[kraemerJK]

Maybe somebody can share some of their wisdom :

I have to replace 2 workstations that are quit old. I have been out of the whole cpu / mainboard loop for a while, and have a hard time deciding what to buy.

I have come to this decision : Intel Xeon 5050 (3 Ghz, 667 FSB, 2x2MB Cache) with at least 2 GB of RAM. Does anybody have experience with these cpu´s regarding maxwell ? What mainboard ? AND is there something like a dualboard for these Xeons ??

Thanks for any comment.....

( I remember a time when there was a 4x86 and you knew it was better than a 3x86, no sweating about cache, and fsb and stuff like that.... )

[lpotamianos]

I remember a time when my Amiga 500 was a lot faster than my CPC6128, which was faster than my ZX Spectrum 48K... but that was a long time ago!!!
Nevertheless, I assume that the Xeons are a bit expensive, it seems that most people recommend Athlons X2s for the job, as they are cheaper and perhaps a bit faster.
To give you another point of view, I work on an Athlon 4400+ with 2GB of ram, which is a single core CPU, and had to replace a faulty laptop, so I bought an ACER with an Intel Core Duo T2400 (1.83GHz) with 2GB ram.
The laptop rendered a sample scene at 14min, while my workstation at 25 min. It seems that dual cores are really cutting edge! The particular scene was a vray scene, so I had to try it with maxwell, and the laptop gave a huge benchmark in comparison to my workstation. So it seems that I have to do my test renders on my laptop...

[thxraph]

working with dualcore AMD workstations & rendernode here. chipset NFORCE4, probably the best power/price ratio there is. the only thing that can move me to another than AMD is the CELL processor...

if you need to render multilight at more than 1000x1000 with some emiters (8-15) you'll need more than 2GB of ram. The less CAS your memor have, the more speed you'll get in render (not big change, but good to know)

So, if you only buy 2Gb of ram, take care of having free slot on the motherboard.

I recommend ATHLON X² with 1Mb per core cache for workstation. If you want to spend more money, take dualcore Opteron... even 2xdualcore opteron.

Choose your motherboard with many care, the most expensive arent always the best.

a little quadro is better than a big GeForce, even in SLI what ever you want. as comparison, my workstations have both 2x7800GTX SLI. an old Quaddro FX2000 AGP (GF5 serie, from an old workstation) beat them in the 3D app (lightwave here).

thxraph

[kraemerJK]

Thanks for the input, I appreciate it. I think I will settle on Athlon X2 with 4GB Ram, let´s see what this will do to my render times....

And by the way, for another bit of "golden computer days" : I remember my first memory upgrade. It was a c64, you had to solder some very expensive memory chips on top of the existing ones, but had to lift up certain legs of the new chips. Chances were that you destroyed the original ram along with the new one.....