I have no idea about their performance but intel just released the new 5400 series xeon chips a few days ago. Comparable speeds to the old 5300’s seem slightly cheaper.
whats the specs on the Q6600 system system?
what brand PSU, mobo, heatsink (remember i have to deal with tropical heat) and ram…hmmm i think thats all i need for a render slave (oh and HD but i find they cost the same to get here than in the states so ill save on shipping cost by getting the weight down on those HD’s and cases
We just built a few Q6600 rendernodes w/ 8G of Ram for about $1100 each including OS. The Zalman cooler is amazing. We had cases and HDDs so they aren’t included. What is cool about this is the parts were ordered on a Thursday and on our farm and rendering Monday night, what better burn-in than a week of rendering
(EDIT: I edited the totals to reflect curent pricing - WOW, less than $1000)
CPU-Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600-1x$279.99=$279.99
CPU cooler-ZALMAN CNPS9500-1x$47.99=$47.99
Motherboard-GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3L-1x$94.99=$94.99
Memory-G.SKILL 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 800-2x$139.99=$279.98
PSU-Rosewill RP550V2-D-SL 550W-1x$64.99=$64.99
DVD-LITE-ON Black 16X DVD-ROM-1x$24.99=$24.99
Video Card-ASUS GeForce 6200 LE-1x$29.99=$29.99
OS-Microsoft Windows Vista 64-Bit Business-1x$149.99=$149.99
The 550s are more than enough for this spec, the machines are only pulling about 250-300W under load (using a wat-o-meter). It is becuase they are only single CPUs with cheap graphics cards and only a single hdd. We have 650s+ in our workstations but they are running dual CPUs with multiple hard drives (RAID) and worktation level graphics cards. There just isn’t much in these rendernodes to suck power other than the CPU which only uses about 125W if I’m not mistaken.
BTW, they have been running non-stop for about 4 weeks now with no problems whatsoever. I will stress again how good those zalman coolers are.
IMHO, that is all the more reason to be carefull with dual CPU systems. We used to run dual Xeons (pre dual-core days) and dual Athlons and had a hell of a time trying to keep those boxes cool - especially the Athlons.
my dual xeon 2.8ghz machine is ok for the chips but the case sucks monkeys balls in my oppinion and its the ram that gives errors when they heat up so i have a normal fan pointing into my case right now
Those Q6600 specs seem pretty good. I would however recommend a silverstone PSU they are terrific. And for the cooler I would get a thermalright ultra120 extreme.
yea!!!
Our machines (the board speced above) uses 8G but only has 4 slots so you have to use the 2G DIMMS, also speced above. I also agree with XP, Vista is a PITA but our vendor was out of it when we ordered