Dual Xeon or Dual I7 for graphic design?

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PlasmaBomb

Lifer
Nov 19, 2004
11,815
2
81
Originally posted by: aigomorla
Originally posted by: themisfit610
Dual Nehalem Xeon workstations aren't all that expensive.

The Mac Pro is a pretty good value, and Dell / HP both sell workstations for under $3k that get you 2 Nehalem Xeon CPUs, and support for tons of RAM.

~MiSfit

i see it for 3.2K.

>.<

And that's with Two 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processors.

:T

He could piece it out on a super micro board, and have vista on it for less, and skip the consumer route entirely.

I think that's what he's asking.

You can get a dual E5540 (2.53 GHz) Gainstown setup with 8GB of ram from Dell for <$3k ($2,927 PowerEdge T410) and that is without any "special" discounts. Granted it only has a 160GB HDD...
 

alyarb

Platinum Member
Jan 25, 2009
2,444
0
76
Originally posted by: mlah384
*what should have been the OP*


i know you're not a kid, we just needed to give your ego a little jolt to get some useful information out of you. it's good that you're sensitive enough that it worked. frankly i don't care if your feelings are hurt. you can't blame us for not taking you as seriously as you wish when your OPs are incredibly vague and only consisting of a few lines. when, within a matter of days, you post several shopping-spree threads pertaining to a several very expensive components on top of some very basic tech-support threads, using a username that can be pronounced "moo-lah," you do sound like a kid whose daddy has his back, and buys a totally new setup complete with 30" monitor when something doesn't work right one day. With the quality of your posts leading up to this one there is absolutely no way any of us can take you at face value to be a professional. if you want a lot of information from us, you have to communicate, and that means long, detailed posts. i don't need your life story, but i will not skip over it if you include it. The Win32k error could be a corrupted file system due to malware, overclocking, or a damaged hard drive, SATA or southbridge component. If that was the machine with the blown power supply, it could be some other hardware failure as the whole board is up for grabs. But if the system POSTs, all you need to do is get your data off that drive, format, and reinstall. Go easy on the overclocking since that particular CPU/board doesn't seem to make long-term commitments and keep your systems running lean.

You do not "catch hell" from me for using improper computer jargon, but you will catch it for being completely nondescript in every conceivable way posting several threads that may or may not refer to several machines. I don't care if you know the model numbers or not of every component, but if you know the frequency and core count of your CPU, the volume (not the brand or speed) of your memory system, disks, then yes, we are more able to help you with more information about what you're using.

For a business, listing all the programs and all the machines you use is standard operating procedure. we need to know where you're at in order to plan something out that is substantially improved in the proper areas. it's good that you're familiar with setting up RAID, because you're going to keep doing that for the next few machines you put together. you were correct to get an SSD for its "speed," but in a laptop where you're transporting hundreds of gigs of temporary work, of course that is infeasible. SSDs should only be used for booting your OS, booting programs, and paging data in and out of memory. they are not for bulk storage. you can use them for scratch work but the cost of doing this goes up significantly and rendering is never disk-limited so I would avoid that. I think the ideal storage config for you would be two or three 80GB intel X25 SSD in RAID 0 for your OS/apps/swap, with a big RAID 5 for scratch/storage.

waiting on the six core xeons, even if you don't plan to buy them, is a good idea as the gainestown models will fall in price somewhat. however, you should be prepared to spend around $2000 per CPU. In order to run dual CPUs you have to get 5500 Gainestown series xeons which are substantially more expensive than the 3500 Bloomfield xeons, and six-core xeons will likewise be substantially more expensive than their quad-core counterparts. Right now I think the best deal would be a pair of Xeon E5540s at $790 each. That's 16 threads at 2.53 GHz. If you like to work with all of your applications open, then yeah, go for 12 gigs of memory. supermicro is the defacto leader in high quality workstation boards and that is who I recommend. ASUS also makes workstation boards but the service is abysmal and the quality is questionable. You get what you pay for. Just get one with 12+ DIMMs instead of 6 so that you can expand on the RAM if you need to (i would start with 12 gigs and go up to 24 or 36 if you have to). This board is expensive but will cover all your bases:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16813182176

So that's $2000 for two Xeons and a board. 12GB ECC registered DDR3 1333 is ~$360. Two X25 SSDs will be $500. Talk to us more about your bulk storage requirements and scratch work and we'll work out something that's good for that. Seagate makes some very quick, very inexpensive single-platter 500GB disks and I think a big fast cost-effective RAID 5 would be up your alley for speed and reliability reasons.


