Sounds fine to me. I can't say much about the case; if you like it and find it a good value, great.
Usually I just get the best case and PSU and RAM that I can find on sale that is of good quality.
Anything better than DDR2-PC2-6400 with 5-5-5-15 timings would be very suitable.
DDR2-PC2-8000 would be icing on the cake for a bit of overclocking or running with a little less
RAM latency and faster timings; if the budget permits it, this would be ideal if you do plan to
overclock a bit.
Much number crunching is actually memory bound in terms of how fast it can access memory
and not limited by CPU calculation speed. In that case, you'll want to overclock the Q6600 so the
DDR2 is running at something like 500 MHz if you buy the faster PC2-8000 and the CPU is running
stably overclocked around 333x9 or a bit more.
Not all number crunching programs effectively use a quad core CPU, and, in fact, if you're memory
bandwidth limited (as above) there are many programs that won't work any faster on a Q6600 than they'd
work on a comparable dual core CPU. That said, the Q6600 at around $180 is SUCH a good deal, that
I'd have a hard time suggesting anything else. For programs that do use multi-core parallelism well,
of course it'll be the superior choice. It is also nice since it helps the system be responsive to interactive
use WHILE you're number crunching in the background, for instance if you're running some kind of
interactive visualization / analysis / editors et. al.
Of course if your problem domain is embarrassingly parallel, you might as well just get a GPU like the
GTX 260 or TESLA from NVIDIA or a HD4870 or a current Firestream card for GPGPU and use
the Q6600 box as a GPGPU host for some *serious* number crunching.
Adding in such a GPU and using the GPU aided BLAS or FFT from NVIDIA CUDA or the GPU
aided ACML from ATI/AMD to speed up CPU resident programs that use BLAS/LAPACK library calls
would be beneficial in many cases too.
If your problem is severely memory bandwidth limited and you cannot / will not use a GPU to solve it,
yet it has parallel solutions that don't require much more than 100MBy/s communications (Gb ethernet),
it is often a better price/performance proposition to buy two or more PCs with cheaper dual-core CPUs
and use them in parallel with something like MPI rather than trying to build one fast PC.
With commodity RAM you get about 3-5GBy/second transfer rate depending
on the speed grade and overclocking. If you build two such PCs that's double the memory bandwidth
(6-10 GBy/s total over two machines) for less cost than buying very high end motherboard/CPU/RAM for
a single system which would still not typically be able to give you more than 5-6GBy/second even with the
best available components.
But again, if your problem admits such solutions, GPUs are often better since they can give you
30GBy/s to 100GBy/s transfer rates to their RAM though it is a limited amount of RAM compared
to the 8GBy you can fit on a desktop PC motherboard.
The only other problem with using commodity RAM/motherboard is that without ECC data protection
for the RAM, you can get bit errors due to glitches in the electronics that will give you some statistical
rate of faulty memory operations over the course of weeks. If you depend on using 8GBy memory
for computations that are running for long periods of time (days or weeks), there's a not insignificant
chance for the calculation data to be undetectably corrupted without the benefit of ECC memory.
Motherboard? I'd look at the ASUS units like the P5K-Deluxe (it uses the P35 Intel chipset);
I've built more than one these with Q6600s with good results. I'd stick with DDR2 supporting
models, though, since DDR3 is not cost effective, so that probably means you'll be staying away from
some of the newer X48/X38 chipset models.
If you will overclock, get yourself a ThermalRight Ultra 120 Extreme cooler and
a D12SL low speed Yate Loon fan for it.
Originally posted by: dhoom
Folks,
I want to build a Decent cost effective number cruncher desktop system following are the parts I have, please suggest suitable motherboard and also give feedback on other parts
1) Antec 300 case
2) 650W Corsair psu
3) Corsair 8 GB Memory
4) Intel Q6600 PSU
5) Motherboard - Please suggest
