You can help me specify a new computer

[sje]

You can help me specify a new computer

The other day, the CPU cooler on my four year old 3.4 GHz Core i7 box passed beyond this mortal veil. It had long served faithfully with 24/7 service, so I guess it made it into Heat Sink Heaven.

I have to make a trip to the old style computer store which has been supplying me with custom built machines for nearly two decades to pick up a replacement cooler. While I'm there, perhaps I can ask the proprietor to assemble a new computer for me from his wide selection of CPUs and mainboards. But what to get? The budget is between US$2,000 and US$4,000 and should include a reasonable profit since the store's owner has been quite helpful to me over the years. There is no charge for an operating system as he sells me naked hardware; I supply Linux.

Must have: at least one 64 bit CPU with as many cores as reasonable, capability of at least 64 GiB RAM with at least 16 GiB installed, a video card with fairly high-end OpenCL capability and HDMI output, a WiFi card, a SATA DVD drive, a SATA 2 TB drive, and the usual ports.

Some commercial solutions like an eight core Mac Pro would work, but generally are not good value for the money.

[jdart]

For general purpose computing you could put together a very reasonable system for under $2000. You only need an expensive graphics card if you are into PC gaming. I would recommend something like the i7-4790k, which is 4 cores at 4GHz, and overclockable: http://ark.intel.com/products/80807/Int ... o-4_40-GHz

If you want it for chess then you may want even more CPU power. Intel's 8-core deskcop chip i7-5960X is popular for this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819117404

It is expensive but still you could get a system together under your $4k target.

The top of the line for CPU power is a dual- or quad-CPU Xeon system. They are designed to run 24x7 but everything is expensive, including the CPUs, memory and boards. That would probably blow your budget, although you can pick up older used systems with 8-12 cores pretty reasonably.

--Jon

[sje]

The Apple Retina iMac can be had with a 4.0 GHz Core i7 (I7-4790K) for $2,750, but that system has limited expandability and there have been many concerns about thermal overloading of the Radeon video. Like the current Mac Pro, the Retina iMac has too much Revision Zero Apple hardware risk and too much effort was spent on looks instead of on performance.

I would like a high-end video card for its OpenCL capability for coding chess in OpenCL under Linux. Mostly the machine would be operated remotely anyway and would be hosting Symbolic for ICS competition. I already have a USB3 SSD for tablebase storage ready to go.

[Joost Buijs]

When you want to spend something like 2K I would also suggest a system with the core i7 5960x. A system with the 8 core 5960x is a the moment the fastest single processor system you can get.

Last year September I build a system with:
processor core i7-5960x
mainboard Asus X99-Deluxe
32 GB DDR4 memory
1 TB WD Velociraptor and a 3 a TB WD RE enterprise drive.
The cost of it all was less than 2k euro.

This is the fastest system I have used till this date and it runs very stable at 4 GHz. for 9 months now.
In the past I build several machines with two and even more processors, but they were not really worth the money.

[jdart]

I think AMD is supporting OpenCL in almost all their new GPUs, although driver support is apparently still a bit patchy. See http://streamcomputing.eu/blog/2015-02- ... d-drivers/

--Jon

[Joost Buijs]

I would like a high-end video card for its OpenCL capability for coding chess in OpenCL under Linux.

AMD video cards are clearly the best choice performance wise if you want to code in OpenGL. For integers the speed advantage is something like a factor 2 to 3 compared to nVidia cards. The only drawback is that the AMD drivers are rather buggy, at least under Windows this is the case.

[sje]

More data on the Core i7-5968X

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Core_i7/I ... ition.html

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu ... 40+3.00GHz

Very good overall throughput, but not the best for single threaded applications.

The older AMD FX-8350 eight core is a better value, given the throughput per price metric.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu ... re&id=1780

[Joost Buijs]

More data on the Core i7-5968X

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Core_i7/I ... ition.html

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu ... 40+3.00GHz

Very good overall throughput, but not the best for single threaded applications.

The older AMD FX-8350 eight core is a better value, given the throughput per price metric.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu ... re&id=1780

Yes when you compare the price the FX-8350 has better value, but it has less than 70% of the performance of an i7-5960X and it draws more power on average.

[Zenmastur]

If you want more than eight cores and want to be cheap about it you could get older reclaimed 6-core Xeon CPU's off Ebay and have him build a new system with those and some of the newer mother boards that handle these older chips. So a 12-core 3+ghz system is possible on your budget and still allow enough room for your builder to make a good profit with money left over.

16-cores at 2.6 ghz (E5-2640v3) would appear to be possible within budget. 20-cores at 2.6 ghz might be possible if you do it your-self. There's probably not enough money in it for him to do it. But you can always ask. 16-cores at 3.2 ghz is clearly out of budget. You could go with 24-cores and stay in budget but the CPU speed would drop enough that its not cost effective.

Regards,

Zen

[sje]

I've ordered a new system to be built. From memory:

Eight core (16 thread) 3.0 GHz Intel Core i7-5960X

8x 8 GiB DIMMs (DDR4 2100)

Asus X99 Deluxe mainboard

800 W power supply

Ugly generic case

AMD video card with HDMI/DVI/DisplayPort

Asus WiFi PCI card / SATA DVD / SATA 2 TB HD

Intel CPU cooler

No Windows / No keyboard / No mouse / No monitor / No power cord

US$2,700

ETA next week