Computer Upgrades

[AireTamStorm]

I started another thread a while back about building a PC... and I'm at a point where I should probably upgrade again.

I ended up with more or less what I was going for in the previous thread:

1x Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 on Water Cooling
3x EVGA nVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 GPUs
Dual 800W PSU
8GB of RAM

Nowadays, these specs aren't all that hot anymore, and I have been hitting the ceiling lately with the addition of features on my new web site.

This box is a bit of a server in addition to being my workstation. I run my own web server for personal use, as well as feeding friends funny pictures.
In particular, I added a thumbnailer to thumbnail images, PDFs, and video files on-demand, as well as an on-the-fly transcoder to stream media to flash-capable PCs and devices:

These features are REALLY nice, as I can walk out the door and get my media anywhere, and its 100% built by me. But operations like the transcode process and thumbnailing videos take a long time when you have 200-300 videos in a folder all trying to create animated thumbnails at once. Thumbnails and transcodes are all build-once and then reuse, so the transcode/thumbnail are placed in a directory where they're referenced once created, but the content is very dynamic and changes on a daily basis.

Anyway, I'm looking to upgrade to grab more CPU performance and memory, but I'm kind of inbetween a couple of solutions: I like having multiple video cards, but I eat 8GB of RAM and all 4 current cores alive.

On one hand, I have a server-like configuration, with two mid end LGA 1366 i7-based Xeons...
The other hand, a really high end gaming motherboard with a higher end LGA 1366 i7...

If you were building a multimedia workstation / server, what would you go for? It doesn't have to be one of the solutions above, it can be anything, as long as it is one machine. Any thoughts from the Apache/PHP savvy would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Mr B]

From my POV your lacking a good storage solution, with the workload your describing this has an impact.

I'd get a 2/4 cpu socket motherboard for the future. Something like TYAN S7010. (2 sockets) with a single W5590 you get 4 3.3Ghz cores, 8Mb L3, and HT. (It's the Nehalem family, so it's pretty much the same cpu as a i7, with the added benefit of running multiple sockets.(2))
Get a motherboard with 1 16x PCI-E and at least 1x8 PCI-E. (Gen 2)
In the x16, you'll be running graphix. Pretty much a free choice. You'd probably be best of with the 5970 thats on the way if you were to start shopping right now.
In the x8 you'll run pretty much any SAS controller, and stack it with S-ATA drives. Keep your OS and games away from this. Make darn sure to run it as Raid5 or 6.
(Hint. Get a controller that supports 2 hot spares, and auto-rebuild)

In a year, when you think your hitting the roof of computing power, get two of the latest 5500 series Xeons, and rip out the old one.
As far as it goes for the boosting in performance from the GPU's... you could try and find a motherboard with 3+ PCI-E, but your going to be hard pressed to find one, and your probably not going to like the price of em. I'd suggest updating to a newer GFX once every 6 months / a year or so instead.

Or, the cheap solution. Get a new motherboard, stick a i7 on it, and replenish the memorybanks. Stick your current gear in it, and add a small SAS solution, with S-ATA drives. Just get at least a x8 gen.2 PCI-E slot for it. It will give you more GPU power today, and less CPU power by the end of next summer... But will be a fair bit cheaper.

B!

 

[AireTamStorm]

From my POV your lacking a good storage solution, with the workload your describing this has an impact.

I was thinking about storage and had a few ideas regarding them... yours seems to be one of the better ones.

I'd get a 2/4 cpu socket motherboard for the future. Something like TYAN S7010. (2 sockets) with a single W5590 you get 4 3.3Ghz cores, 8Mb L3, and HT. (It's the Nehalem family, so it's pretty much the same cpu as a i7, with the added benefit of running multiple sockets.(2))

The motherboard I'm currently looking at for a dual socket solution would be a SuperMicro: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182176
This fulfills my requirements for 3 x16 slots (1 is 8x electrically) and your recommendation for an 8x Gen2 link.

In the x16, you'll be running graphix. Pretty much a free choice. You'd probably be best of with the 5970 thats on the way if you were to start shopping right now.

I'd cram my 260's into this one until the GT300s come around early next year. I'm on the NVIDIA side of the fence, especially since I'm running Linux. There is a company coming out with ffmpeg accelerator cards that would help performance with encoding, which I could also use the PCIe slots for.

In the x8 you'll run pretty much any SAS controller, and stack it with S-ATA drives. Keep your OS and games away from this. Make darn sure to run it as Raid5 or 6. (Hint. Get a controller that supports 2 hot spares, and auto-rebuild)

The SAS controllers will take SATA? SAS is a tech I haven't touched yet. With the board I'm getting, there seems to be SAS onboard. Are there real benefits for getting an actual card?

Keep your OS and games away from this. Make darn sure to run it as Raid5 or 6. (Hint. Get a controller that supports 2 hot spares, and auto-rebuild)

I don't game on this rig. I watch video, play music, and surf. I just happen to do all -at once- on occasion, which is my reason for having multiple video cards (multimonitor).

