I've decided to try to take advantage of this forum.
Situation is this. I'm putting together a new system for work (I may build one for private too).
I'm going to be a bit tight lipped here, but I'm working with a very demanding app. As demanding as a 32-bit app can be. Meaning, the cpu crunches at 100% almost continually all day, and I have to consistently fiddle with models, in order to fit into the 32-bit space. With 1GB-1.5GB RAM, swapping during computing is not bad at all though. It swaps, but the time spent swapping is very, very small compared to total computing time.
What is worse is loading/saving work and libraries for various 'tools' during interactive work. This has started to annoy me.
Our hardware budget is rather small, and we are using it to upgrade often, like every year at least, with rather 'value' PC systems. From what we've seen sofar, more ambitious systems, like multi CPU, would not have done as well. (a competitor, only recently was able to replace rather old and slow R6000 workstations. I also suspect their software cost 4 times as much, and we're speaking 6 figure numbers here.) The key is that age defines the performance of a PC much more than cost.
Our current machines are XP3000+, which were found to be much better than Intel on this app, about a year ago. Recent versions, however, have seen some SSE2 optimization of libraries. We are going to try A64 3400+ and socket 478 3.2GHz P4E this time. My money is on the 3400+, because I think the code still suits AMD better (and we may see a 64-bit version, we have requested it.), but we do use 2.8P4Cs for other apps, and HT is slightly tempting.
Anyway, because I've found waiting on HD-activity annoying lately, I'm tempted to put 74GB Raptors in the machines. Drawbacks, as I see it, are noise - 32dBA is abit too much for us, I suspect. And economy, we don't get many GB for our money here
. I'm busting the budget a bit, we already have other HDs we could use instead, and I'm not sure we'll have enough space...)
We will not consider SCSI, and I don't think we'll consider RAID0.
So, those of you that have experience with the Raptor, do you think it's worth it?
How likely are problems with the SATA150 interface? (nForce3 250, I865PE)
I invite any comments about the Raptors.
Situation is this. I'm putting together a new system for work (I may build one for private too).
I'm going to be a bit tight lipped here, but I'm working with a very demanding app. As demanding as a 32-bit app can be. Meaning, the cpu crunches at 100% almost continually all day, and I have to consistently fiddle with models, in order to fit into the 32-bit space. With 1GB-1.5GB RAM, swapping during computing is not bad at all though. It swaps, but the time spent swapping is very, very small compared to total computing time.
What is worse is loading/saving work and libraries for various 'tools' during interactive work. This has started to annoy me.
Our hardware budget is rather small, and we are using it to upgrade often, like every year at least, with rather 'value' PC systems. From what we've seen sofar, more ambitious systems, like multi CPU, would not have done as well. (a competitor, only recently was able to replace rather old and slow R6000 workstations. I also suspect their software cost 4 times as much, and we're speaking 6 figure numbers here.) The key is that age defines the performance of a PC much more than cost.
Our current machines are XP3000+, which were found to be much better than Intel on this app, about a year ago. Recent versions, however, have seen some SSE2 optimization of libraries. We are going to try A64 3400+ and socket 478 3.2GHz P4E this time. My money is on the 3400+, because I think the code still suits AMD better (and we may see a 64-bit version, we have requested it.), but we do use 2.8P4Cs for other apps, and HT is slightly tempting.
Anyway, because I've found waiting on HD-activity annoying lately, I'm tempted to put 74GB Raptors in the machines. Drawbacks, as I see it, are noise - 32dBA is abit too much for us, I suspect. And economy, we don't get many GB for our money here
. I'm busting the budget a bit, we already have other HDs we could use instead, and I'm not sure we'll have enough space...)We will not consider SCSI, and I don't think we'll consider RAID0.
So, those of you that have experience with the Raptor, do you think it's worth it?
How likely are problems with the SATA150 interface? (nForce3 250, I865PE)
I invite any comments about the Raptors.
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