Do androids dream of cost-effective supercomputers?

[xekc]

Looking at various CPU/mb benchmarks, most of them focus on two main use cases:

1. games
2. cad / 3d rendering / sound studio / large photo edits / photoshop

And both are completely irrelevant for me, yet I fail to find any recommendations for my (weird, maybe) case.

I use computer for online research/monitoring, mostly - and I would like to aim my future config on having 1000s of web browser windows open + 100s of documents (word, excel, mindmaps, presentations, visio docs, emails, outlook mails, texts) open in 10s of virtual desktops.

I want to see thousands of browser windows running flash games and flash banners, forums, twitters, facebooks, chats-chats-chats open at the same time, I want to see scrolling and all those various JS-heavy scripts performing smoothly in browser, virtual desktop switch being immediate. I want scrolling to switch from one window to another in moments. In fact, I'd like to keep them all open 24x7 for as much time as possible - weeks, maybe?

I know software would fail, but browsers restore tabs/windows on crash and it's fine. I could even use 5 or 6 different web browsers at the same time.

I normally use chrome, so, as far as I get it - each tab would be a separate thread in a separate portion of ram. So I would want to have as much ram as possible and for i7 systems that would be, 16gb, I guess. I currently have 4gb+SSD system and it's very very slow for what I do, maybe because when I say 1000s of windows - I mean 1000s, not 20 or 200.

I'm sure the easy answer would be to top everything up and get 8 Xeon-system with 128 Gb of ram and stuff like that (no idea if such is possible) but I'm not THAT rich I'm just trying to make it comfortable for my work and would be grateful for any suggestions on a cost-effective setup aimed at super-heavy web browsing / fragmented software usage with many small apps running at the same time.

Is there something for less than a fortune to build for such case?

Thanks a lot!

P.S. Not sure it matters, but I use 3x24" and would like to have 3x30" with 3 video cards in my future setup (or even more).

P.P.S I'm also considering building a Hackintosh (for the sake of its window management) - will mac's OpenGl-ish interface rendering become a huge change in my setting? Thanks again!

 

[ddemon]

ok i'm no expert but here goes .......
Firstly: You need a good multi threaded prossessor, i72600k or maybe the new AMD bulldoser when it comes out. Thats if you don't want to build something thats of a server class.
Secondly: You sound like an internet span, bot or troll merchant and maybe i shouldn't be trying to help you ....lmao

 

[xekc]

ok i'm no expert but here goes .......
Firstly: You need a good multi threaded prossessor, i72600k or maybe the new AMD bulldoser when it comes out. Thats if you don't want to build something thats of a server class.
Secondly: You sound like an internet span, bot or troll merchant and maybe i shouldn't be trying to help you ....lmao

Thanks for your input!

CPU is the main thing(-s) in question (that's why I posted it here). I do understand 2600k / 980x / xeon 5600 are three main ways to go, but have no idea what would work best. Everywhere I look it's about games or pro apps.

The problem with i7 2600k is that I see no way to use more than 16gb RAM with it (ok, maybe 32gb is _possible_, but well, still) and I have 4gb now and don't feel that 16gb will do. Browsers leak and somehow it's never enough. It feels like such task needs next to endless RAM - the more you can keep in RAM... the better, I guess.

Yes, with 980x I could have 24Gb... But afaik it's not SandyBridge - so, maybe that would become a loss, not a gain, for my tasks.

For even more ram the only way to go is Xeon - but that's a huge spike in the set pricetag, and I Don't Know if it will make any difference to what I do. + xeons are quite old already.

And I don't know who internet span is - but I'm the good guy not a bot or troll. Maybe I'm just lazy and thin spread over many areas of work - so I want to keep it all open and stop browsing around all day. In a way, I would like to open ALL my "intranet/internet" once (all pages I ever visit for my work tasks - all projects in basecamp, all jira's etc; all news sites I read, twitter, facebook, all that stuff) and Never close it, have it all auto-rereshed, and just bring the appropriate window in front, when needed. Is that too much for the current hardware?

Sorry for being log-ish, thanks again.

 

[ddemon]

again i'm not really any expert but it sounds like you are really after something that is not quite out yet ...AMD bulldozer or Sandy Bridge E maybe. What are you running now? As 2600K seems pretty good in most bechmarks and might be as good as you can get right now.