AMD Opteron quad cpu or phenomx6 which would be a faster machine

It'd be cheaper to use the phenom ii x6 in my opinion, on top of that from what i've seen on that server motherboard (and most for that matter) there isn't a reliable port of graphics for gaming and other gpu accelerated tasks.
To add to that, games don't really use more than 2-4 cores so most of that processing power will be wasted unless using a program built to use more than 1 processor (not cores).

Thanks 4 the feedback! As far as $ goes I can get a used S4882w/4 processors and heat sinks and fans for around $100 I dont think I can get the Phenmon and mobo for that kind of $

Gaming is not the most important thing for me I mean I do game but gaming is like 20% of my use I use gimp and photo shop google sketch up as well as some other home 3d modeling software and video editing every day so that would prob be 60% of my daily use Im not sure if those aps do use multi processors

As far as video cards there are multiple pci-x slots so although i know i will not have access to the latest and greatest video cards out there but I know there are video cards available and im pretty sure pci-x is compatible with standard pci

so please as much feedback as possible would be great Im cheap bastard and I look long and hard B4 i spend my money LOL

http://www.tyan.com/archive/products/html/thunderk8qspr...
I'm pretty sure this is the board you are talking about, it has no pci-e slots so you'd be stuck with a old pci video card which won't give much performance in games, the bandwidth would limit you on gpu work.
Your best bet is to get the phenom ii, overall less worry about issues with multiple processors, gaming, and what video card can be used. You can get the phenom ii and a nvidia card to help with a lot of tasks you do. If you look up pci video cards and find something worth it that won't keep you from playing games from the past 5 years then go for it, but there isn't much to look at as for pci video cards.

You would be much better off with the Phenom II X6 than the TYAN S4882.

- The S4882 supports only single-core CPUs, so that board can at best have four 3.0 GHz Athlon 64-era cores (four Opteron 856s). Six Phenom II cores at 4.0 GHz are considerably more powerful; the Phenom II X6 probably has twice the performance of the quad Opteron setup.

- You also have to deal with the fact that the S4882 is an enormous 16" by 13" MEB form factor board that will not fit into very many cases, even with significant modifications. The lowest-priced case I have encountered that will fit such a large motherboard without trouble is the Chenming ATX-801F, which is about $300 plus $50-70 in shipping as it weighs about 80 pounds and is an enormous case. Others have sliced and diced up Cooler Master Stacker 810s, which are no longer made, and $150-200 Cooler Master HAFs. Those two require pretty significant modifications to fit an MEB board, though. If you are not reasonably familiar with a rotary tool/Dremel and how to work with sheet metal, don't try it.

- The S4882 requires a pretty beefy power supply that will cost about twice what you are paying for the board + CPUs + RAM. You'd want something in the 800 watt range in there with two EPS12V connectors. The Phenom II X6 can use a typical desktop power supply that costs about half as much as the one the S4882 would need.

- Going with the above, decently fast Opteron 800s each throw off around 100 watts when put under load. The Phenom II X6 will throw off somewhere around 150 watts running at 4.0 GHz. The Opterons will thus require much better case cooling to not overheat and likely be considerably noisier as well. I will also bet the heatsinks that come with the board are server heatsinks, that is to say they are very noisy. You can put normal AMD desktop heatsinks on the TYAN board so it is quieter, but you'll need to buy four of them and that will cost you over a hundred bucks.

- You need Windows Server to use all of the CPUs on a quad-socket motherboard. Your copy of Windows XP x86_64 will only recognize two of the four CPUs. The version of Windows Server that supports >2 CPUs costs about a grand. The Phenom II X6's cores are all in one socket so any remotely modern version of Windows will see all 6 cores.

- The S4882 has no way of interfacing with much of a graphics card. There are PCI graphics cards, but the PCI bus is a huge bottleneck to them. Simply playing a YouTube video can overload the PCI bus's data carrying capacity. PCI-X graphics cards are very rare and old. The last one I saw was a Matrox, which should tell you how long ago it was. You can get a PCI-X to PCIe converter to make a PCIe 1.0 x4 slot from a 133 MHz/64-bit PCI-X slot, but they cost $150 or so. Phenom II motherboards have PCI Express so you can simply drop in just about any inexpensive GPU you want to.

Huge multi-processor systems are a lot of fun, and there is a lot of perfectly functional older server hardware out there, often for a surprisingly low price. Video editing is very well threaded and would lend itself well to such a machine. That particular motherboard/CPU combination just isn't the right setup for you. I'd look for something like a dual Socket F motherboard and a couple of quad-core or six-core Opterons (Opteron 2300/8300 or 2400/8400 series) CPUs. That would give you performance that would beat a Phenom II X6, especially if you got two six-core Opterons. A dual LGA771 board that supports 45 nm CPUs would work well too. It would fit in a normal full-tower case, work properly with your copy of Windows, and have PCI Express slots that can fit a modern GPU.

thanks again to all who have posted

To MU Engineer

Thanks for the great feedback and info is the dual Opteron System u recommended similar to what you are running on your work station?

