[cricke]

I´m about to buy myself a new Workstation, stationary, and am concidering either

- two Dual core Intel 54xx 3.0 GHz
or
- two Quad core Intel 53xx 2.66 GHZ which is about the same price.

Since the MPI is slowing down the calculations maybe it´s more convenient using two duals which slightly higher clock frequency than 2 quads?

Please come up with a suggestion on a new workstation setup for approx 3000 euro.

Regards
Christofer

[gdbaldw]

Christopher,

I'm no expert, but perhaps I can get the ball rolling for you. What I've read on this forum is that the bottleneck is CPU cache bandwidth. Further, I've read here that duals perform better when operated as uni-processors. So, with that, about a year ago I purchased the fastest uni with the highest bandwidth to memory - AMD 3800+ AM2 socket, 4 x 0.5GB DDR2 800Mhz, 4 x 250GB SATA. Mirrored each disk pair, then RAID-0 on top. I've since replaced memory with 4 x 2GB DDR2 667MHz and recompiled kernel for large memory. I've solved 1.7M hex grids while simultaneously surfing the web. Very satisfied. Only regret is installed 32-bit OS, and once hit malloc limit. Next machine will likely be 64-bit.

Doug