Motherboard Wanted

[rajkumar_personal]

I wanted all you hardware gurus to help me buy a good motherboard which supports the following !!

1) It needs to be a dual processor motherboard

2) It needs to support Pentium Dual Core Processors (Preferably Pentium D EE)

3) It needs to support at least 16 GB of DDR2 RAM

4) It needs to support good bus speeds such as 800 MHz (If that is what it is measured in ! Please correct me if I am wrong. And someone needs to explain what the heck is a BUS speed !)

5) Needs to have support for NVIDIA 7900 GTX Graphics Card

and it needs to be an extremely preformance oriented motherboard !



PLEASE Help me out there and also mention other stuff that I need to keep in mind while buying a Dual Processor Moherboard !


MORE details about motherboards and RAMs and other hardware stuff will be welcome as well.




WHY THE HELL AM I ASKING THIS ?????

Just because I am about to get a new machine assenbled that has a dual processor motherboard...... 2 Pentium D EE 4 GHZ processors......16 GB DDR2 RAM (please mention which brand I should opt for) ........ a NVIDIA 7900 GTX Graphics card (what is the difference between GTX and GT versions of a graphics card ? Which one is better in performance?) and other such hardware....

It is primarily aimed for the project which I am going to undertake seriously.....GAME Making !

PLEASE HELP !!!!!

[cyrux]

16 Gb ddr2 ram ?? my my , does any mother board even support that..i thought 4Gb was max

[MysticHalo]

Originally Posted by cyrux

16 Gb ddr2 ram ?? my my , does any mother board even support that..i thought 4Gb was max

4 GB is the max for socket 939 motherboards. But i dont think there's a mobo that s'ports 16 GB...8 GB is the limit IMO.( 4x 2GB sticks)
But seriously...have u won a jackpot or what...16 GB RAM, 7900 GTX... why dont u buy FX 62 in place of Pentium D

[drvarunmehta]

Why don't you get a server with 2 dual core Opterons and a nVidia Quadro or ATI FireGL series graphics card? It's much better suited to "Game development". Anyways, the kind of rig you want to buy is overkill even for game development.

PS Don't get offended but game development is serious business that needs a lot of investment in terms of time and money. Unless you are sure you can earn money out of it, I suggest you limit your involvement with games to just playing them like the rest of us and leave the development part to EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard etc.

[Rollercoaster]

game development does not require so much hardware..

[Vyasram]

16GB RAM, never Even in Vista's prime wud u need this. 4 GB is more than enough 4 the next 3 yrs

[gary4gar]

for bus speed:A local bus is a computer bus that connects directly, or almost directly, from the CPU to one or more slots on the expansion bus. The significance of direct connection to the CPU is avoiding the bottleneck created by the expansion bus, thus providing fast throughput.

source:answers.com


also it will be very diffcult to get this high end cpu.

btw,any lottery bro as it costs around 1lakh

[samrulez]

16 GB ram....Do u want to go to mars with that memory??

[john_the_ultimate]

Good that u r getting that kinda config. But which softwares r u going to use and r u buying the softwares too (just thought that if u could spend so much on hardware then u must be buying original/legal software rather than using the pirated ones).

If u r thinking in terms of modelling, rendering and animation I would suggest that instead buying a single most powerful and most expensive system, buy some average systems (which is certainly possible imagining ur budget) and connect them for batch processing (render farm). U will get better result.

One more thing u could do is get one new pc and buy some second hand system such as P4 1.7's or even P3 1GHz's and setup a render farm.

[Rollercoaster]

^^Dude that would be cool.. just make sure if u do it u tell us all abt it.. and may be u will get a page in the DIGIT Mag

[rajkumar_personal]

What mates........

Still no answer to my ques ?

How come no motherboard supports it ??

[john_the_ultimate]

Well 16GB DDR2 is supported by server class mobo for the XEON single and dual core processor. For example see this: http://www.intel.com/design/servers/...0af2/index.htm

For AMD AM2 processor compatible mobo with support for 16GB DDR2, see this: http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=C51GM-M&cat=MBB

[thetopcyborg]

my my, 16 GB RAM is alone gonna cost u almost 80k....what's ur budget and pls do call the DIGIT guys to interview you and of course, ur to-be-mean-machine...

and what's a render farm?

[rajkumar_personal]

I am not going for AMD X2 Processors bcoz of 2 reasons......

1) They have less clock speed and hence less number crunching power (badly needed by some of the apps like video editors)

2) I have heard that the motherboards which support them are not PCIe compatible (It is there 2 stay for the future and I wanna make my machine future proof for at least 5-7 years !!)



And hey.......
Is XEON a better processor than P4EE Dual Core ??
I know that they are meant for Servers but I want to put my machine to other uses like game programming, rendering, testing, video editing and composing and lots of heavy duty work !!!

Is the XEON capable (it better be !) to do that better than P4EE Dual Core ?


If NOT... then please mention the best motherboard available in the market which supports 2 dual core P4EE Dual Core processors (AMD X2, in case I find out that it is PCIe compatible ) and also has the support for the largest RAM modules available in India (in terms of capacity, of course )

[gannu_rox]

Great!

You want a PC for developing games, huh?

Well the DELL XPS 700, might just suit your needs. They'll ship it to your door, but at a premium. But thats not an assembled PC, right!

Here's the rig:

1. Intel® Pentium® Processor Extreme Edition Dual-Core 965 with HT Technology - (3.73GHz,1066MHz FSB, 4MB Cache)

2. The NVIDIA® nForce 590 SLI MCP core logic enables two graphics cards to work together rendering a single image. All connected by PCI Express x16 bandwidth to help provide the ultimate visual experience.

