First workstation build

[brisa117]

Hey guys,

I've been building computer for as long as I can remember, but I've never built a computer on a server board. One of my regulars operates a computer forensics business and mentioned to me about building a new workstation for him. He's currently running a workstation (about 4yrs old) with two dual core processors and just recently upgraded above 4 gigs of ram.

With the budget of $5000-$7000 I though I could build him a beast of a machine, but I don't know much about servers. Any useful tips? Special hardware (ram, PSU, etc) or just the regular stuff? I'm looking to build a 2 processor machine with about 32 gigs of ram, and probably about 8 TB of storage. Also, would you go with the Intel 6 core Xeon 5000s or the AMD Opteron 12 core 6000s?


Thanks!

 

[HeyImGodly]

What exactly will this be used for?
CAD, Folding, Adobe Products, What?

 

[brisa117]

He uses several different products. I'm not terribly familiar with their ins and outs but I know he makes complete images of HDDs and then searches through them, he also uses password cracking software which I'm told uses ungodly amounts of ram. I'm mostly just looking to find out if I'll need a certain type of power supply or ram. I know they sell specifically "server PSUs" and "server ram".

Most of his programa are made by a company called "access data."

 

[tomate2]

is he unhappy with the performance of his current machine? if not maybe you should go with xenon because they have better performance... opterons are only cheaper per core but not as performance wise as the xenons...

 

[tomate2]

if he was not unhappy with the performance of his current build maybe is more cpu clock dependent and less core dependent so xenon would be more appropriate in this situation