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I've got my new development workstation all set up and in use now. It is definitely not a petite flower by any means. Its big and kind hulking looking, though oddy quite empty inside. I guess this is to maximize air volume for cooling reasons.
Its a dual 1.7Ghz Xeon PIV machine based on the i860 chip set, with dual channel RDRAM, dual PCI busses 2 64 bit/66Mhz slots and 2 32bit slots), 64 bit dual channel Ultra-160 SCSI controller (Adaptec), two 15K RPM 8MB cache 18GB Ultra-160 SCSI drives (and one 10K 18GB one as a backup/temp drive), dual monitor Radeon VE, 400Mhz FSB (actually a 100Mhz that is quad pumped so 4 transfers per bus cycle), plus the other usual stuff.
Needless to say its a wee step up from the previous 733 Dell Dimension
The big advantage to me is that it now builds my CQC system well over twice as fast, but the system remains completely responsive to do other work at the same time. Before, I was pegging the CPU at ever link step, and running about 70% or so just during the compile steps. The machine was sluggish during those builds to say the least. Now it feels like nothing else is even going on while a build is active. It takes about 40% CPU (which is a cumulative measure of both CPUs) on average during the builds, so there's plenty left over for other things.
Its actually way faster than my server now, which is a dual 800Mhz PIII. But the server doesn't get nearly that much abuse and just provides domain controller services for my 4 machine network, has the DAT tape backup machine in it, and hosts SQL Server 2000 for development purposes.
I haven't tried putting a software DVD player on it yet, and its not intended to be an HTPC. So I don't know how it would do in that role, and there's no guarantee that it would be any better than the machine I replaced, though the high speed FSB might help some. But for development purposes, with the huge and piggy Visual Studio .net, it throws that stuff around like a TRex.
There isn't an Adaptec specific driver for the SCSI board yet, under XP that is. So I'm not sure if I'll get any more I/O performance once I get one or not, since I'm not sure how good the built in XP driver is. They have one out in beta form now, but I'm not about to put a beta driver on my development machine.
One less than ideal thing is that they do some sort of OEMing of the Radeon card, so you can't just download the latest drivers from ATI because they claim they aren't compatible with that board. I might just replace it with another Radeon or Geforce I have laying around.
It has both USB and Firewire ports. Once nicety is that it has USB and Firewire ports both on the back and on the front behind a little door. So its easy to just plug a digital camera in on the fly and then remove it.
Its a dual 1.7Ghz Xeon PIV machine based on the i860 chip set, with dual channel RDRAM, dual PCI busses 2 64 bit/66Mhz slots and 2 32bit slots), 64 bit dual channel Ultra-160 SCSI controller (Adaptec), two 15K RPM 8MB cache 18GB Ultra-160 SCSI drives (and one 10K 18GB one as a backup/temp drive), dual monitor Radeon VE, 400Mhz FSB (actually a 100Mhz that is quad pumped so 4 transfers per bus cycle), plus the other usual stuff.
Needless to say its a wee step up from the previous 733 Dell Dimension
The big advantage to me is that it now builds my CQC system well over twice as fast, but the system remains completely responsive to do other work at the same time. Before, I was pegging the CPU at ever link step, and running about 70% or so just during the compile steps. The machine was sluggish during those builds to say the least. Now it feels like nothing else is even going on while a build is active. It takes about 40% CPU (which is a cumulative measure of both CPUs) on average during the builds, so there's plenty left over for other things.Its actually way faster than my server now, which is a dual 800Mhz PIII. But the server doesn't get nearly that much abuse and just provides domain controller services for my 4 machine network, has the DAT tape backup machine in it, and hosts SQL Server 2000 for development purposes.
I haven't tried putting a software DVD player on it yet, and its not intended to be an HTPC. So I don't know how it would do in that role, and there's no guarantee that it would be any better than the machine I replaced, though the high speed FSB might help some. But for development purposes, with the huge and piggy Visual Studio .net, it throws that stuff around like a TRex.
There isn't an Adaptec specific driver for the SCSI board yet, under XP that is. So I'm not sure if I'll get any more I/O performance once I get one or not, since I'm not sure how good the built in XP driver is. They have one out in beta form now, but I'm not about to put a beta driver on my development machine.
One less than ideal thing is that they do some sort of OEMing of the Radeon card, so you can't just download the latest drivers from ATI because they claim they aren't compatible with that board. I might just replace it with another Radeon or Geforce I have laying around.
It has both USB and Firewire ports. Once nicety is that it has USB and Firewire ports both on the back and on the front behind a little door. So its easy to just plug a digital camera in on the fly and then remove it.
