New toys

[sobrique]

Just had a presentation from some dude about HP proliant servers.
Looks like AMD/Opteron is totally outclassing Intel. It would seem they _can_ do dualcore, maybe, sometime soon, but for a ninja bastard machine you pay half as much for crunching power, and lose badly on the memory IO race.

Clickly clicky, Alienware says for £3500 (OK, just over 2k if I don't go for dual drives, extra memory, that kind of thing), I can have a dual, dualcore opteron system, with assorted bells and whistles.

Which is nice. Anyone else know of places that do 'build to order' or 'ninja' spec PC builds?

(Yes, I'm aware of the possibilities of build my own, but for various reasons a whole thing strikes me as a good plan)

Comments

[mister-jack.livejournal.com]

But, er, why?

I dunno, for £1000 you can put together a system fast enough to play even the shiniest of modern games, and by the time it's beginning to creak you could pay another £1000 and get a shiny new system even faster than what the £3500.

AMDs have the distinct edge in dualcore and 64bit technologies, however, for most users what matters is not raw speed but responsiveness and for that Intel's HyperThreading technology delivers better results than the dualcore stuff.

[sobrique.livejournal.com]

Responsiveness? Are you trying to tell me that you notice the difference between a 2.2Gh clock cycle, and a 3.8Ghz?

I'm not convinced about the Hyperthreading - in my experience the limiting factors on 'responsiveness' are IO. Memory and Disk. For the latter, AMD suffers the same performance limits as Intel, but for the former, the HyperTransport memory bus just puts the North Bridge to shame.

A hyperthreaded processor is a nice tweak, but when you have 'real' processors which a similarly low communication latency (since with a dual core, you don't have to go offdie, and if you do, you go at HyperTransport speeds) I can't see how Intel is an improvement.

*shrug* not that I've tried 'em or anything.

[sobrique.livejournal.com]

But yeah, a £1000 system will probably be what I end up buying instead. Opteron systems are something I really like, but in terms of performance (e.g. current games) the AMD64 is probably a better choice for my budget :)

[ehrine.livejournal.com]

When it comes to bandwidth, AMD win hands down. Latest dual-core intel, 800mhz half-duplex. Latest dual-core AMD, 1000mhz full-duplex... Not to meantion the AMD having a memory controller for _each_ core rather then one controller shared between the two.

[mister-jack.livejournal.com]

2.2 and 3.8? Oh god no! Nothing that crazy.

It's all down to the way Windows is coded and the way it can utilise the speed of the processors. A dual-core AMD system is a faster system in a raw bench-marky kind of way, however, in actual use this doesn't necessarily result in a more responsive system. HyperThreading is good for one thing, and one thing only, and that is allowing Windows to process the foreground thread when it has got its knickers in a twist and is thrashing around all over the place, this means that when you click on something while it's doing something else you get a more instant response. This kind of responsiveness is surprisingly noticeable as a user.

[xarrion.livejournal.com]

I put a fairly high-end DIY system at around £2100-2300. I'll dig out the spec when I get home :)

[the-wood-gnome.livejournal.com]

When I looked at getting my machine I looked at www.scan.co.uk

It's pretty much down the road from me. I didn't eventually buy from them, but I went for a prebuilt system anyway in the end.