How to justify a new computer...
I have now completed my look at power needs. My intial guess of 500 quid a year to run the server luckily seems to be an overestimate. Actually its closer to 120 at my current energy prices. The machine is a 2.4 GHz Celeron PIV with 9 harddrives in it. It is set to sleep, but it runs filesharing stuff and Thunderbird 24/365.
Looking at the apps I was running CPU load seemed important. I don't want anything maxxing the CPU as that could be an expensive power drain. All the bittorrent clients I could find were rather crap. Shareaza brings the machine to its knees, so I switched to the standard Bittorrent. That had a wacky crappy interface - a max of 3 downloads at once, so was quickly binned. I heard Azureus was good. No it isn't. It had a nice interface, but maxxed the CPU *the whole time* and gave me really crappy download rates. Eventually (after trying a bunch of others in growing desperation) I went for ABC. Quite a nice interface - clean and simple, with a solid compatible implementation of BT. Seems to use no more than 6% CPU, so hopefully will be quite friendly on power draw. I am only interested in reliability, simplicity and speed BTW.
It uses about .8 Amps in sleepy mode - screen off, one HD spinning. Thats 180 W. So I'd like to drop that down. My other box is an Athlon M 2500+ w/ Nforce 2. I measured this at 1Ghz clock - underclocking is easy with the Athlon M, it can go down to 600 MHz or so - and it virtually asleep is 0.35 Amps. I am guessing then at a £50 a year saving. My CPU requirements are very low - a DivX file can play fine on a 800Mhz CPU, so leave a little headroom and it should be fine. Just a shame the dynamic frequency stuff doesn't seem to work on my motherboard.
When the PIV is up and spinning it consumes an alarming 1.8Amp ~ 400W. No wonder I blew a few cheap PSUs over the years. I now have a Tagan 480W that seems to live up to its claims. Since I run lots of harddrives I thought it was the best choice, as it has seperate 12V and 5V rails. Normal PSUs have a stepdown transformer. I noticed each PSU I blew still lit up the motherboard light, so I am guessing the 12 V rail was being taken out by all those HDs. Cross fingers but the Tagan has been much better...
This of course allows me to justify buying new kit! Hurrah! Obviously each time I have to take into account where it ends up. I like to play a few games and write some software on my main desktop, so a fast machine is good, but not vital. I have no real problems with my Athlon, so if I can buy an even lower power version, which is about the same speed I'd be happy. The Winchester (or possibly Venice if they can be got cheap enough) cored A64's seem like the obviously choice. I have all the other bits I need, and one day this will go into the server. I expect it will need to play HD movies by then, so I have been trying out my current Athlon-M to see if its up to the task. Microsoft have some HD samplers and I am pleased to say all of them could be played when the chip was clocked at 1833MHz. The 1080p sample used about 60-80% peak cpu.
I also have a work 3Ghz PIV so I thought I'd do a little test as a comparison. The answer was the Intel sucked. It was maxxed most of the time, and obviously dropped a few frames. The machine has a Geforce4 and an expensive MB so cannot be blamed for being below spec. So my advice: if you want to watch HD movies, use AMD.
But that's for the future... Now my developing requirements mean I like RAID 0. There have been lots of claims and counter claims as to the need for RAID 0. I run a RAID 0 config on tw 10K 36gigers on the PIV, and use lots of Microsoft SQL Server. I can say that it *definitely* makes a diffference in this environment. Whether running Doom 3 is any quicker I neither know nor care. I did however do an optimize of a 5 Gig database and had to check myself when I look at the performance monitor - it was reading at 121Megs a second for minutes at a time. Infact a 3 disk SCSI RAID on a test server only managed 100Mb a second doing the same thing. Apps that do lots of small file access are over twice as fast as a single 7200RPM drive, period.
So anyway now I'm off to scan the net for deals. Hopefully I won't have to wait too long before the bits I desire come into the cost saving bracket.
All this makes me think that willy wavingly fast GPUs in SLI are suddenly much less appealling, unless you like having a 4 digit leccy bill...
Looking at the apps I was running CPU load seemed important. I don't want anything maxxing the CPU as that could be an expensive power drain. All the bittorrent clients I could find were rather crap. Shareaza brings the machine to its knees, so I switched to the standard Bittorrent. That had a wacky crappy interface - a max of 3 downloads at once, so was quickly binned. I heard Azureus was good. No it isn't. It had a nice interface, but maxxed the CPU *the whole time* and gave me really crappy download rates. Eventually (after trying a bunch of others in growing desperation) I went for ABC. Quite a nice interface - clean and simple, with a solid compatible implementation of BT. Seems to use no more than 6% CPU, so hopefully will be quite friendly on power draw. I am only interested in reliability, simplicity and speed BTW.
It uses about .8 Amps in sleepy mode - screen off, one HD spinning. Thats 180 W. So I'd like to drop that down. My other box is an Athlon M 2500+ w/ Nforce 2. I measured this at 1Ghz clock - underclocking is easy with the Athlon M, it can go down to 600 MHz or so - and it virtually asleep is 0.35 Amps. I am guessing then at a £50 a year saving. My CPU requirements are very low - a DivX file can play fine on a 800Mhz CPU, so leave a little headroom and it should be fine. Just a shame the dynamic frequency stuff doesn't seem to work on my motherboard.
When the PIV is up and spinning it consumes an alarming 1.8Amp ~ 400W. No wonder I blew a few cheap PSUs over the years. I now have a Tagan 480W that seems to live up to its claims. Since I run lots of harddrives I thought it was the best choice, as it has seperate 12V and 5V rails. Normal PSUs have a stepdown transformer. I noticed each PSU I blew still lit up the motherboard light, so I am guessing the 12 V rail was being taken out by all those HDs. Cross fingers but the Tagan has been much better...
This of course allows me to justify buying new kit! Hurrah! Obviously each time I have to take into account where it ends up. I like to play a few games and write some software on my main desktop, so a fast machine is good, but not vital. I have no real problems with my Athlon, so if I can buy an even lower power version, which is about the same speed I'd be happy. The Winchester (or possibly Venice if they can be got cheap enough) cored A64's seem like the obviously choice. I have all the other bits I need, and one day this will go into the server. I expect it will need to play HD movies by then, so I have been trying out my current Athlon-M to see if its up to the task. Microsoft have some HD samplers and I am pleased to say all of them could be played when the chip was clocked at 1833MHz. The 1080p sample used about 60-80% peak cpu.
I also have a work 3Ghz PIV so I thought I'd do a little test as a comparison. The answer was the Intel sucked. It was maxxed most of the time, and obviously dropped a few frames. The machine has a Geforce4 and an expensive MB so cannot be blamed for being below spec. So my advice: if you want to watch HD movies, use AMD.
But that's for the future... Now my developing requirements mean I like RAID 0. There have been lots of claims and counter claims as to the need for RAID 0. I run a RAID 0 config on tw 10K 36gigers on the PIV, and use lots of Microsoft SQL Server. I can say that it *definitely* makes a diffference in this environment. Whether running Doom 3 is any quicker I neither know nor care. I did however do an optimize of a 5 Gig database and had to check myself when I look at the performance monitor - it was reading at 121Megs a second for minutes at a time. Infact a 3 disk SCSI RAID on a test server only managed 100Mb a second doing the same thing. Apps that do lots of small file access are over twice as fast as a single 7200RPM drive, period.
So anyway now I'm off to scan the net for deals. Hopefully I won't have to wait too long before the bits I desire come into the cost saving bracket.
All this makes me think that willy wavingly fast GPUs in SLI are suddenly much less appealling, unless you like having a 4 digit leccy bill...
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