NEW BUILD***

Hey guys, I have been thinking and doing a lot of research on a test platform build I want to tryout.

It consists of 2-4180 AMD Opteron 6 core processors @ 2.8ghz (yes 2 on an ASUS dual socket server board that is designed for desktops)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131929

With 32gigs of DDR3 1866

1 EVGA GTX 580

Now these 2 processors combined have 12 physical cores and 12 logical cores, (so in theory of today's standards 24 cores of computing power) and
they are based off of the Thuban architecture which is part of the AMD Phenom II line up, my assumption is together and properly configured they would make a pretty sick gaming rig. I know they are ment for servers BUT there are more and more people picking these up for gaming systems now that the software is catching up. If all else fails I can sell the rig to someone in need of a server or even donate it to S&H as a standalone server if that's an option.

AMD had an enthusiest build similar to this back in 2006 on a 1207F socket mobo using 2 dual cores on the same board called the FX 4x4 using 2 AMD FX 74 dual cores at 3.2 GHZ the made it at the time to compete with intels quad core offering and it did hold its own pretty well, it worked well but the software at the time was lacking as XP was top dog and vista was a few months out, they later configured 2 Quad core opterons for this purpose for and 8 core/ 8 thread gamming monster! There was 1 person I know who built one I seen it at a lan fest in Dayton, OH at the time it was one of the fastest computers availible, with 3 8800gt graphics cards, but again the software wasnt up to par, so you had 4 cores not doing anything :'(

But the total cost of the system build is around $800 I found 2 CPUS on ebay for $50 each. and the Mobo is around $350, Ram is $200 I have a full tower and a Thermaltake 1000 watt psu, and picked up a used GTX 580 for $200 (craigslist)

Any thoughts or ideas to add to this build to improve on it? I know there are faster things available but I wanted to give this a try and do the build myself and gather my own opinion, i have seen some benchmarks but most are of single processors, the dual cpu configurations run in parallel so single thread and multithread applications are both handled with ease.

Thanks!

night-walkr

That actually sounds like it'll be a monster of a rig. Let me know how it works out. The price is pretty reasonable, especially the used video card. I am looking to build a new rig for FarCry3 and BF4, so I have some time to shop around.

Wow

An SSD will make your computer start and load a thousand times faster.

Shootist75 wrote:

An SSD will make your computer start and load a thousand times faster.

this is true and well worth the purchase, love the ssd I got a month ago!

An SSD will definately find its way in here, I have one in my main rig and I havent touched a standard drive since except for backup and storage purposes.

Battlefield 3 loads no time at all and changes maps in 5 secs or less no wait= more frag time