However, let me back up for a sec. You're spending $2k on 2 CPUs and 1 motherboard. I want you to realize that if you step back into the consumer segment for a moment, understand that you can have a single i7 and motherboard for $500. This i7 will do 4-4.2 GHz easily and it can run up to 24GB of memory. So you may want to consider having several "sweet" workstations instead of one "bad ass" workstation. It depends on how compartmentalized your workflow is, and it depends on how well-threaded your work is within a given program. Yes, premiere and 3D studio run great with up to 16 or 32 threads. But illustrator? No. Photoshop? ehh, not a huge difference. Sometimes 8 threads at 4 GHz is faster and cheaper than 16 threads at 2.5 GHz. Not always, but considerably often. It depends on exactly what you're doing (filters, effects) in a given program; mainly, having double the CPU power doesn't mean everything goes twice as fast. But one thing is certain: the i7 can be done for less than 25% the cost of the dual xeon machine while competing admirably against it due to overclocking. You can get your home machine and a couple work machines knocked out for the cost of the dual xeon system.

I would avoid cube cases until they make one with good airflow. 4+ GHz CPUs are better off with good general airflow with a big aircooler than a hot case + water loop to spot-cool one tiny area. There are plenty of great mATX X58 boards and high-flow mATX cases for you to consider for your home machine if you want it to not take up space, but you have to realize that cube cases or mATX cases will not let you put a ton of drives in the machine. If you're interested in water cooling, you need a case that can mount at least a dual 120mm radiator otherwise your loop will starve for heat-exchanger surface area and will struggle to outperform air coolers (thus, not getting your money's worth).

This is a nice little mATX case.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16811163058

you can get 5 hard disks and a DVD burner in there with dual 120mm intake/exhaust. I would just focus on good, silent air cooling. Overclocking these days is not cooler-limited.

As for the monitors, I really don't see how you have any other choice except Dell. You can get their refurbished 30" screens at half price and they come with the same exchange/warranty period as if it were new. You can exchange it for any reason if something is wrong, no questions asked. Compared to the price of a new Apple display, Dell is offering a superior panel at "buy 1 get 1 free" pricing with leading support to ensure that it's in as-good or better shape than an untested, unopened product.
 

mapesdhs

Junior Member
May 14, 2008
6
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Just for reference, there are a few XEON Nehalem systems which support large RAM if one really needs it, eg. the SGI Octane III has up to 96GB per blade (12 RAM sockets
per blade) for the non-gfx config with a max of 10 dual-socket blades, or 144GB per blade (18 RAM sockets) for the gfx-included config with a max of 2 dual-socket blades.
Without gfx, the 10 blade tower unit thus has a total max of 960GB RAM, but it's a cluster in a single box; default GigE included, Infiniband optional. With gfx included (multiple
Quadro FX, Tesla, CUDA, etc.) the max is 4 x quad-core XEON i7 5500 series and 288GB RAM, with seven PCIe 2.0 expansion slots wired as two 16x slots, four 8 slots and
one 4x slot (though this is still effectively two separate blades in a cluster AFAIK; nice to have a 2-socket render node in the same box though). See:

http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/octaneIII/
http://www.sgi.com/products/se...phics_workstation.html

I only have an example price for a non-gfx config atm, namely for a maxed-out no-gfx tower with 10 blades, 20 x quad-core i7 XEON L5520 2.26GHz, 240GB RAM: $53K.
This works out to about 50% better price/performance than, for example, the cluster of Dell R710 servers I recently helped spec out for a movie company in Spain. Alas, bad
timing, Octane III wasn't yet announced when I specced out the R710s.

You'll have to wait for NUMA support to see i7 XEON systems with lots of sockets. SGI's UltraViolet project is due to use these, ie. a shared-memory, single-system-image i7
XEON machine. If it supports less than 512 CPUs I'll be surprised since that's the existing limit of their Altix 4700 which has a max of 128TB RAM in a single system (ie. not a
cluster).


