[Miguel Piñón]

Hi
I'm planning to upgrade my WorkStation but I have a technical doubt about a better config. For the best Maxwell performance......

Wich config is better for speed?
a).More cores like dual EIGHT cores at 2.0mhz?
Or
b).More speed clock like dual SIX cores at 3.06mhz?

Thanks for your help

[Fernando Tella]

8 x 2.00 = 16
6 x 3.06 = 18.36

I'd say the latter but don't really know.

[Tim Ellis]

My benchmark tests:-


Dual Intel Xeon X5670 @ 2.93ghz (24cores) 24Gb Ram renders the Maxwell Benchwell scene in 3mins 52secs

Intel i7 960 @ 3.2ghz (8cores) 24Gb Ram Asus Sabretooth X58 120Gb OCZ SSD 6GB/s renders Maxwell Benchwell scene in 9mins 19secs. When overclocked to 4ghz it renders it in 8mins 13secs.

I would say dual 6 cores at 3ghz would be faster as long as you have the RAM to help.

Tim.

[Fernando Tella]

I hope you don't mind if I hijack your thread Miguel. I've got a question about dual motherboards: if you want to install 12GB of RAM in your workstation do you have buy 12GB for each CPU (24GB)?

[polynurb]

no, ram is shared via qpi/numa across all cpus.

i think there used to be opteron systems with exclusive memory access but that is a while ago.

[dmeyer]

Assuming the chips in question are from the same core generation then the aggregate Ghz is a reasonable way to gauge which is faster.

However if the comparison is close the one with faster single core speed may be quicker in real-world use, as some parts of the process are single threaded or nearly so (voxelization, mxi merge, etc).

[Fernando Tella]

Thanks Poly!

@Miguel: please tell us more about what you are putting inside your new monster.

[Miguel Piñón]

Hi Tim, Fernando and all thanks for your help!

The monster that I want to buy is a Boxx technologies serie 8920

•Dual Xeon E5-2670 (EIGHT cores each procesor), 2.6Ghz, 20mb cache, 8.00 QPI
•16 GB DDR3-1600 REG ECC
•NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 1.5GB

I have another question,......
1 micro procesor with 8 cores = 16 cores HiperTreading and Maxwell use the 16 cores? Per microproccesor?
In other words, 8 cores at 2.6ghz = 20.8Ghz......... so with HT 2.6Ghz * 16cores HT= 41.6Ghz?

Thanks for your tips

[dmeyer]

Hi Tim, Fernando and all thanks for your help!

The monster that I want to buy is a Boxx technologies serie 8920

•Dual Xeon E5-2670 (EIGHT cores each procesor), 2.6Ghz, 20mb cache, 8.00 QPI
•16 GB DDR3-1600 REG ECC
•NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 1.5GB

I have another question,......
1 micro procesor with 8 cores = 16 cores HiperTreading and Maxwell use the 16 cores? Per microproccesor?
In other words, 8 cores at 2.6ghz = 20.8Ghz......... so with HT 2.6Ghz * 16cores HT= 41.6Ghz?

Thanks for your tips

Yes, Maxwell will use as many cores as you give it.

Hyperthread "virtual" cores are not the same, though. Base your calculations on physical cores and add maybe 15-20% on top for the virtual cores.

[Miguel Piñón]

Ok thanks for clarify me dmeyer!!!

Someone have any experience with BOXX Machines?

[dmeyer]

Ok thanks for clarify me dmeyer!!!

Someone have any experience with BOXX Machines?

BOXX make generally good stuff. Good support. A bit pricey.

[Miguel Piñón]

Ok thanks for clarify me dmeyer!!!

Someone have any experience with BOXX Machines?

BOXX make generally good stuff. Good support. A bit pricey.

So is a good choice and yes is a bit pricey, but DELL and HP WorkStations don't have a similar config in Mexico

[eric nixon]

Put more ram in it, ram is cheap, I think I paid 150 for 48gb triple channel for my SR2

btw. Boxx machines had overheating problems in the past, not sure about now. I've heard 3 people cursing them. But I wouldnt recommend building your own either, my home build wasnt easy and I feel pretty lucky that it worked. The x5670 dell I had at work seemed a bit slow, (Tim are you using my old machine, glad you like it!), dont really know what to recommend.

I used e5645's and they dont get too hot @3.8 but those eightcore e5's didnt exist back then, they look good.

[polynurb]

i can second that.. i am running sr-2 and x5650s w 24GB ecc and i already managed to max it out once or twice

home building the hardware is not that more complicated than a normal workstation imho, but overclocking&setting the bios up, or solving hardware related problems can be very tricky because the board is so complex.
..and it won't be much different with the new dual socket 2011 boards coming from asus and sooner or later evga.

right now asfaik only the asus is just out, so i'd wait at least one or two month to see if anything bad pops up about it.

the sr-2 is a bit old by now and still expensive, although performance is good.
@3500 the benchwell scene takes ~3min and scores almost 3500 benchmark.
the e5645 Eric mentioned is below 500€.. which is a good price/perf. ratio for a xeon cpu, assuming you overclock it

also don't forget that many functions in software are not multithreaded, so if you are not exclusively rendering on that machine, less cores at higher speed will give you a better workstation.

[Miguel Piñón]

Put more ram in it, ram is cheap, I think I paid 150 for 48gb triple channel for my SR2

btw. Boxx machines had overheating problems in the past, not sure about now. I've heard 3 people cursing them. But I wouldnt recommend building your own either, my home build wasnt easy and I feel pretty lucky that it worked. The x5670 dell I had at work seemed a bit slow, (Tim are you using my old machine, glad you like it!), dont really know what to recommend.

I used e5645's and they dont get too hot @3.8 but those eightcore e5's didnt exist back then, they look good.

Hey Eric thanks for your response, the RAM is pricey but if its necesary for the total performance in this monster I'll add more RAM.

BTW how about the AMD Opteron at 16 real Physical cores? Its better than Intel Xeon 8 physical with HT?

Thanks for your help