newbie setting up some HW - xeons and fileserver

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all suggestions and advices welcomed, I’ve never done it before…

I wanna setup 2 workservers dual xeons e5520 and one 1TB fileserver based on linux.
In future its possible I will add 10-20 render nodes and few more workstations…

Workstation 2P Intel Xeon midi tower, i5520, 6xDDR3-1333

Price 1730 EUR incl 19% tax
Procesor- Intel Xeon E5520 (Nehalem.2,26GHz@5,86GT 8MB cache,QuadC,HT,80W),box 2
cooler- SNK-P0035PA4 Aktivní 4U cooler pro 1P/2P LGA775/1366 (19,5dBA,2050rpm,4pin) 1
MoBo- X8DAL-i i5520,2S@QPT6.4,PCI-E16(g2)+E16(E4),-E4,2PCI,2GbE,6sATA,6DDR3-1333 1
RAM- 2GB 1333MHz DDR3 ECC with Thermal Sensor, CL9 - Kingston 6
HDD- HD 500GB WD5002ABYS 7200RPM/8,7ms/16MB/SATA II Raid edition 1
DVDRW + DVD-RW SONY-Nec AD-7200 20x DVD+/-, RAM, SATA black 1
GPU- ASUS VGA ENGTX260/G/HTDP, 896MB DDR3,2*DVI,HDTV 1
sound+ on board 1
network- Intel 82574 dual 10/100TX/Gigabit on the mobo1
Box- SC733TQ-665 miditower eATX quiet (25dB) 4sATA/SAS,2x5,25",665W(80+),black 1
keyboard- A4tech KBS-26B5R + mouse1
work … 1
OS- winXP64, have not heard anything great about vistas and win7 are not available yet..

regarding to fileserver I just started research - no idea yet, need advices

would like to buy two 24" monitors as well, should be good but not expensive of course;)
any hits?

thanks
filip

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Get lots of RAM. A dual Xeon has 16 threads. Each thread is going to claim a portion of RAM to work with and for memory-intensive scenes you’ll run into problems if you don’t have a good chunk of RAM to begin with. 32GB of RAM would be ideal. I have 24GB which works great in apps like max and VRay. I have one app though, which doesn’t manage RAM very well and I actually have to disable most of my cores during rendering so it doesn’t crash.

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thanks for reply,

tried to upgrade from (6x2GB 1333MHz DDR3 ECC with Thermal Sensor, CL9 - Kingston 6 ) to(6x4GB 1066MHz DDR3 ECC Rg. w/Par., D.Rank x4 w/Therm 6Sen, CL7)
is there a big difference in speed (different kind and mhz) in between these two RAM options? which one is slower and is it a lot slower?

could you tell me your suggestion? do I really need 24GB? In my old office we had single quad cores with 4GB and it was enough even for huge scenes with many proxied animated cars and million of trees… it increases the price a lot…

considering as well to switch my HDD for SSD (120GB SATAII 2,5" SSD Vertex
Series disk) what is your opinion please?

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If you find that 1GB per core is working for you than no reason to change I suppose. I would guess that you’d need 16GB RAM for that. Each core seems to need its own separate chunk of RAM at least for some things; I am not quite certain how much they can share RAM or if that changes with different apps.

I was able to get the RAM pretty cheap in relation to everything else. The vendor was doing a double your RAM type of deal. I do still have RAM issues in one app which is a beautiful program but sucks at memory management(it has none). Because I have to turn off cores I am only rendering at 25% speed in that app. If I add cores to the render, the system runs out of memory. That’s an extreme example; VRay is not so inelegant.

So I’d get 32GB if the price is right, 16GB is probably a solid affordable bet, and 12GB is affordable but maybe a little iffy for large, complex scenes since it’d be less RAM per core than you have now.

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Keep in mind that these new processors are handling RAM quite a bit differently than any previous, and your main working drive will be a much bigger factor if you do cut back on RAM as you may be paging if you do run short on physical memory.

A good SSD can run you quite a bit, probably enough to get the RAM you need, but it will also increase overall performance. If you do decide to go the non SSD route, you will want to at least opt for a WD Velociraptor 150GB as your main system drive for OS and program installs, and a second larger capacity dependable drive for backup of the system drive and everything else.

Check out www.frybench.com to see some good comparisons of how rendering performance can be affected by RAM and OS with these newer processors.

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thanks for reply, I’ll do what you said… switched MoBo to 12 mem-slots one and I’ll put there 12x2gb ecc ddr3 unbuffered and WD Velociraptor 150GB, tried the scsi option with 150gb cheetah but it was finally (with sas mobo and raid) the same price as ssd…

now considering the screens, does anyone have experience 30" dual screen? is it good for working or too large?

making decision between:
if 24": 24 LCD HP LP2475w or dell 2408WFP or EIZO EV2411WE-BK EcoView
if 30": Samsung Syncmaster 305T or Dell Ultrasharp 3007WFP Black 30-hc

any suggestion?