New machine

[jujubee]

@askhamdesign - hard to say as I've a bunch of slaves. Render times were above 6+ minutes on the benchmark scene posted here in the forum.

I waited for prices to come down as well as the new AMDs to come out. I finally got tired of waiting.

Interesting to note that if I bought the same setup back in December, it would have run me over the $10k mark.

[askhamdesign]

Yeah Ive got a feeling if I buy a X5355 now the price will drop the week after!

[jujubee]

Lawl. And the week after that. And the week after that...

Then something new will come out that you will want. Then the price of that will drop a week after that...

I'm sure you could get a real good deal on a dual PIII 400 mhz Intel system if you want. In fact, I may have one for free you could take off my hands if you cover the cost of shipping and handling. It'll save me the cost of having to trash/recycle it. It's only about 8 years old now. It's good for surfing the web!

Personally speaking, I couldn't wait much longer on efficiency and I finally had a paycheck that covered the costs of building a new system. I also have a bunch (like 30) tiny little animations for one project that's around the corner and desperately needs to go out the door. Those were the main things influencing my decision.

[askhamdesign]

Yeah I sold my old dual xeons for about 15% of what they cost me 4 years back!

[s0real]

I believe my socket type is 771 so I guess the answer would be no. I've had problems trying to find a replacement CPU fan for these boards.

found these when looking for some on mine...
http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=421

haven't got any yet but i think i might have to as my new machine seems to be getting very hot using passive cooling - i don't think the case fans are spinning up when it's under load (set to auto on bios) so i'm a bit scared to use it yet.

i'm using tyan i5000xt mobo and dual 5345 xeons.

[jujubee]

Those fans are a nice alternative. Socket 771 seems a bit difficult to accomodate. The processors I ordered came with Active fans from Intel. The passive series (no fan) I believe is open air cooling meant for rack servers.