future tech inquiry: Dual i7 socket, PCI Express 3.0

[Araelus]

Dear BG tech, I upgrade my computer substantially every four years, and graphics card every two. This year I am scheduled for a total system renewal.

However, it might be advantageous to wait for some new items to hit the market, maybe into 2011, and I'd like your input on the matter.

PCI Express 3.0 is due to come out "soon", but not yet. The new cards will be backwards compatible with 2.x slots, just like PCIe 2.0 cards are backwards compatible with 1.x motherboards. But using that backwards compatibility means using the old standard's throughput etc. Any later GPU update will probably be a 3.0 card - should I care about this feature?

Other thing I am considering is dual quadcore - I guess with the rise of multi-core CPUs I would call it an "octocore" or some nonsense.

My day-to-day rendering projects will benefit from a workstation setup but I've gone with the more familiar ATX form factor in the past because I have no idea how a regular OS, wordprocessing, that boring stuff will run with an unusual setup. Probably the extra processing power would just not come into play, or would it cause problems? Supposedly Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit supports dual socket systems.

Anyone on BG have experience with a workstation-also-as-PC? Lots of people have two discrete GPUs, but not CPUs. And searching for "two CPUs" just gets me results for single-CPU dual core info.

If two discrete (so eight... sixteen cores as hyper-threaded) CPUs in a "desktop" (not trying to run a server) is feasible, then I need a motherboard recommendation, but in case it is totally idiotic, you can ignore the following:

Spoiler: show

Right now the only dual socket LGA 1366 Intel board (there's only one on the market) is for the Xeon 5500/5600, which are a little out of even my price range. Besides, those are server CPUs. A dual i7 setup would be nice, but it doesn't exist, or if it does I can't find it anywhere.

Does someone offer a dual socket i7 board? Will they ever? It seems the desktop CPUs don't usually get that option. For that matter I'd be satisfied with a dual socket LGA 775 (Core 2 Quad) board but can't seem to find one of those either.

Should I just build two separate quad-core boards and read Old English poetry to them?

"Intel i7 Hexadecacore" sounds cool, but if it won't do anything besides be a rendering farm, I'd like to know in advance. Thanks.

[orinthia]

You shouldn't have any problems using a dual cpu setup. There's really no problem using them with XP or newer, though the server versions of windows can be a good option for such a setup (if you're a student or still have a .edu email address, you could probably get a full windows 2008 server r2 for free from microsoft's dreamspark website).

There haven't been any problems using dual cpu setups for desktops for forever, just their cost is huge and require twice as much ram - ram for each cpu, and the cpus themselves have to be able to work in a dual+ setup. Xeons are made for this, i7s probably not but I haven't researched it. A single search on google showed that there were some possible dual socket i7 boards coming out, but nothing definite...

Tbh, unless you really need a very powerful workstation to do some serious data crunching while playing some games (you'd be able to do a whole hell of a lot at once lol), you won't need to go dual socket anytime soon (but it'd be gigantic for your epeen if you've got the money to toss at it! ).

If you need a new setup right now, I'd buy for right now with what's available. If you can put off the purchase until more stuff comes out, wait, and maybe save a little more for it.

[Araelus]

and the cpus themselves have to be able to work in a dual+ setup. Xeons are made for this, i7s probably not but I haven't researched it.

Ok, I managed to find the documentation. Apparently the i7 desktop line only have one Intel QuickPath Interconnect link, so they can't run dual socket. As you allude to, the Xeon line have two or more QPI, so they can.

Other info you provided is encouraging - twice as much ram isn't a problem. I'll see how the prices drop between now and next summer, since I'm not in a rush. The 1366 servers haven't had time to settle similar to how the 775 did. Or they could change the binning, etc.

Anyone else's comments are welcome as well. Depth of BG poster's experience never fails to surprise me, thanks.

[aalryn]

games see very little to no improvement over dual core still. There was a test comparing the single core all the way to 6 core processors in all of the major gaming benchmarks. All else was equal. Dual Cores were about twice as fast as the single core in most tests and everything above dual core was neck & neck, but not far ahead of dual. There is no reason to bother with a multiple cpu, 6 core or whatever.

The only real bottlenecks in a PC nowadays is only the video card or increasing actual CPU clock speed. Any other upgrades are marginal at best.

[Soap]

I use to have a Dual Xeon Nehalem(i7) workstation, for a total of 8 physical cores and 16 logical. I have since upgrade to a 6 core system, i7 980X at 4.2Ghz vs my previous Dual Xeon 5520 at 2.26Ghz. You wont run into any problems with regular day task like word processing or anything. They operate just like any other desktop except with much more horsepower and are very costly and require Dual Socket OS's such as Windows 7 x64. The main advantage is rendering and encoding power and time over a single socket i7. Theres not much of a performance gain for gaming yet, but maybe in the future.

You can get prebuilt Dual Socket Xeon workstation from HP, Dell and Apple. Or you can build your own and they must be Xeons, there are no dual i7 boards and will never be. Me personally, I'm waiting until late 2011 when the new Xeon "Sandy Bridge" Intel chips come out and I will either build my own workstation or buy one from apple at a premium for their BTX motherboard and beautiful case.

Heres my old workstation, you can get the same one from Dell/HP for $1000 less but you get a weaker powersupply/motherboard and a case that resonates like a sub woofer.

http://store.apple.com/us_smb_78313/...family/mac_pro

[Furtwangler]

I haven't personally researched the benchmarks on the matter, but it seems you'd be better off just waiting for the new 6 cores to be affordable, or just going for those. Seems like too much of a money sink and possible compatibility issues too.