Note there are various ordinary pro-series desktops that support large RAM, but I'm not sure what mbds they use, eg. the dual-socket i7 XEON Dell T7500 has a max RAM of
192GB (running RHEL) or 128GB (64bit Windows). They're just a tad expensive, as someone else pointed out, if one wants large RAM because of the high price of 8GB
DIMMs. The T7500 I helped the Spanish company buy was:

2 x Quad-core XEON X5570 2.93GHz 8MB L3, Memory @ 1333MHz
NVIDIA Quadro FX5800 4GB graphics card
24GB DDR3/1333MHz RAM (6 x 4GB ECC RDIMMs; 6 slots unused for future expansion)
160GB 10000rpm SATA system disk
2 x 1TB 7200rpm SATA data disks (setup as RAID 1 for reliability)
16X DVD+/-RW Drive and 6X Blu-Ray Disc Rewritable With Roxio, PowerDVD and Bluray media
3.5" Floppy drive
Keyboard, mouse, etc.

7772 UKP + shipping/tax list price

Though with all the other stuff they bought, I think they nabbed a hefty discount, worked out at around 6250 UKP total for the T7500. I specced it using 4GB DIMMs so the
cost wasn't excessive but they could still double the RAM if necessary without issue. Fitting it with 3 x 8GB DIMMs instead of 6 x 4GB would have added 1000 to the price.

Ian.

 

rchiu

Diamond Member
Jun 8, 2002
3,846
0
0
Originally posted by: mlah384
Wow... so much love. I'm flattered at all the press and especially all the youngsters that are researching all my threads/comments in other posts trying to belittle me. Since there are so many eMuscles on this thread and since I'm home today with my wife and child (We all have food poisoning from the fair last night.. ughh...) .......

Heh, not trying to belittle or anything, but a guy with wife and kid, running a successful business with bunch of employees still have the time to go around asking for advise on custom build overclocked watercooled PC? (and still have the time to read all the poster's posts)? And you need to ask for advise when you have been overclokcing for over 10+ years and won some video award?

But anyway, if you want real advice, go focus on your business and buy dell or hp for your PC needs. Rather than spending time on buinding pc, dealing with oc, take the time to build your client relationship or take care of your employees. $10k+ plus on apple is nothing if you save the extra time to get one new client or groom a productive and loyal employee.

 

NXIL

Senior member
Apr 14, 2005
774
0
0
Hey Mlah,

I do hope you and your family are feeling better, and that you did not pick up hepatitis A at the fair.

In reply to your thorough (epic?) and informative post:

I'm flattered at all the press and especially all the youngsters that are researching all my threads/comments in other posts trying to belittle me.

No, trying to get more info, make sense of it. Sorry, but to me, your posts did not make sense. And yes, I tied your posts together because I read your contemporaneous posts in other sections (busted cap, and BSOD question, and video card), and still they did not make sense to me. Lot of posts, all at once, with questions like "which is better, a dell 30 inch or apple 30 inch".....well, to be honest, neither, since from reading I have done, for productivity, dual monitors is best:

http://lifehacker.com/168488/d...-increase-productivity

Regardless,I could not tell if you were a high school student, college student, or what. 40 year old food-poisoned father? Never would have guessed.

I definitely did not get the sense you were looking to build a business machine--and, my philosophy on that is Apple, Dell, IBM, etc, with service and support. Machine down? That's money down the drain. (And I saw someone posted similar sentiments just above this post.)

I would not overclock a production machine--just me. I am sure there are overclockers here whose machines run better than my stock machine. RAID 0: I would have big time backups, ready to go, and would test that backup system to make sure it worked.

As for the Q6600 and the BSOD/Win32K.sys: with the STOP codes, you should be able to narrow it down. Could be memory. Could be power supply (lots of faults are caused by bad power supplies.) Could be hard drive problem, could be a driver that has been corrupted for whatever reason.

According to Google (yes I Google everything), I couldn't find anything saying that it could be ram if the BSOD was a win32k.sys so that's why I asked on this forum. So I'm the type that instead of spending valuable time buying and replacing ram, running tests, etc.. I'd just buy all new up to date stuff which is the reason I started asking about i7, xeon, graphics cards, 24-32gb ram, etc...

