Good morning. NEWBIE here...
Ya know, the sheer amount of information to wade through right now when choosing a system to buy/build is daunting. Add to that the fact that the choices are not clear cut: Intel vs. AMD, XP vs. 64 vs. FX, Xeon vs. Opteron vs. MP... a lot of conflicting reports as well.
I initially thought I would opt for a dually system, either dual Xeon 3.06s or dual Opteron 246s. A barebones system with either would run in the $1500 range. Opterons are probably a better bet as far as upgrade path (dual-core Opterons down the road) but now enter the 800fsb Xeons. What about those? Augh!
Now I'm wondering:
In terms of overall system responsiveness, instead of a dually rig would I be better served by something like a single AMD 64 (3400+ or 3700+) and putting the extra money into:
I don't do anything earth-shattering with my box, but I tend to have a lot of windows open and doing a bunch of stuff at once. Minimal gaming. Lots of working in Photoshop, scanning, MP3 encoding, DTP.
I'm having a hard time nailing down a clear-cut "right choice" and what will give me the most spry system...
Thanks in advance,
-Dan
Ya know, the sheer amount of information to wade through right now when choosing a system to buy/build is daunting. Add to that the fact that the choices are not clear cut: Intel vs. AMD, XP vs. 64 vs. FX, Xeon vs. Opteron vs. MP... a lot of conflicting reports as well.
I initially thought I would opt for a dually system, either dual Xeon 3.06s or dual Opteron 246s. A barebones system with either would run in the $1500 range. Opterons are probably a better bet as far as upgrade path (dual-core Opterons down the road) but now enter the 800fsb Xeons. What about those? Augh!
Now I'm wondering:
In terms of overall system responsiveness, instead of a dually rig would I be better served by something like a single AMD 64 (3400+ or 3700+) and putting the extra money into:
- more RAM (2GB instead of 1GB) and
- a better hard drive subsystem? I'm thinking either:
- 74GB Raptor boot/system drive + dual raptors in RAID 0 for data [not doing RAID for performance, but rather to create a larger drive] + 160GB SATA drive as a backup for the RAID, or
- venture into SCSI. My experience with SCSI is limited to SCSI as implemented on the Macintosh back in the mid-1990s. I do know that things can get real expensive real quick, especially when you're talking 15K vs. 10K drives, and SCSI RAID cards.
- 74GB Raptor boot/system drive + dual raptors in RAID 0 for data [not doing RAID for performance, but rather to create a larger drive] + 160GB SATA drive as a backup for the RAID, or
I don't do anything earth-shattering with my box, but I tend to have a lot of windows open and doing a bunch of stuff at once. Minimal gaming. Lots of working in Photoshop, scanning, MP3 encoding, DTP.
I'm having a hard time nailing down a clear-cut "right choice" and what will give me the most spry system...
Thanks in advance,
-Dan
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