In a year, when you think your hitting the roof of computing power, get two of the latest 5500 series Xeons, and rip out the old one.

Will these dual socket boards take just one chip?

As far as it goes for the boosting in performance from the GPU's... you could try and find a motherboard with 3+ PCI-E, but your going to be hard pressed to find one, and your probably not going to like the price of em. I'd suggest updating to a newer GFX once every 6 months / a year or so instead.

Again, I use the cards for multimonitor. While I've experimented with SLI a bit, it is much more important that I'm able to get 4-6 screens.

 

[Javacat]

In the x8 you'll run pretty much any SAS controller, and stack it with S-ATA drives. Keep your OS and games away from this. Make darn sure to run it as Raid5 or 6. (Hint. Get a controller that supports 2 hot spares, and auto-rebuild)

The SAS controllers will take SATA? SAS is a tech I haven't touched yet. With the board I'm getting, there seems to be SAS onboard. Are there real benefits for getting an actual card?

SAS is designed to be backwards compatible with SATA. A lot of businesses have moved over to SATA on SAS for storage on their servers, because the reliability isn't too bad, the drives are much cheaper and much higher capacity that SCSI.
Using a dedicated card gives huge speed boosts over the the chipset RAID and usually over any controller included on the motherboard. From what I've read in the past, they are also meant to be much more reliable and stable, along with providing more RAID configurations.

If you've got the money, the ideal setup I would go with would be 4 or 6 500GB or 1TB SATA drives in RAID 10.

 

[brendentaylor]

I am purchasing the vista home premium or ultimate this week, i am getting the oem version from newegg with the win 7 coupon. My question is will it solve vista memory usage issues, the windows 7 rc that i have is fast and runs efficiently, however in ancient times when i used the upgrade option from 98se to xp, it was kinda crappy had 98se problems and xp problems. I put the service packs on my cousins computer , and vista is still a bit of a resource hog, anyone in the know?

 

[AireTamStorm]

I've narrowed my choices down to 2 Server Motherboards...

TYAN S7025AGM2NR, with 4x PCIe x16 Gen 2.0 Link Slots (LGA 1366 Dual Socket)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813151208
SUPERMICRO MBD-X8DAH+-O with 2x PCIe x16 Gen 2.0 Link Slots, 1x PCIe x86 Gen 2.0 Link Slot in x16 form (LGA 1366 Dual Socket)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182176

I like the TYAN for the 4x x16 Slots... although only having 8 DDR3 slots is a bit of a minus (especially not being a multiple of 3, for triple channel support).
On the other hand, the SUPERMICRO MBD-X8DAH+-O has an x8 slot positioned above the x16 slots, allowing me to put other accessories in without blocking my room for video, as well as the plethora of RAM slots.

Overall, I'm leaning toward the SUPERMICRO... thoughts?

 

[Orkie]

Yes, I have a thought: it is a waste of money. Both on that machine and the electricity bill that will come from running it.

I'm pretty damn sure I have had video playing, surfed the Internet and (*gasp*) had music going at the same time on my current laptop which is very, very far from top of the range (I only needed to upgrade to 4GB RAM because I run a huge stack of Java stuff for work). The only possible reason for owning such a thing with what you have described as typical use is as a status symbol, but I really don't see who will be impressed except on forums. Just pay for hosting elsewhere and it will be somebody else's problem and still cheaper than spending a bloody fortune every year.

Save the money which you would spend on having a vastly overpowered machine, and use it for a holiday, save it in case you have an emergency, going out, or anything which will better your life in some way is my recommendation . I'm quite certain it won't bring you much happiness in the long run!

 

[AireTamStorm]

I'm pretty damn sure I have had video playing, surfed the Internet and (*gasp*) had music going at the same time on my current laptop which is very, very far from top of the range (I only needed to upgrade to 4GB RAM because I run a huge stack of Java stuff for work).

Everything you describe is normal desktop usage, which I will be doing. But I'm also doing development and server work on this. My Quad core CPU and 8GB of RAM are floored, almost all day serving content, thumbnailing, transcoding, and running a number of other services. Maybe you should have read my first post.

The only possible reason for owning such a thing with what you have described as typical use is as a status symbol, but I really don't see who will be impressed except on forums.

I never considered it as a "status symbol", but you obviously do. <sarcasm>I'm flattered.</sarcasm> I gave a description for this: Workstation and server. The box I'm running on now is more of a gaming rig, which isn't really fulfilling my server side needs, so now I'm switching to server hardware. Is that really so hard to understand?

Just pay for hosting elsewhere and it will be somebody else's problem and still cheaper than spending a bloody fortune every year.

I have a very fast business connection, so why would I need to do this? Root on a remote box != Root on your own box, with your own connection and hardware. I can do anything I like with this, why pay extra to get a server I can do less with?

Leaving that aside, I'm still inbetween on the SuperMicro and the TYAN. Any relevant thoughts appreciated...

Edit:oh, and Happy Thanksgiving to those in the US, in case I don't get back here tomorrow.