OK, going to be very blunt here, but, you are going to build an entirely new system because you are getting a BSOD? You are a Microsoft/Intel poster boy. Sorry, but that does not make sense, especially when you are talking such high end gear--you are looking at a 3-5K$ replacement system, unless I am mistaken. (And, if you are going to chuck that BSODing Q6600 with 8GB of RAM: I will take it.)

You said you posted here for help, but, again, to be quite blunt, "BSOD" and "win32k.sys" is not enough info. Need the stop codes. Need the memory dump. Need to know what you changed last in system: new graphics drivers, new program installed, new hardware added......and: never heard if you ran MEMTESTx86 overnight, or tried running machine with less RAM, etc. You said the memory was overclocked--high voltage and high speeds can, in fact, damage RAM--so yes, RAM can go bad, and that can spill over into data corruption on the hard drive, etc.

At this point, what I'm leaning toward is keeping my quad cores until the new xeons are out because I want to go commercial grade and get out of consumer

XEONS are often higher binned consumer CPUs...not always. Some XEONs are server grade only. But then you need server grade motherboards, server grade ECC memory, possibly buffered, server grade power supply and case (not a mini case--hence some of the confusion--you were apparently talking about more than one system in various threads. )

Apple is good in GRAPHIC DESIGN because they use XEONs... period..

Oh, I don't even want to go there....to PM Viditor, and say you are dissing the graphic design prowess of AMD CPUs and GPUs......he will "bust a cap on you"--and oh, I said that, not you. It's a slang phrase, delivered in a joking manner, it's hyperbole and "gangster" and really quite ridiculous when you think about it, but it was *not* a slur directed at you. It does sound to me like a capacitor, a "cap", blew in your cheap power supply--and it sounded like a gun shot? Hence the "busted a cap" reference, which I do hope came across in a humorous fashion for at least someone.

Viditor is not violent in any way, by the way, and I do think he will stay away from your power supplies. However, I do think he would appreciate your looking at some of AMDs server grade offerings--AMD cpus run the render farms at some big movie/graphic design houses.

As for:

bad language, immature rants, attacking or disrespecting community members was not allowed and was frowned upon by everyone in the community. People would get banned for such things.

Sorry, but I, and others, feel the replies you got were appropriate.

Bad language? You said:

Oh sweet! That sounds badass..

Naughty word.

Really: and again, sorry, but you ask vague questions, apparently interested in commercial grade gear, but ask on a high end consumer/hobbyist/enthusiast forum, and use "sweet" high school slang.....

Your first post on this thread:

I heard xeon was best for graphic design (video stuff like After Effects, Premiere, Vegas and 3D stuff like Max, Cinema 4D, etc... ) and I also heard that I7 was better than Xeon until the 6core xeon came out? or something like that? Should I wait for the new xeon's? or what? And what would be the ideal setup? Also, can you overclock dual setups (dual xeon or dual i7)?

Dude, you're all over the place. "You heard xeon was the best for graphic design".....where? Why? In what price range? Because of the extra instruction set in Intel chips? At various price ranges, AMD does, in fact, win for "graphic design".

But then you say i7 is better than XEON.....until the 6 core XEON comes out.....should you wait for the new XEONs? for SATA 6, for USB 3? "What's the ideal setup"--dude, what's your price range? "Can you overclock dual setups"--generally no, because that is server grade production kit, and needs to run stable. If you need more speed, you pay for more speed; you don't try to overstress that sort of gear to eek a bit more out of it for free.

But I read that going from q6600 to i7 isnt a huge difference? Maybe it would be smarter to wait and get dual i9? I wonder what the max ram will be on those boards too?

Will it be likely that an i9 be twice as fast as i7 in rendering?

Someone asked that on another forum:

http://www.tomshardware.com/fo...28-intel-gulftown-core

They are going run 4500MHz @ .8v (stock), Overclock to 7+GHz and cost $89.99 and come with free Motherboard fitted with 12GB of DDR4-3000


They are going to be the cats meoow.

and, same thread:

I hate questions like this...NO ONE CAN GIVE A DEFINITIVE ANSWER until the processor is actually in the hands of reviewers...anything else is speculation and worthless...most users barely need 4 cores now, let alone 6 cores...if you want to upgrade or want a new machine, don't wait for "what might be" order the best system you can afford today!


Hey, at least you got some straight answers here. Harsh, but straight!

