Top tier A64/Opteron manufacturers?

[Pradeep]

So tomorrow I put the Athlon64 up against the Nocona. Assuming the A64 is faster, I then have the problem of providing a supplier for them. Right now we use Dell for our customers. Home built OC'd A64 is fine for our in-house use, but is not something we can support externally. Are there any top tier providers using Athlons/Opterons in their workstation lines? I found HP using them in some of their rack mount servers, but that's not the kind of machine we need. 3 year warranty is a must.

The IBM IntelliStation A Pro looks like the closest match:

http://www-132.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/s...alCurrId=73&catalogId=-840&partNumber=622410U

I will also be putting some 15K SCSI action into the mix tomorrow, they just don't believe it could be all that much faster than slothy IDE

 

[Pradeep]

God those sneaky IBM basturds. Looking at the link above, you would swear the freaking thing comes with a 36GB U320 SCSI drive, and an 80GB SATA drive. But when you click on configure, low and behold, it's a multi hundred dollar option to get a SCSI drive. Shady.

 

[Mercutio]

What about Sun?

 

[Pradeep]

$5,000 for a base configuration 2100Z (admittedly with two CPUs)? If we had a "certified engineer" it wouldn't be bad with 35% off.

 

[Pradeep]

Thanks for your reply tho

 

[Mercutio]

Check that same config on ebay. I've seen them BIN for $2500.

 

[Handruin]

You might think I'm crazy...alienware offers an opteron (single/dual) workstation solution. They offer 3 year warranties as an option, but I have no idea if they are a top tier provider.

 

[Handruin]

I speced out a:
3 year warranty
550 watt enermax power supply (EG651P-VE)
Tyan Tiger K8W S2875 Dual Opteron Motherboard
Dual AMD Opteron™ 246 2.0 GHz 64-Bit
Corsair™ 4GB DDR PC3200 Registered ECC Server
NVIDIA® Quadro™ FX 500 128MB 8x AGP
80GB Seagate® Barracuda 7,200 RPM w/8MB Cache
Lite-On® 16x DVD-ROM Drive

$3,731.00

 

[Pradeep]

I have some numbers from the face-off.

Nocona 2.8GHz, 1GB RAM (DDR2)
Times are 5m 1sec, 6m 53sec, 11m 27sec.

Athlon64 3000, oc'd to 2250MHz (ram at 250MHz), 1GB RAM (DDR500)
Times are 4m 25sec, 6m 5sec, 8m 10sec.

(Lower times are better)

Three different times are for increasing quality of output images, first is 300dpi binary, second is 300dpi color, third is 600dpi color.

What I found interesting was that the Nocona takes a nose dive at the 600dpi color setting, I wonder if the data can no longer fit in the 1MB L2 and it has to hit main memory more? The A64 only has 512KB of L2, and it still seems to scale much better.

By my estimation we would need a Nocona @ 3.4GHz (a $600 dollar upgrade option from the Nocona 2.8 at Dell) to defeat my measly $150 dollar OCd A64. And if we were spending that much on a CPU, I could easily get an A64 3800+ and OC that bad boy.

On a disturbing note, I seem to have caught the OC bug again. The sedate days beside the Dell 400SC, with no BIOS options at all, are behind me now. I put a TT 112 solid coppa towa on the A64 yesterday, in the hopes of going beyond 2400 stable. But it isn't to be. If only the mounting/dismounting wasn't such a pain.

Thanks for all the help everyone.

 

[Handruin]

So I take it no need to suggest an opteron when the A64 does the job? I'm glad to hear the good news.

 

[Pradeep]

Well it would be nice to test an Opteron to see if the 1MB L2 cache improves things further. But for now the A64 looks like a very efficient processor.

 

[ddrueding]

The athlon64 is darned efficient. That's why my desktop can spend 90% of it's time at 800Mhz.

 

[Bozo]

I thought the AMD site had links to system builders. I'll look as soon as I get a chance.

Bozo :mrgrn: