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Saturday, March 06, 2004 #

Project "Speed Demon" - Part I
Okay, I'm building a new machine. It's not to replace my day-to-day PC that I lovingly assembled into my new Antec Sonata case as described here, here and here.

No, this is more of a test/development machine I'm building. The plan is to load Virtual Server on this and build a "sandbox" of sorts for playing around with a lot of different things - MOM 2004, ADS, RMS, etc. With that in mind, I need three things - fast CPU, lots of memory, and screamin' disks. Portability and space requirements are also a concern, so I think I have compromised on #2 and decided on the basis for project "Speed Demon" - the Shuttle 20th Anniversary Special Edition XPC for Socket 478 at 533/800MHz FSB CPU, Model SB61G2R:

Shuttle 20th Anniversary XPC


This thing has it all. Portability/Size - check. Screamin' fast CPU - check, it'll take up to the 3.4GHz HT Intel P4 all with a 800Mhz FSB. Memory - maybe check, the most I'll be able to get in the thing is 2GB using 1GB DIMMs - an expensive proposition. Speedy disks - check, integrated ATA133/SATA150 with RAID 0. Extras - check, this thing includes integrated USB 2.0, IEEE 1394, Sound, Video, a DVD-ROM, 6-1 Media Reader, 802.11b wireless, a carrying case, liquid-cooled CPU, etc.

The plan is to purchase things in stages as to not hit the wallet so hard at one time. I'll be purchasing the XPC soon, then a processor, then some memory. And the disk? I just finished Ebay bidding on one of these super fast 10,000 RPM SATA drives that Western Digital makes. It's only 36GB, but will be perfect for my OS drive - my virtual hard disks will sit on a separate hard drive - probably my 250GB 8MB Maxtor ATA drive.

I spent a lot of time researching this little thing - I had three different options: (1) Build a P4 based box, (2) Build an AMD 64 based box, or (3) Buy something from Dell. I have posted my "thinking notes" in Excel form here. When it comes down to it, Dell is VERY competitive on price. I almost couldn't justify building my own machine with a Dell PowerEdge server @ 3.2Ghz coming in at $1100. I'm glad it worked out in the Shuttle's favor - I'll end up with something much more practical and "cooler" at the same time.




So, it was down to the AMD and the P4 configuration. I used some benchmarks at Tom's Hardware to try to figure out if the AMD 64bit chip was worth the extra $$$. If I were building a gaming machine, it would hands-down be the Athlon 64. Its Quake and UT numbers blew the Intel P4 out of the water - even on a 32-bit OS. On synthetic benchmarks, though, the AMD loses to the P4 every time. When a x64 (x86 with 64 bit extensions) version of Windows comes out, though, this might change. Virtual Server, however, won't run on 64-bit at v1 stage. So, Intel was the clear winner for me.

The AMD HyperTransport technology is intriguing - and I think it architectually gives them a leg up on what Intel is doing. Intel is very limited by their architecture at this point - the Northbridge/Southbridge bottleneck is starting to rear its ugly head as the processors get faster and faster. AMD's got a winner with their HT architecture - up to 6.4Gb/s throughput directly between the CPU and the RAM in addition to another 6.4Gb/s between the CPU and the PCI bridge, Graphics Bus, etc.

I'll keep you updated on the progress of "Speed Demon". I'm in no hurry to get this done - I want to shop it around and do it right for the least amount of $$$. I'm still debating how "overboard" to go on the CPU - is 2.8GHz HT enough or does the $100 difference justify the 3.2GHz? Suggestions? Ideas? E-mail me.
posted @ 1:07 PM