Intel Quad Core Desktop Motherboards

[wesleyw]

Anyone know of a motherboard that could take two of these?

 

 

 

Wes

[DMcCoy]

You can only do dual Core2 anything with the Xeons as far as I know

[SYNACK]

Nothing in the desktop line, you are probably looking at a server grade board. You can still use these in a workstation but they are considerably more expensive.

[PeterW]

As already mentioned your looking at a workstation board £200-£300, Intel have launched a platform called V8 which is a workstation board 2x socket 771 quad core CPUs but you would require FB Dimm memory for this.

[SYNACK]

This might shed some light on possible boards http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/05/21/six_dual_xeon_motherboards_on_the_cheap/

[wesleyw]

FB Dimm memory?

 

 

Wes

[SYNACK]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_Buffered_DIMM

 

google is your friend

 

It is a new type of RAM that has a different memory addressing scheme. It is required by the newer Xeon server grade CPUs that you need to use to get Dual CPU on an intel system.

[DMcCoy]

Note that article is from 2004 and doesn't cover the newer multicore chips.

[SYNACK]

Oops my bad, it did look relevant, I just forgot to check the date.

[dhicks]

> Anyone know of a motherboard that could take two of these?

 

Are you asking because you've got two spare and are trying to figure out what to do with them, or are you planning to build your own machine from scratch? We simply went out and bought a Dell PowerEdge 1900 server, with two quad-core processors and suitable RAM already included, much less palavar (and probably cheaper, too).

 

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David Hicks

[wesleyw]

How much roughly did it come to? I am looking at building a decent workstation for video editing and quite a few other tasks?

 

 

Wes

[dhicks]

> How much roughly did it come to? I am looking at building a decent

> workstation for video editing and quite a few other tasks?

 

Around £2000, but that was with 4 harddrives and 8GB of RAM (we use the machine as a thin client server and file storage for a classroom). Your best bet is probably to look at Dell's website and figure out a price from there. I see they also have the SC1430 which does dual quad-core, and might be a bit quieter than the 1900 (I have a SC430 at home, similar tower case, and that's very quiet - the 1900 has a fair few fans and so on make noise).

 

Is video editing really all that processor-intensive (are you planning to do lots of special effects)? You might find that either a SAS harddrive or a RAID-0 striped array of two SATA disks improves performance better (both are options on those Dell machines). Also, make sure you get a motherboard that can take whatever expansion cards you want to put in it. Video editing types would probably install a fancy graphics card, so at least (preferably two) one full-sized (16-channel) PCI Express slot is going to be needed.

 

I'd say buy the PC (with second processor, RAM and RAID controller) off Dell, but buy harddrives and graphics cards off eBay.

 

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David Hicks

[localzuk]

I'd be looking at one of the HP professional workstation range myself, such as one of these...

[dhicks]

Just came accross this review:

 

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/150402

 

Quad-core, RAID-1, being sold in Tesco for £600 all-in. Pick one up along with the frozen peas.

 

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David Hicks

[localzuk]

Just came accross this review:

 

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/150402

 

Quad-core, RAID-1, being sold in Tesco for £600 all-in. Pick one up along with the frozen peas.

 

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David Hicks

 

Lol, I love the paragraph 'Given the small case, modest PSU and absence of fans, we'd hesitate to add a high-end graphics card, so if it's a low-cost gaming PC you're after you'd do better spending £400 more on PC Specialist's Apollo Q660GTS which has the same processor, 4GB of RAM, an Nvidia 8800 GTS graphics card, a huge 22in monitor, and a more upgradable future.'

 

Low cost? A grand?? That machine is perfect as a low cost gaming machine. It will handle 90% of new games. Maybe not in 'super glitz' mode but in some playable way.

[dhicks]

> Given the small case, modest PSU and absence of fans

 

I searched for images of the motherboard used, and it would seem to support 4 RAM slots and one each of PCI Express X 1 and X 16. It would probably still be cheaper to buy this PC and shove the components in a larger case (around £30?), maybe buy a fancy graphics card (the motherboard doesn't support "crossfire" and whatnot for /really/ fancy dual-graphics card setups, but you don't need that for video editing), than buying all the components from scratch.

 

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David Hicks