3. Up to 4GB Dual-Channel DDR21 SDRAM (667MHz, 2 or 4 DIMMs)

4. Up to 1.5TB Multiple Serial ATA 3Gb/s Hard Drives

5. Multiple DVDRW, Combo, DVD-ROM configurations Available

6. NVIDIA's next Generation 7 series graphics, QUAD SLI Technology, Dual (7950 GX2)

7. Sound Blaster X-FiTM XtremeMusic with Dolby 5.1

8. AGEIA® PhysX® physics accelerator
Note: Games must be designed to take advantage of the PhysX accelerator.

9. Chassis 750 Watt Power Supply (Jet Black Chassis); 1KW Power Supply (Special Edition Formula Red Chassis - Available in Americas only) - SLI, ATX2.0, EPS12V, SSI industry compatibility
Externally available: 2 Optical (5.25), 1 13-in-1 Media Card reader (2 x 5.25) & 1 Floppy (3.5)
Internally available: 4 x 3.5 (HDD*)
Memory DIMM slots: 4 available
(H x W x D): 22.5” x 8.6” x 24.25” (with stand); 21.86” x 8.6” x 24.25” (without stand)
7-slot full sized BTX standard motherboard (12.6" x 10.5")


Well, the price is $6487 if you don't mind that tag, they're shipping that system right before 30th of this month. Proceed straight to Dell.com and select your country as US and go on.

The 16 gb ddr2 wont make a much of a difference here.

Bye n happy hunting for your rig.

[rajkumar_personal]

Thanks for the reply BUTTTTTTT

It doesn't help me out !!

This is the config I am aiming for
1) 2 P4EE 4 GHz Dual Core Processors
2) 16 GB DDR2 RAM
3) NVIDIA 7900 GTX
4) 3 TB Hard Disk Space ( 6 x 500 GB HDD)
etc.
etc.
etc.


By the way.....

What is the difference between GTX and GT in NVIDIA's Cards ??

[john_the_ultimate]

Originally Posted by rajkumar_personal

I am not going for AMD X2 Processors bcoz of 2 reasons......

1) They have less clock speed and hence less number crunching power (badly needed by some of the apps like video editors)

2) I have heard that the motherboards which support them are not PCIe compatible (It is there 2 stay for the future and I wanna make my machine future proof for at least 5-7 years !!)



And hey.......
Is XEON a better processor than P4EE Dual Core ??
I know that they are meant for Servers but I want to put my machine to other uses like game programming, rendering, testing, video editing and composing and lots of heavy duty work !!!

Is the XEON capable (it better be !) to do that better than P4EE Dual Core ?


If NOT... then please mention the best motherboard available in the market which supports 2 dual core P4EE Dual Core processors (AMD X2, in case I find out that it is PCIe compatible ) and also has the support for the largest RAM modules available in India (in terms of capacity, of course )

See if this helps: http://www.tomshardware.com/2003/08/...duo/index.html

Amd X2 does support PCI-E and for AMD X2 review see this: http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q2...2/index.x?pg=1

Yes XEON Dual core is certainly better than P4EE Dual Core (in terms of number crunching).

[john_the_ultimate]

Originally Posted by thetopcyborg

and what's a render farm?

SEE THIS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Render_farm and here u see its implimentation : HOW TO BUILD YOUR OWN RENDER FARM: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1815797,00.asp

U R going overboard.

3Ds Max, Maya XSI, Zbrush, these are the primary applications u r gonna do modeling in, or the game, now since it's a game, low poly is the key, all these applications except XSI, can't use beyond 3 GB RAM in a Single PC configurattion. for the graphics card, using a NVIDIA 7900GTX is useless, get a Quadro, as it has more OpenGL power to handle these modeling applications, & since it's the game, u need to make your renderer (The game engine). U can get a 7900GTX , but u will be limited to high gaming power but low OpenGL Workstation power

16 GB is useless for u, even if u compile the complete game code, which u can never do, as game engine compilation is done in stages, so as to keep an eye on the bugs etc...u never compile the whole code at once, & then check it to find bug, re-code & recompile, it is always done in stages. For which, multiple PCs are a better idea

3 TB Harddisk, what are u gonna use that for, no (gaming grade ) graphics card in the market can use textures more then 4096X4096 pixels, which at uncompressed TGA ammount to 7 to 8 MB, this is again something , hardly used in games, as textures of the maximum size of 1024X1024 pixels are used, & when the resolution goes higher, Anistropic filtering is done to make the texture sharp at even that resolution. Even Doom 3 uses this sized texture at Ultra quality, else it just downsamples, cos to use this sized texture u need 256 MB VRAM atleast

Better get a Dual Xeon setup with Asus PC-DL motherboard, with 4 GB RAM, & since it's gaming, u won't be using the inbuilt renderer of the modeling application (mental ray etc), u will need to use your own game engine renderer, which will depend on your gfx card. U can buy 2 such computers & make a render farm

[rajkumar_personal]

So does that mean that I'll settle for a P4EE Machine with 8 GB RAM ??

[john_the_ultimate]

Originally Posted by rajkumar_personal

So does that mean that I'll settle for a P4EE Machine with 8 GB RAM ??

By what gxsaurav has said, u must have an idea as to what is required for gave development. So it now depend on u as to which setup is better for u. Also could u please give some info/details about ur plans regarding ur project and how u wish to complete it. Are u working alone or have a group? etc.
And if u could post some samples picture/models that u may have created, then it would be great.