.

I would wait for the 64 bit CPUs to make their mark on the world market before you do anythign like this though. EVERYONE is holding off buying a huge upgrade till they come along anyway.

~ Boli

(Trying to spend your money on his dreams)

[Joe]

Unlimited budget?

prolly something like this:
http://www.es.jamstec.go.jp/esc/eng/ES/hardware.html

[leejsmith]

Originally posted by Joe
Unlimited budget?

prolly something like this:
http://www.es.jamstec.go.jp/esc/eng/ES/hardware.html

but how will doom 3 run on that

[leejsmith]

at the moment i have the following systems

1. p3-600 windows 2000 server running as NAT to share internet connections + email server setup to remove spam and any attachments containing com , pif , vbs , js , scr , exe.
inoculate it antivirus server setup to check for update every 3 hours and send them to my other pc's.

this is water cooled with my koolance exos in silent mode with no other fans and runs 24/7.
( i used one of the chipset coolers on the cpu as my 200g would not fit)

2. p3-1000 with a radeon all in wonder card setup as digital video recorder connected to my tv and has a wireles keyboard.

3. p3-1000 server in a intel sc5000 server chasis , imb 4l ultra 160 raid card with 5 lvd 9gb scsi drives. This was going to be used as a learning tool for my mcse but it's too noisey. I might re-use the case for something else.

4. compaq deskpro sff p3-550. this is being used for a webcam server at the moment.

5. my main computer p4-2.533 running at 3.230 gforce 4 ti4200 water cooled with a diy cascade soon to be a real cascade. I use this for most things from games to visual basic programming , 3d studio ect ect.

plus i have a p41.7 and athlon 1100 used for testing the water blocks i made and they are not in cases.

so i almost have what you discribed boli.

I am not saying i am actually going to spend all my money on a super powerfull pc but i am interested to know what is the most powerfull desktop i could get.

at the moment i would have to say a dual xeon 3gig with a fx5900 ultra but i also know this will change very soon with the new athlon64's and opterons on the way.

And i agree it is the wrong time to spend so much money. Either wait and get a new system or wait and get this system at half the price.

[Blackeagle]

Hi Lee,

One thing I see you are considering is a Lian-Li server case.

They are not cheap by any means, but boy the PC76 I have purchased is sure sweetly built. Everything fits so well, no sharp edges, and it's enormous amount of space & bays to put things.

20 total bays, 8 external bays, 5.25"= 6 bays and 2 X 3.5" bays.
Then there are the 12 3.5" bays in 2 removable drive cages.

It also has a 120mm blow hole and 120mm back exhaust along with 4 X 80mm front intakes.

MAN, I sound like a freaking salesman, it's one to check out for sure in the Lian-Li line up. Nuf said.

PS

Any chance you could put some/all of that puter power you have now to work folding with us on the Pro-Cooling team? Would be great to have you with us!

[leejsmith]

HI be,

you sure like your lian-li case. how about some pics.

i only have the one pc on 24-7 so i will put the folding on that and also as a screen saver on my main rig.

so far so good my flat is going on the marget and i have a house i like at a good price so i am on target for the cash.

Has anyone seen any test results for the mac g5 other than the ones from mac ? I hate the adds claiming they are the fastest personal computer in the world.

[Zhentar]

They are the fastest computers in the world! Oh wait, you meant the real world. Never mind, they suck there.

If you want some real extravagant purchases, I'd point you in the direction of Solid State Drives or RAM drives (thats not quite the right name). Solid State drives are a sort of flash memory type hard drive, though they're kinda expensive- like $5000 US for 4 gigs last I checked, but really fast. One person at SPCR said they put Windows 98 on their solid state drive and it booted in 5 seconds.

And then the RAM drives are a PCI card with a lot of RAM slots, but the downside is their volatile, so mainly you just clone things from your main disk, or stick your swap file on there.

