should I go socket 1366 now and upgrade soon?

[pesos]

Been limping along with a C2D dell workstation, but it won't physically take my new gtx460 (my power supply will fit but dual slot boards won't fit in this optiplex case).

So I am thinking of accelerating my new project which is to build my new machine into a Mac Pro case. I don't have the new 2009 front panel connector pinout figured out yet, but I can survive without Front USB and a ghetto rigged power switch for now.

The problem is I've waited this long and was trying to hold out for SB...

I also have a side project that will require me to set up a home server so... I'm thinking I could get a 1366 cpu/mobo now, and transition that setup to the home server when I move to SB next year. I would just go 1156 but ideally I'd like to be able to get 24 GB of ram in the server down the road...

Sound like a plan? Are there any 1156 mobos with more than 4 slots out there?

Any suggestions I haven't thought of are very welcome, thanks!
-Wes

 

[Arkaign]

How about grabbing a Socket 775 board from FS/FT or the Egg and overclocking that C2D into the 3.2-3.5ghz range? With a 460 and 4GB (?) of DDR2, that should game really well and be a decent holdover for you without having to buy a ton of crap that you might just end up replacing. Plus you'd get to figure out the Mac case connections/etc on a cheapish board rather than some $175+ brand new board.

$75 AR P43 board, even has USB3!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128428

Grab a cheap ATX case, 5450 or so, and some other cheap odds and ends, and you could transition it to a good spare/media/etc PC after getting your big SB system built next year.

EDIT : Good lord, what would you need 24GB of ram in a server for? AFAIK, outside of severe-duty setups, servers do not need hideously large amount of memory unless they're running gigantic server-side hosted apps. Usually servers just need to transfer and process data quickly to and from workstations, which doesn't take all that much memory, but benefits from fast storage and memory throughput.

 

[pesos]

Trust me, I need that much memory 🙂 It's for virtualization. My current Hyper-V host only has 16 GB and it's very tight to virtualize a DC, Exchange server, and DPM server all on there...

 

[Arkaign]

Ah, got it. Well I'd still recommend waiting, unless you have need for big power now, in which case grab a 920/930 and OC it up. 980X+ is too expensive to make sense for anyone without massive wallet size right now.

EDIT: You'd also be somewhat amazed in how good an overclocked C2D runs on a quality mobo, those Dells/HPs/etcs at stock speeds usually seem really gimped in performance. What C2D cpu is it, and how much DDR2 memory? DDR2-800?

FWIW, if you feel like it, usually you can ebay the OEM Dell PSUs and Mobos for a fairly decent amount on the bay.

 

[pesos]

I kinda like the idea of going with a socket 1156 server board... because I will be freeing up a bunch of 4 GB RDIMMS from another server that I can pop in there instead of having to buy all new memory.

My concern is physical layout... All the server boards seem to have only a single x16 slot (and some of those actually run at x8 only - which isn't the end of the world) and they are all positioned to the extreme left - and the Mac Pro case only has 5 slots and the power supply would be in the way if I tried to shift the mobo to the right... Will have to do some measuring.

 

[Arkaign]

You already have a bunch of DDR3 sticks? That would certainly change the financial aspect of this job.

I'm kind of confused, you have a GTX460, which would seem to indicate that you game? I know the Nvidia GPUs can also help with distributed computing and the like. But you also talk about using the same HW for a server? Server boards almost invariably do not have OC options, which would put a firm ceiling on performance compared to a more gaming oriented-unit, while offering things like SAS and generally higher-quality LAN and Memory options.

If at all possible, I'd recommend a server build and a gaming build always be separate things. A GTX460 in a server board in a Mac Pro case just doesn't make a lot of sense in my head.

 

[Arkaign]

Also of critical importance, if you go 1156, you *must* use a Xeon processor to use registered ECC Dimms, the desktop processors will not work, which will limit max memory in all of the boards I see to 16GB instead of 32GB.

 

[pesos]

Let me see if I can try to alleviate the confusion, sorry for being all over the place:

I ultimately need two machines: my workstation (with gtx460 in mac pro case) and a server (with 24 GB ram) that is hopefully relatively quiet as it will be in the house, replacing a loud server that is currently hosted in a datacenter.

I don't want to jump to current great hardware if possible, with SB right around the corner. So I am thinking that ideally, I will get halfway decent hardware that I will transition into the server machine down the road when I transition to SB (the datacenter server will suffice until then).

I have a number of 4 GB ddr3 dimms I will be freeing up, but they are ECC RDIMMS, so they would require a mobo that can take those, such as the 1156 server boards 34xx chipset)...

 

[Ben90]

I would probably get something like an Asus P6T WS Pro which supports ECC memory. Your also going to need a Xeon processor so something like a W3530 would be decent.

Decent gaming platform which you can move to a server once you feel the need to.

 

[pesos]

Good call... newegg had an open box p6t wspro for 2 hundo. Will post back the results, thanks guys!

 

[vapordub]

Good lord, what would you need 24GB of ram in a server for?

LOL. Built a DL380 G7 this morning for a client, installed 9 4gb sticks for each processor for 72gb total. The memory alone cost more than the server and extra processor kit together.

 

[pesos]

Yep, my T710s both have 9x4GB and I am about to replace half of those with 8GB sticks. The plan was to use the replaced 4GB sticks in my new Asus MB but the damn thing doesn't post using those sticks. !#K$JK%H!%!