So, in summary: you need to set your budget for this new uber-Xeon rig. You need to balance CPU(s), motherboard, ECC(!) memory, hard drives, video card--and please get an uninterruptible power supply--or, get a quote on a workstation from Dell or IBM, with a service contract.

If you wait for i9--i11 with a built in Larrabee (for graphic design) will be around the corner. You can wait for that too.

And: I do hope you and your family feel better--that you do, in fact, get a sense of people in this posting thread trying to help, as profane and irreverent as I at least can be, and I hope you put together a system that works well.

When you do: post some pics. I heard it may have blue LEDs?*

NX

*Joking!

PS: AMD has a six core server processor you can buy today: 115W, fast, well supported:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...CodeValue=6528%3A48486

Slap two into a dual Socket F mobo:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16813182195

That's a lot of memory slots:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...20Server%20Motherboard

and you've got 12 cores and lots of RAM this week.
 

aigomorla

CPU, Cases&Cooling Mod PC Gaming Mod Elite Member
Super Moderator
Sep 28, 2005
20,846
3,190
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Originally posted by: rchiu

Heh, not trying to belittle or anything, but a guy with wife and kid, running a successful business with bunch of employees still have the time to go around asking for advise on custom build overclocked watercooled PC? (and still have the time to read all the poster's posts)?

:X

im not married... no kids...
I have a successful business... otherwise i couldnt afford all these toys. There more toys then office machines...

My employees hate dell because they been using machines i built.. more like handed down after i got bored...

Lol my admin is using Sakura... a machine i retired last year (QX9650 @ 4ghz DFI X38).
:X

I dare ya to try to replace her system with a dell. She'll castrate you.

Im currently typing on a i7 965 in my office as my main office machine. :X

And ive been watercooling since Pentium 3 days.

;P


Originally posted by: NXIL


Someone asked that on another forum:

http://www.tomshardware.com/fo...28-intel-gulftown-core

They are going run 4500MHz @ .8v (stock), Overclock to 7+GHz and cost $89.99 and come with free Motherboard fitted with 12GB of DDR4-3000

Yeah right... and i have a 90000jigawatt cooling system that can go below absolute 0. :p

Okey im done belittling myself...
 

rchiu

Diamond Member
Jun 8, 2002
3,846
0
0
Originally posted by: aigomorla
Originally posted by: rchiu

Heh, not trying to belittle or anything, but a guy with wife and kid, running a successful business with bunch of employees still have the time to go around asking for advise on custom build overclocked watercooled PC? (and still have the time to read all the poster's posts)?

:X

im not married... no kids...
I have a successful business... otherwise i couldnt afford all these toys. There more toys then office machines...

My employees hate dell because they been using machines i built.. more like handed down after i got bored...

Lol my admin is using Sakura... a machine i retired last year (QX9650 @ 4ghz DFI X38).
:X

I dare ya to try to replace her system with a dell. She'll castrate you.

Im currently typing on a i7 965 in my office as my main office machine. :X

And ive been watercooling since Pentium 3 days.

;P

Haha, wait til u got a wife that demands your attention and kid you need to run after. Although as my sons become older, I am making building PC a father/son thing. :)

But seriously if you are a pro in building all these customized/oc'ed pc and have the know how to fix any problem without asking for support, of course that beats Dell every single day. But if like the OP who have to ask about dual i7, differences between xeon and i7, seriuosly I 'd recommend him leaving the build/support to the likes of Dell.
 

aigomorla

CPU, Cases&Cooling Mod PC Gaming Mod Elite Member
Super Moderator
Sep 28, 2005
20,846
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You guys really need to wait for gulftown if u have a large budget.

Umm... cant say much right now.. besides yikes...
 

NXIL

Senior member
Apr 14, 2005
774
0
0
Looks like six core Gulftown may be Apple Mac Pro exclusive for a while:

http://www.appleinsider.com/ar...x_core_processors.html

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Apple's next Mac Pro may sport six-core processors

By Sam Oliver
Published: 09:00 AM EST

A forthcoming update to the Mac Pro line could have short-term exclusivity of a new Intel Xeon six-core CPU early next year, according to a new rumor.
 

aigomorla

CPU, Cases&Cooling Mod PC Gaming Mod Elite Member
Super Moderator
Sep 28, 2005
20,846
3,190
126
im pretty sure mac's would have them...

gulftown is pretty scary... :X