How much should the following cost?

[Scott2010au]

How much should the following cost?

In American dollars versus Australian dollars.
Sure, they are at parity, just the US imports a lot more technology than we do.


■CPU: Intel Core i5-650

■MOBO: Gigabyte GA-H55M-USB3

■RAM: 4GB DDR3-13333 (2 x 2GB DIMMs, Kingston)


Note: The motherboard may be overkill for my requirements, and I don't need integrated video (in the CPU), however it does increase the chances of reselling the equipment at a later date while preserving a video card.

Q1) Are there any newer revisions of the motherboard, or any other part?

Q2) Are there better deals to be had for around $400 ?


PS: I've already got some alright parts, just my motherboard is on the blink after -yet another- electrical storm. It's working right now, but doesn't always boot up.

 

[Scott2010au]

Oh,

Feel free to recommend other configurations, so long as they include the AES-NI instruction set, and/or the Trusted Execution Technology instruction set.

If the difference in Total Cost of Ownership makes up for the performance increase, or decrease, then I will definitely consider it.

■ VT-x and VT-d are secondary concerns in this build, they may even be disabled in the BIOS (if supported) due to security concerns.

 

[Scott2010au]

1) Storage server with full disk encryption. (Either RAID-0/1 or RAID-0, using 4 x 250GB 7200rpm HDD's to start with).

■ I already have the HDD's
■ Gigabit networking is a must, ideally a good Intel NIC or similar (integrated)
■ Must be able to perform cascading ciphers at 'over' 100 MB/sec
■ Google 'Desktop' Enterprise Server, etc. (I understand this is pretty easy to do now, Google Desktop is great!)

2) General usage. (Microsoft Office, iTunes, light to moderate coding)

3) Gaming (I already game fine on a Core 2 Duo E6600 [2.4 GHz], with a Radeon 4890OC).

4) Watching HD-DVD and/or BluRay if you can squeeze that in

 

[Scott2010au]

A TomsHardware article that relates:

AES-NI Performance Analyzed; Limited To 32nm Core i5 CPUs - page 5
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/clarkdale-aes-ni-encryption,2538-5.html

■ Ideally it'll be able to read 1TB, of mostly sequential data, within 3 hours over the network, and be 15% to 50% faster locally (if not more).
■ I would much rather use Solid State Drives, the budget just does not permit this.


Update:

Some of these processors support the required instruction feature set(s)

Intel® Core™ i5 Desktop Processor Family
http://ark.intel.com/ProductCollection.aspx?familyID=42912&MarketSegment=DT

To my knowledge only one model of the Core i7 series supports 'one of' the required features.

To my knowledge the Core i3 series does not currently support AES-NI or TXT (Trusted Execution Technology).
■ Feel free to point out if this is/becomes wrong, as cost is a major concern.
■ With the right instructions it would leave most existing Xeon's in the dust, at least in this particular field.

 

[Scott2010au]

Yeah, except I also started (and did most the research on) that thread, so it doesn't really help me much...

 

[Scott2010au]

I'm using it on a private LAN, so I won't need SSL offload.

AES is an algorithm, not an application. (For example, ReadyBoost uses AES encryption on all the data that it caches for privacy reasons).

■ SSL and IPSec are different technologies, although both might benefit from AES-NI somewhat. Between the two I lean towards IPSec, as SSL has been superseded by TLS. No-one should be using SSL for anything.

The AES-NI will be to accelerate the full disk encryption by a factor of between 3x to 10x, thus making it fast enough to retrieve/serve spinning platters with data. Otherwise it needs to wait another revolution (or more)*, which cripples performance.

■ * This would require a peak encryption/decryption performance of around 750 MB/sec (for 4 drives), even if the sustained throughput is a fraction of this.

■ A good example to test this, is to disable DMA mode and start copying files around, with the full disk encryption enabled. The sheer quantity of interrupts going on will grind the server to a halt, even if CPU usage is 'nearly 0%' at the time. (Although in PIO Mode 4 it should hit 100% load on at least one core/thread).

