Your $3000 Dream Computer Setup

[Vector86]

What would you do for $3000 for a computer setup. Ignore cooling. (I already have a Prometeia Mach 2 and a watercooling setup). I'd like to do dual Opterons but the boards suck for them. What would you do in terms of processor, motherboard, memory, harddrives.?

[killernoodle]

I would still get dually opterons. Anything with an AGP port on an opteron board will own an intel in every category. After that, the rest is up to you. At least 1gb ECC ram, a 9800XT, dually raptor 76gb, a few 250gb storage drives. Get two 8x DVD-RW drives. The rest I would invest into some very large speakers

[KnightElite]

If you're including monitors in the cost, I would get something with dual 19" monitors of some sort, or perhaps one 19" CRT and one 17" LCD. Or even 3 or 4 monitors, if the board has multiple AGP slots, or you throw in some PCI cards.

[Cptn. Foo Foo]

One word....projector.

[Puzzdre]

Originally Posted by Cptn. Foo Foo

One word....projector.

LOL, I second that!!!

[warpath]

id start off w/ a64fx
a nice k8t800 mobo
1.5-3gb of pc4000
at least a terrabyte of storage
2x72gb raptor v2's
some beefy 17" LCD's X2
either a 5950 or a 9800XT
400W smartpower psu
8xdvd-rw+rw+r-r
lian li PC70

[Joe]

Originally Posted by KnightElite

if the board has multiple AGP slots, or you throw in some PCI cards.

Hu??? Multiple AGP slots? didnt think that was possible.

[KnightElite]

Yeah, I think some workstation chipsets support multiple AGP. Like, graphics workstations and stuff.

http://h18002.www1.hp.com/alphaserver/a-chart2.html

There's some Alpha workstations there that have two, or four. I think some high end x86 boards do as well.

[Joe]

I dont think so. Hence its called a "port" not a "bus". As far as I know there has never been any workstation chipset (serverworks, intel, Nv, Via, SIS, UMC, etc...) to ever support more than 1 AGP slot. From what I thought it was pretty much impossible to get a dual AGP thing functioning within any compatability specs of X86.

There really isnt a reason to now with PCI-X and above coming soon and pretty much out pacing AGP.

[Boli]

Nah better to get one of the dual/tri/quad output speciality card that are MADE to support many monitors.

I mean getting one of the top of range monster Raedon cards that supports 4 LCD outputs. (sorry I can't find a link).. that is about £3000 by itself. Now THAT is a dream heck even 4x18.1" TFT can set you back £1500.

£3000 is too low for my dream machine Heck my computer costs around the £2500 mark.

~ Boli

[KnightElite]

Joe, I did some searchign and you seem to be correct. However, it does appear to exist with that alpha:

Tower: 5 64-bit PCI-X, 1 AGP slot
Model 2: 16 64-bit PCI/PCI-X, 2 AGP slots
Model 4: 32 64-bit PCI/PCI-X, 4 AGP slots

[Joe]

Hehe DEC never was quite right

[msv]

The best investment I did in my computer was the chair. It cost me almost $200 but it was worth every penny. My but is very deer to me.
regards
Mikael S.

[Groth]

There's nothing technical preventing using multiple AGP ports with X86 chipsets. It's a combination marketing/bandwidth/driver problem. AGP is just a variation on PCI, and multiple independent PCI busses are commonplace.

For example, a number of Opteron boards have APG, 32bitx33MHz PCI, 64x66 PCI-X, and 64x100/133 PCI-X (four independent PCI busses). And, when they came out a lot of the nVidia drivers failed because they used a fixed bus#/device# (which pointed to the second CPU) instead of polling to find the video card. How well do think those drivers would do with two identical cards on two busses?

Actually, the way that AMD implements their AGP-bridge/hypertransport-tunnel it would be realtively easy to make a board with multiple AGP. And multiple CPU's with integrated memory controllers would help the the memory bandwidth bottlenecks.... It's a shame the market just isn't there.

Maybe PCI-Express will allow some multi-GPU, multi-monitor, ultra-performance solutions.