Are those chips able to be over clocked in a dual configuration?

How much faster will the system be then the Phenom IIx6 system? will it be almost as fast as the FX series chips?

The other thing I all ready have are 4 Seagate Cheetah 73.4 GB - 320 MBps - 15000 rpm hd to use for the system so im really looking to put together something that is fast and can use as much stuff as i all ready have to put it together

I have another question on some what of the same topic but after what you said i guess i wont be using the original quad processor setup i spoke about for my workstation but what form of linux or other free server operating system would you know that would use all 4 processors?

I actually have lic copy's of nt 4 server and 2k advanced server but the 2k server copy is scratched bad and every time i have tried to back it up it comes up can not read disk
Thanks Again

Opteron 2419 Six Core 1.8 GHz Processor - Socket F 1207 - 6 MB L3 Cache Memory

Is this one of the processors you were talking about? would 2 of those be fast as to what i caked above?
Thanks

The parts I recommended are a generation older than what I run and so available used for considerably less than what new parts go for. The motherboard, CPUs, heatsinks, and RAM would cost you about $1000 to buy today as only the CPUs are "obsolete" and selling used at a discount (they're roughly $150 each used, as opposed to $250-280 new.) Everything else is still being made and still commands full retail price. They are somewhat less powerful, how much so depends on what chips you choose. A pair of six-core Opteron 2400s running around 2.5 GHz or better will be pretty close in performance to mine in multithreaded tasks, a pair of 1.7 GHz 2344 HE quads will be about 40% as fast.



No. Very, very few dual-CPU motherboards allow overclocking. There have been only three made in the past half-dozen years to the best of my knowledge, the ASUS L1N64 AMD QuadFX board, the Intel DX5400XS "Skulltrail," and the EVGA SR-2 dual LGA1366 board. Only the Skulltrail is currently being made, and it's a $600+ motherboard that requires special, larger, HPTX-compatible cases. There are a handful of HPTX-compatible cases currently made (unlike MEB-compatible cases), but they aren't all that common and all cost $150+.



A pair of six-core CPUs around 2.0 GHz will be close to the overclocked Phenom II X6, and the faster six-core units will be faster in multithreaded work than the Phenom II X6. They will also be more reliable since they are not overclocked. A stock Phenom II X6 at 2.8-3.2 GHz will be beaten by any pair of six-core CPUs and also by two quads running north of 2.5 GHz. However, none of them will beat the Phenom II X6 unless the tasks use 8+ cores. Video editing usually does do this, but beware in getting CPUs that have a very low clock speed as some desktop tasks can seem just a little poky on them. I'd stick with units with a clock speed of at least 2.0 GHz and probably more like 2.5 GHz if possible.



You need a SCSI controller for those drives. Unfortunately few boards made in the past half-dozen years or so have onboard SCSI controllers. Most add-in SCSI cards worth a crap are PCI-X and newer boards don't have PCI-X either, only PCIe. A decent PCIe Ultra 320 SCSI controller is going to cost a bit of money and you'd be better off from a price and a performance perspective to spend that couple hundred bucks on an SSD or two. SSDs are great, they make a system much snappier than you would think. It makes this system with 2.0 GHz processors much snappier at general desktop tasks than you would think.



Any Linux distribution would support all four processors, as would most if not all of the BSD UNIX distributions (FreeBSD, etc.) Windows actually supports something like 64-256 processors/cores in as many sockets but Microsoft limits the number of sockets and cores in various editions so that they can sell you a much more expensive version if you have expensive multi-socket hardware and need that support. Just about everybody I know that has a four-socket system that they themselves paid for and run a legally-obtained OS on it run Linux or BSD. The only guys running Windows Server either illegally copied it, are running it on a work machine, or are developers and can get it for "free" from MSDN.



Those might work, but I would be very, very hesitant to run those. Finding driver support for anything but server hardware made in the 1990s or maybe the early 2000s on NT4 is probably not going to happen. Windows 2000 might have better driver support but neither it nor NT4 have been updated in years and are very vulnerable to viruses and malware if you connect your machine to the Internet at all.



Those would be somewhat faster in highly multithreaded code (such as video editing) compared to a stock Phenom II X6 but an X6 running at 4.0 GHz will be a little faster than those two 2419 EEs.