Currently most cascading ciphers will give me between 40MB/sec and 60MB/sec, using 100% of both of my CPU cores (Core 2 Duo E6600, without AES-NI).

'Unfortunately' the CPU needs to be able to serve other tasks, such as running an Operating System. (The encryption uses a lot of CPU resources that generally don't show up in Task Manager, the interrupts it causes might however).

One of my objectives is: 4 HDD's in RAID-0/1 or RAID-0 while keeping CPU usage low enough for the chip to throttle into low/silent mode and giving 100 to 150 MB/sec 'sustained throughput' (locally) at < 20% utilisation and far beyond that at 100% load on all cores. (And of course being able to max out a Gigabit Ethernet link at very low CPU load).

■ ^ This (above) would require a 9.216 GHz Core 2 Duo (to maintain < 20% CPU usage). Thankfully there are processors with AES-NI that lower that requirement into 'realistic/current' technology levels.

■ So long as I get an acceleration of a factor of 2.76 times, or greater, then a 3.33 GHz Core i5-660 (for example) should meet the above requirement (of < 20% CPU usage for 100MB/sec to 150MB/sec full disk encryption).

Both of the above two cases are assuming a 128 MB/sec sustained to/from the media sequentially. (4 x 250GB HDD's, assuming 32 MB/sec per HDD in RAID-0). It is likely, and highly desirable, if it can handle even more to future proof it somewhat (as 250GB HDD's are not really all that fast by today's standards, even four of them).


Updated: I edited some of the numbers/factors above as they were about 20% off!

 

[Scott2010au]

Yes that I know. But look what I said it DOESN'T COME WITH THE APPLICATION SIDE ITS COMES WITH THE PART TO OPTIMIZE ITS performance.

Remember this is not new. we us to use network offload cards for this especially with ipsec. I know what aes and des etc is so you don't have to show me what wiki said. But my personal preference for a server would be The Xeon series who also supports it. Because although that I5 supports it that cpu used as a server are going to buckle under the load. Remember 10 percent difference its got. Servers needs lot of cpu

You do realise that most Xeons on the market do not currently support AES-NI, right?

 

[Scott2010au]

How much should the following cost?

In American dollars versus Australian dollars.
Sure, they are at parity, just the US imports a lot more technology than we do.


■CPU: Intel Core i5-650

■MOBO: Gigabyte GA-H55M-USB3

■RAM: 4GB DDR3-13333 (2 x 2GB DIMMs, Kingston)


Note: The motherboard may be overkill for my requirements, and I don't need integrated video (in the CPU), however it does increase the chances of reselling the equipment at a later date while preserving a video card.

Q1) Are there any newer revisions of the motherboard, or any other part?

Q2) Are there better deals to be had for around $400 ?


PS: I've already got some alright parts, just my motherboard is on the blink after -yet another- electrical storm. It's working right now, but doesn't always boot up.

Just a quote on the above will be fine.

Please don't try to subscribe, or oversubscribe, me to anything, a once off comparison of costs (between American sources, and Australian sources) is all that I am after.

Bear in mind that: the above motherboard may be overkill for my requirements...

I don't need to offload it to a PCI-X card, nor can I, since the motherboard only comes with PCI Express (PCIe), and PCI slots.

■ An Intel integrated NIC does all the offloading that I will require.

I'm not building a Sun Microsystems 'like' system here, it is for a private LAN.

Remember: The budget is $400 for the hardware.

 

[cadder]

> Please don't try to subscribe, or oversubscribe, me to anything, a once off comparison of costs (between American sources, and Australian sources) is all that I am after

Are you able to access newegg.com? That is where many of us buy all of our hardware.

 

[Scott2010au]

Best answer selected by Scott2010au.

 

[Scott2010au]

Yeah, thanks.