need help to find a prebuilt super fast computer

[jjet67]

Dear users,
My friend is looking for a real fast computer. He does not play game but runs a program that needs real CPU power. I have not updated myself for the latest tech. So could you recommend a pre-built computer (i.e, dell, IBM, etc) that is super fast?
He does not have a limit for the budget.
Thanks,
JJET

 

[Emulex]

i spent $271 on a q6600 dell inspiron 530, 4gb of ram, ati 3650hd, 250gb drive. took the drive out and added 4 x1TB drives in raid-10 (100gb) and raid-5 (rest) intel matrix raid. pulled the 4gb out and threw in 8gb of Black dragon $93 ram. threw windows server 2008 X64 Hyper-V on it and it flies. not the fastest but i do not game. does tear up transcoding. if you need more speed pad-mod it to 3.0ghz.

makes a great nas/xbmc/hyper-V virtual machine rig.

 

[FleshLight]

Anything with Intel Core2Extreme Quad should do the job.

 

[slugg]

IBM BlueGene.

 

[bamacre]

Originally posted by: Emulex
i spent $271 on a q6600 dell inspiron 530, 4gb of ram, ati 3650hd, 250gb drive. took the drive out and added 4 x1TB drives in raid-10 (100gb) and raid-5 (rest) intel matrix raid. pulled the 4gb out and threw in 8gb of Black dragon $93 ram. threw windows server 2008 X64 Hyper-V on it and it flies. not the fastest but i do not game. does tear up transcoding. if you need more speed pad-mod it to 3.0ghz.

makes a great nas/xbmc/hyper-V virtual machine rig.

How did you fit four hard drives in an Inspiron 530?

 

[bamacre]

jjet67,

I would recommend a Dell T3400 for a single processor workstation, or a T5400 for a dual processor workstation.

Dell Outlet is a good place to look, or even Ebay (make sure there is a warranty offered). 😀

 

[TheStu]

If money is truly no object then I suggest the Mac Pro. Actually if Money is truly no object then get the Dell, as it is more expensive.

The Mac Pro with dual 3.2GHz Quad Core and up to 32GB RAM (get that elsewhere) would be an insane screamer no matter what you are doing. It holds up to 4 hard drives, 2 optical drives and 4 PCI-e graphics cards.

 

[Emulex]

Originally posted by: bamacre

Originally posted by: Emulex
i spent $271 on a q6600 dell inspiron 530, 4gb of ram, ati 3650hd, 250gb drive. took the drive out and added 4 x1TB drives in raid-10 (100gb) and raid-5 (rest) intel matrix raid. pulled the 4gb out and threw in 8gb of Black dragon $93 ram. threw windows server 2008 X64 Hyper-V on it and it flies. not the fastest but i do not game. does tear up transcoding. if you need more speed pad-mod it to 3.0ghz.

makes a great nas/xbmc/hyper-V virtual machine rig.

How did you fit four hard drives in an Inspiron 530?

remove the dvd burner and put it in usb enclosure. $10

ever heard of drive rails? it has 4 power supply for sata and 4 sata connectors. win2008 x64 hyper-V DELL OEM loads quite fine from external usb dvd-rom. two drives on the side, one in 3.5" one in 5.25". quite a load for the 350W but i've been running it for a while.

if you enable hyper-V with nvidia cards it hangs big time; the ATI 3650HD can route hdmi audio and run xbmc in the HOST o/s while running hyper-V guests (using RDP/MSTSC to access them ie suse linux and xp).

hacked 1.0.15 bios allows both raid-10 and raid-5 on the same set of disks (matrix raid).

quite a robust rig. I was up at 5am EST during the 20% outlet deal to snag this one. the other ones i got (one new, and a more expensive similar rig) provides me with a level of redundancy so if i need to pull a motherboard from the 2yr olds' machine to service the nas or my pc i can do so.

the SLIC2 in the bios is the crema if you know what i'm talking about.

Probably not the fastest pc ever but dang for the money its hard to beat.

 

[LOUISSSSS]

what program(s) will he be running?

 

[coffeemugnick]

I think your friend definitely needs a BladeCenter QS22/LS21 Cluster, PowerXCell 8i 3.2 Ghz / Opteron DC 1.8 GHz , Voltaire Infiniband.
Would suit him perfectly as its really fast!

 

[DaveSimmons]

> runs a program that needs real CPU power.

What program?

Is the bottleneck the speed of a single CPU, the combined speed and number of all cores (scaling up to how many?), the amount of RAM, or disk I/O?

Depending on the answers it might make sense to go with:

- a faster dual-core with 4 GB of RAM
- a quad core with 4-6 GB RAM
- a systen with SCSI or 10K SATA drives
- a server motherboard with 8+ cores supporting massive amounts of very expensive RAM
- a minicomputer or supercomputer, since price is no object