[Cova]

If I had an unlimited budget, the computer wouldn't use up very much of it (ya, it would be a nice dual-CPU AMD-based system with a few gigs of RAM) - most of the cash would go into the disk-array thats attached to it. Now with any of this equipment involved, size and noise increase to the point of pretty much requiring a dedicated computer room/closet to put it in. But I'd just love to have one of these at home to play with: http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/s...ise/index.html Placed somewhere down in the basement along with an iSCSI router connected to a dedicated gigabit ethernet switch. Computers all around the house would have either a FibreChannel adapter with a fibre-cable running down to the EVA (the thing linked above) and no HD's at all (boot from the EVA), or dual NIC's and an internal HD to boot from (one NIC for the LAN, one NIC to the gig-ethernet switch). For those who aren't familiar with the technology (likely most of you), iSCSI is SCSI-over-ethernet, and would basically allow me to use disk-space from the EVA as if it was a local computers hard-drive (it would show up as a SCSI disk in disk-manager on the computer). I'm not even going to try and describe how much functionality an EVA disk-array has built into it - suffice it to say that it can do things you probably think are impossible for a disk-subsystem to do (how about taking a RAID-5 array striped across 50 disks, logically split into 10 segments which are assigned to 10 computers around the house through the iSCSI router - and hot-adding 5 more disks, re-striping the RAID-5 to include the new disks, and expanding one (or more) of the 10 segments on the fly and having the D: drive on your workstation upstairs just automatically show up 500GB larger in disk-manager - you just create a new partition or expand the existing one using windows Dynamic Disks and never even have to reboot).

BTW - I work with enterprize-class storage for a living. Even though the one I get to play with doesn't have anywhere near the functionality of an EVA box it's still by far the coolest piece of computer equipment I've ever worked with. I'll also likely never ever have one to play with at home, a fully-loaded EVA5000 box like linked above would likely be well over $1Million US.

[leejsmith]

This is what i had in mind for overclocking a dual xeon system
quite a good read and some good tips on volt modding the mobo chosen.

http://www.linuxhardware.org/article...48&mode=thread

I checked out the tech specs of the dual 2g power mac g5

quite impressive stats on paper.

http://www.apple.com/powermac/performance/

The idea of running the OS from solidstate storage is a good idea Zhentar

[MadHacker]

Something fast off the self..
Try this machine.
http://www.ocsystem.net/proddetail.a...mber=6&sku=iGK
P4 OC 3.50GHz 1GHz FSB with HT
Add some good water-cooling.. a chiller or a peltier or and I imagine you could over clock this beast some more.
with unlimited budget I’d just grab a couple 46" Plasmas

[leejsmith]

what about this i put together today.



add to this a dual cascade system each with it's own pump , rad

should overclock quite well too.

giving dual xeon 3.3 - 3.5 maybe more.

[Blackeagle]

Lee,

I'd love nothing so much as to post some pics.

But until the system is completed, that's where the money's got to go. So no camera for me. On the other hand I AM going to take a few pics of the build it's self, with what ever I have to use to do it, to post in due time.

My Grand Am spun a rod & the engine is toast, so the new system won't be done as soon as I'd hoped. Sometimes I hate cars. If not for that da#$ed engine dieing I'd have had it done before this.

But the new Buick is nice (or so the wife tells me).:shrug:

[iroc409]

Originally posted by leejsmith
This is what i had in mind for overclocking a dual xeon system
quite a good read and some good tips on volt modding the mobo chosen.

http://www.linuxhardware.org/article...48&mode=thread

I checked out the tech specs of the dual 2g power mac g5

quite impressive stats on paper.

http://www.apple.com/powermac/performance/

The idea of running the OS from solidstate storage is a good idea Zhentar

haha, apple is so full of shit.

[leejsmith]

To start my all powerfull project i picked up an ebay bargin today.

2x xeon 2.6gig for £170

so i might try and build the pc but with the oposite end of the budget scale.
i have a intel server case that is doing nothing and loads of spare bits to start with.

i will have to get a new mobo but the asus pc-dl is £200 and with dual channle ddr333 sata raid and dual xeon it should make a nice start.
not sure about what psu i need i think it needs a special xeon psu.

[leejsmith]

over at overclockers.com they have a link to a french site with a benchmark of new cpu's

one of them is a xeon system with the asus pc-dl mobo.

one thing i dont understand in the memory benchmark is the xeon systems are only showing memory speeds of single channle ddr333 when the mobo supports dual channle ?

http://www.x86-secret.com/articles/cpu/k8-2/a64-6.htm

maybe is was an early version or something

anyway it worth a look to see how the cpu's perform under the tests.

[Cossey3]

Originally posted by Joe
Unlimited budget?

prolly something like this:
http://www.es.jamstec.go.jp/esc/eng/ES/hardware.html

if you do get one of these remember who suggested it and make sure you help out profolding (we should be no1 with a sc running for us)