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Looking at building a PC and trying to determine if two Xeon 5410 is worth the extra $900 including the price of the mobo than a single Q6600???

In my opinion (assuming you'll use it for CGI): Yes, it's worth the extra cash.

...so look at the benchwell side,...there you see which systems are top...and yes its worth the money...

http://www.benchwell.com/

cu jurX

Thanks for the info, been looking around and found out the motherboard I had selected will not work. Does anyone have any suggestions

Hey guys, I'm looking at the same thing, would like an Intel Xeon 5420 dual quad and 8Gb RAM, though the boards i have looked at, being server boards need ECC ram which sky rockets the price, can anyone suggest a good board?

Cheers, sorry for hijacking your thread tazzer, but non cg folk are hard to talk to about this stuff.

Cheers

Brett

Brett .. I don't think there's a server board out there where you can get away with out the FB Dimms ... There's always Skulltrail ...

Anyway, .. 8GB's will only run you about $400. That's cheap, .. when I built my system, .. I paid the same amount for only 2GB's.

Just to mention it ... I thought I had read that Intel's Nehalem/next gen chipsets will be going back to DD3 or something other than the FB ram.

As far as boards, .. take your pick. If you don't plan on OC'ing ... then I'd say any Intel/Supermicro for stability reasons.

I have to say that on my Intel S5000XVN(with the now ancient X5345's x2 inside), .. I haven't had nary a hiccup with my system in a year and a half. No freezes, no BSOD's, no nada nothing. Damn, .. I can't believe it's been that long. ..wow.

is the rule always that the best price/performance is achieved with the latest hardware ??

... extra $900? For this money you can buy a second Q6600 and let it run at 3.4GHz. Two times q6600 at 3.4GHz -> 27.2GHz. At a money-speed benchwell the Q6600 would be the number one or?

..imho Micha makes a good point.

if you need pure speed go for the combined q6600; once you set up the netrender it is easy to add another node and expand your cpu power.
I use q6600 at 3.4 in micro atx boards, and they have not crashed a single time since they were set up.

on the other hand a dual Xeon system makes a superior workstation, where you can "do what you want", but you won't be able to OC' them...

..it's a hard choice

polynurb wrote: ... but you won't be able to OC' them...

are you sure?!?

... no..


... but i didn't dare to suggest BESL to tazzer ...

btw. i tried everything else on my old 604pin HT xeons (Supermicro x5da8)
but no clockgen or fsb mod did the job... so they are still living a peaceful live at 2.4 ghz ... guess they'll become really old...

Thanks for all the replies. If I go with the double build this is what it will look like, anything I am missing.

The first PC will be the main computer for Solidworks, Mastercam, Maxwell, and Rhino.
The Second PC will only be used for Net Render and Internet use.
Both I will try to clock to processors to 3.0GHZ nothing higher.

First PC (Main PC)
Case: COOLER MASTER Centurion 5 CAC-T05-UB Black $49.99
Hard Drive: Western Digital Raptor X WD1500AHFD 150GB 10000 RPM SATA 1.5Gb/s $174.99
Video Card: XFX PVT84JUDD3 GeForce 8600GT XXX 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 $92.99
Power Supply: Rosewill RP600V2-S-SL 600W SLI Ready-ATX12V V2.01 $69.99
Memory: G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) $84.99
Motherboard: ASUS P5N-E SLI LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI ATX Intel $119.99
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 Yorkfield 2.5GHz LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Processor $279.99
CPU Cooling: ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 7 Pro 92mm CPU Cooler $26.99

Total = $784.92


Second PC (Network Rendering)
Case: COOLER MASTER Centurion 5 CAC-T05-UB Black $49.99
Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250410AS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s $59.99
Video Card: XFX PVT84JUDD3 GeForce 8600GT XXX 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 $92.99
Power Supply: Rosewill RP600V2-S-SL 600W SLI Ready-ATX12V V2.01 $69.99
Memory: G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) $44.99
Motherboard: ASUS P5N-E SLI LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI ATX Intel $119.99
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 Yorkfield 2.5GHz LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Processor $279.99
CPU Cooling: ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 7 Pro 92mm CPU Cooler $26.99

Total = $744.92

You'll be needing an OS.

I'd take equal amounts of ram, so you can max it out during network rendering.

I used to pay like €500 for roughly the same RAM, so be thankful and pay the ~80 for 4GB

THis was the other build I was looking at for the Xeon!!!!

Case: ABS Aplus ABS-CS-EL Diablo Black 0.8mm SECC ATX Full Tower $139.99
Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250410AS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s $59.99
Video Card: EVGA 640-P2-N829-AR GeForce 8800GTS SSC 640MB 320-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 $209.99
Power Supply: Rosewill RX750-D-B ATX12V v2.2 & EPS12V v2.91 750W $134.99
Motherboard: Intel BOXD5400XS Dual LGA 771 Skulltrail D5400XS Extended ATX Motherboard $659.99
CPU: Intel Xeon E5420 Harpertown 2.5GHz LGA 771 80W Quad-Core Processor $344.99 x2 $689.98
Memory: A-DATA 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 FB-DIMM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) $149.99

Total $2044.92

Still unsure on which direction is best????