Luke, I am your father!!

[Player0]

I've joined the ranks of the darkside!

Case - AMS gTower CF-1006BSW w/Case Window
PSU - PCPower & Cooling Turbo-Cool 475w XE
Mobo - Iwill DPL533 Dual 533mhz Xeon E7505 w/Gigabit Lan
CPU - 2x P4 Xeon 2.4 533mhz
Cooler - 2x SwiftTech MCX603 (w\ lighted fans)
RAM - 2x 512m XMS3500C2
Video - Ati AIW 8500DV
DVD - Creative Labs 8x
Audio - SB Audigy2 Platinum
HD - 2x WD1000JB 8m RAID0, 1x WD800JB Spare

*weg*

Get to put it together either this weekend or next :)

[Farabomb]

Not a bad rig. For a Intel :( Nice case :)

what you planing on doing with it? New Photoshop box?

[NorthernYankee]

OMG how did you afford that the Mobo and cpu's alone must have cost you close to a grand.

But I bet its for the PVR right.

--NY

[4.6POWER]

wow! when's the water cooling coming?! :D

[Player0]

At first, I thought I was going to get a dual MP box, based on the MSI MPX board there. But I was over at 2cpu and scoping out the performance and...the AMDs dont hold a candle to this new E7505 chipset. Dual channel DDR and Xeons with lots of cache lovin. They perform amazingly. Some of the parts I already had here, like the drives and the video. Okay, so I dont have the sound card coming just yet. Maybe after xmas. Same goes for the second stick of ram (waiting on a potential trade).

I made some sacrifices, for instance, I had to go with 2.4g Xeons instead of the 2.6 or 2.8g units. The 2.8g are over $600 a pop so that was out of the budget. The Xeon 533mhz 2.4g was very similarly priced to the Athon 2.4MP. About $30-$40 more per pop I guess. But in terms of performance, the Xeons are just incredible. Plus they have HyperThreading...so it will almost be like having 4 CPUs in the box! It will make a huge performance benefit since I will have folding running in the background.

Nope, no watercooling on this one. The two massive Swifty heatsinks with the 80mm color fans will do more than cool the Xeons. This box won't be overclocked much, if at all, so watercooling wouldnt be such a benefit really. The case is great, cheap for an aluminum case, and I got it in exchange for building a workstation (I usually get paid via cash, but i traded for the case instead this time). So it worked out good.

The motherboard wasn't that bad really. Compared to a decent MPX board, it wasn't that much more because I opted to not get the audio or onboard SCSI (sad). But, it did bring the price down. The cost of the system was only maybe $100 more than the best equipped AMD dually solution, and only maybe $100-$200 more than the best AMD single solution (2800+ are expensive). Because of the trades im making and some free kit, and some parts I already had, the system isn't costing me very much xmas money at all. Ive really just wanted to try a dually system, and i get to play with all the dually xeon boxes at work, I just wanted to have one at home to play with. It will end up being my main workstation for all sorts of things like programming and webdesign to video capture and video editing (1g of dual-channel DDR will make a bloody awesome Premier rig). Im gonna make sure it looks gorgeous too. Plus, it should game quite well. Id still like to think about the 9700 pro but...meh.

My main gaming rig (the cube) will be transfered in to the Prometia if I can ever afford it. The cube, I dont know. I may finish it with the new radiators, but im holding off. Ive lost my taste for the project really.

[WesM63]

Hey tom,
Nice rig man. I plan on building a dually for my Grad present. I still hav'nt decide what to go with, but it's still a wase away.

We have 2 dual 2.4Ghz servers at school similar to yours at school, and are they are beasts.

Good Luck man sounds like fun.

[mdzcpa]

Nice rig Tom:) Keep us posted on how it comes together!

[Player0]

Erf...the board doesnt seem to have onboard raid. Well that can be icky.

Anyone who can recommend a good 64bit PCI IDE RAID controller?

[sptw]

Hey Player0, maybe it can be usefull for you.I dunno.

This schematic is for Xeon P4:

[lechumbl]

Hi Tom,

"Anyone who can recommend a good 64bit PCI IDE RAID controller?"
Check this out: http://www.pricewatch.com/1/44/283-20.htm

Take care.......

[Player0]

Finally, after more than a week of fighting this damn system...I finally got around to playing UT2003 today. Finally got ACPI and HT working. Finally got the ATI AIW working. Finally got the 3ware 7500-4 working. Woot. Feel like i've given birth. Its SOO cool to see Unreal 2003 running completely on CPU 2 while windows and stuff is on CPU one :) IM gonna try some SMP quake soon too...not that...i dont already get 300 FPS in that anyway. Will have some piccies and benches soon too :)

[lechumbl]

Hi Tom,

I take it the regedit I sent for ACPI worked?

Good to hear all is working now.

Take care........

[Player0]

Lee, no...unfortunately that key didnt even exist for me to add the dword too. When I added the key and the dword, nothing happened.

No, what I needed to do was press F5 on the reinstall and select ACPI Multiprocessor PC, which corrected the freezing problem and now everythings kosher :)

[Player0]

Pictures here :) Benches coming soon.

http://www.liquidninjas.com/gallery/holy