Building dual cpu cruncher

[Khyron320]

Ive been away from the DC scene for a while now but come winter time ill be fireing up the crunchers again and i want to build a new box. Looking for suggestions.

Im planning on building the box within 1 month.

I thought about xeons they seemed cheaper per cpu than opterons.

I wanted to do barton xp2500's since it would be cheap but it looks too complex the last time i tried to unlock an athlon XP i broke it =/

This will probably be for F@H btw it was my favorite project before.

 

[IEC]

You might want to look into using Mobile Athlon XPs - you can SMP them on a dually using a relatively simple bridge trick... see about it here... that is, assuming you are using an MPX mobo...

 

[Markfw]

Whats the budget ? I can say that dual Opterons rock in DC ! (but they are not cheap)

 

[Khyron320]

I already have HD/Ram/PSU/CASE all that btw another box is being gutted.

i could spend as much as $800 but would it really be worth it?? Price per crunch????I mean if i can get 2x2500 mobiles and dually them and they perform 1/2 as good as opterons in DC but cost 1/4th as much then going this route makes sense. Now on the other hand if the opterons were pushing out 4 WU for every 1 that an xp2500 then opterons might be a choice here.

I dont really know man im out of the loop here I dont DC until winter time cause these PCs cause too much heat. and i forget everything by the time im ready to start up again LOL. Im noticing that you can snag a dually xeon mobo with 2x 2.66ghz xeons for $667.92 a 242 opteron setup is almost $800 at the same store... Wouldnt xeons perform well too thanks to the hyperthreading?

 

[Mloot]

Yep, the Xeons are probably alot better in the price/crunch ratio, especially if you pair the 2.66's up with an Asus PC-DL or somesuch, and overclock them to 3.0-3.2 (or higher, which is very possible). As far as crunching power goes, I don't think an Opteron 242 setup will be able to touch a setup like that.

 

[GLeeM]

Re the HT: I have a P4 3.0C @ 3.3 that I have checked F@H WU timings on. Depending on the type of WU, I have gotten between 11% and 31% increase in production by running two at once.

A thread at 2CPU forum had some gurus that decided to wait for E0 stepping of Nocona Xeon due in September. (I don't know much, so it doesn't take much to impress me)

Will your Ram/PSU/Case work with either Xeon or Opteron?

Welcome back!

 

[networkman]

Staying on the cheaper end of it, AMD MP2000s and the like are much cheaper than they used to be. I just picked up a couple on eBay for my Tyan Tiger MPX. I got the pair(new OEM) for under $100.00 with the fans.

As with my other Dual rig(p3-1000x2), I'll run the S@H client on the 2nd processor, and the CPDN project on the primary. I haven't played with the F@H client in quite a while but I'd be surprised if you couldn't run it on both processors, probably in seperate directories like SETI is.

 

[Coquito]

Thank you for the link ariafrost. I'm still looking into the possibility of doing dual mobile rig myself, but I just may have to ask someone on these boards to do the modding. The nerves in my hands are way too shot up.

 

[IEC]

Lol, Coquito... My problem is that I don't have the money...

Always glad to help out though.