AMD Opteron based PC

One of my colleagues has recently been bitten by the seti bug and is now planning to put together a dedicated cruncher. To give him a head start, I offered my old GTX 260 to him. Being an AMD aficionado, he is planning to assemble an opteron based desktop. Although I too like AMD, I have no experience with server based PC. I have suggested AMD FX 8150 and any suitable AM3+ motherboard and to get a few GPUs.

This is what he has come up with

AMD Opteron 6284 SE: ~ $1480
Supermicro H8SGL or H8SGL-F: ~ $1040

The prices are what I saw online, although shipping to the middle east where we temporarily reside is not usually offered. That, apart from the high cost of the components, would make this a difficult system to assemble.

I also read that this processor doesnt come with a cooling fan making it necessary to purchase an aftermarket cooler. Any advise on which one to go for, which at the same time will not block the PCI-E slot to be used for the GPU?

Would any of you please give your valuable suggestions in this regard?
______________

My SUN WS has an Opteron 1210 running 24/7 at 1.8 GHz since January 2008. It has its own cooler. But I bought an Opteron 1220 at 2.8 GHz and am planning to install it in fall, when room temperature goes down. I have bought an ASUS Silent Square EVD cooler, which looks quite impressive.
Tullio
____________

I like AMD too but wouldn't it be a lot more cost effective to get a much cheaper CPU and some NVIDIA GPU's instead?
____________

One of my colleagues has recently been bitten by the seti bug and is now planning to put together a dedicated cruncher. To give him a head start, I offered my old GTX 260 to him. Being an AMD aficionado, he is planning to assemble an opteron based desktop. Although I too like AMD, I have no experience with server based PC. I have suggested AMD FX 8150 and any suitable AM3+ motherboard and to get a few GPUs.

This is what he has come up with

AMD Opteron 6284 SE: ~ $1480
Supermicro H8SGL or H8SGL-F: ~ $1040

I was using a 2p Opteron 2222SE configuration for three years (was 2p 2210 for the first two years). They were good at what they did, but clock-for-clock, Intel is the way to go for crunching. Especially when compared to Bulldozer. Having two cores share the FPU cripples floating-point performance unless you only run on half the cores, then you're just hoping that the OS will spread the tasks out evenly so that only one task is running on one FPU.

If you want crunching performance and throughput and are willing to spend more money, go with Intel and a couple GPUs. If you're trying to save some money but still want some good crunching performance, go AMD and a couple GPUs. AMD CPUs and boards tend to be a bit cheaper than Intel stuff, but to each his own.
____________

Linux laptop uptime: 1484d 22h 42m
Ended due to UPS failure, found 14 hours after the fact

If you want crunching performance and throughput and are willing to spend more money, go with Intel and a couple GPUs.

If this is truly about being bitten by a crunching bug, then you owe it to your friend to point-out that a $1,000 in video cards is worth at least $10,000 worth of CPUs.

I have finally managed to convince him to settle for an AMD FX processor (...)

Having two cores share the FPU cripples floating-point performance unless you only run on half the cores, then you're just hoping that the OS will spread the tasks out evenly so that only one task is running on one FPU.

Okay, so I guess I should clarify my statement about the shared FPU thing.

If you compare an FX-6100 to an X6 1100T, the FX will churn out more RAC, but not by a whole lot. There are only a few various "real world tests" where 1100T actually does better, but in general, Bulldozer does win..with a small (<20% margin).

I ran a battery of tests on my FX-6100 when I got it, and found some interesting results. Rather than typing it all over again.. I dug up my old post about it.

However, it must be said that when I run only three cores, I end up averaging about 8%/hour per AP (comes out to 6 APs/24 hours usually). If I run all six cores, it does slow down to about 5.75%/hour. It was noted by somebody when I pointed that out a while back that 8*3 = 24, where 5.75*6 = 34.5, which is actually about 43% more productive, albeit longer crunching durations.

Either way, I still feel that shared-FPU cripples the true potential, because it could be 8*6 = 48, which is 39% more than what is actually observed right now, and follows pretty closely in that 33% range that I noted with various floating-point tasks.
____________

Linux laptop uptime: 1484d 22h 42m
Ended due to UPS failure, found 14 hours after the fact

Having two cores share the FPU cripples floating-point performance unless you only run on half the cores, then you're just hoping that the OS will spread the tasks out evenly so that only one task is running on one FPU.

EHHHHHHH
Wrong. I've not seen any decrease is production speed on my FX 8150. shared FPU or not these things are very fast. I have to assume that the FPU has enough bandwidth to handle minmize any slowdown that could have occurred.

$ for $ and part for part AMD is the value choice especially if you intend to just have a GPU farm.

Thanks for all the posts. The guy has indeed settled down for an AMD FX-8150 after seeing that I too have one of those, although I use it as my main PC for other uses as well.

I would like to ask a slightly different question now. We managed to pick up a used GTX 460 at a good bargain through the classifieds. It has been running ever since. His motherboard has one more usable PCI-E slot and we have been trying to get hold of another similar card to go in there. However, it seems only the older GTX 250 cards are available. Since I only use single card on my rigs, I have no clue if two such cards can be used on a single motherboard to crunch seti? Can they use common drivers? And if so, what will be shown under 'You Computers > GPU'?
______________

If the GTX460 is the 1st GPU, BOINC will 'see' 2 460 GPUs.
But I wouldn't mix these two completely different architectures in one system.
Even you can use the same driver and with only SETI MB WUs, there wouldn't
be much of a difference compaired to 2 460s, if running only 1 task per GPU.

On other projects, Einstein/GPUgrid etc. it's a whole different story.
You'll degrade your 460 (FERMI) to a 200 series GPU!