Guys, I need your help. See I am looking for a new pc which would be running a LOT of CPU and Memory intensive tasks. I will be storing the data files on disc (hard drive - HDD) in zipped (bz2) format hence I need more of a good CPU and lots of RAM and cache size.The motherboard should have a wifi controller, some kind of RAID controller integrated.
So can you guys suggest any motherboard and/or CPU ?? By the way I read somewhere that some motherboards shadow the upper 2GB of a 4GB RAM with that of a video card - which means that if you have a video card with 1GB VRAM and you also have 4GB system RAM, you will only be able to use 2 or 3GB of the system RAM. Is that true ??
Thanks in advance people.
Suggest Suggest and Suggest [mobo and CPU]
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bad_brain
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hm, I can recommend the mainboard of my new system, it has no onboard wifi, but imo it's better anyway to use a discrete wifi card....if you want to use Linux it'll be much easier to use because of the drivers.
here it is:
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Mot ... uctID=2887
it's the best mainboard you can get for the price (I payed 139 euro), I have spent weeks with reading reviews and comparing benchmarks before I decided to get this one. it has an awesome performance and stability, and if you want to overclock your system it has loads of features for this. a RAID controller is onboard, I am running a RAID5 with 4 SATA2 HDDs.
about the CPU: the mainboard has a AMD AM2+ socket, so you can use AMD X2 and Phenom CPUs (even the early Phenom2 ones, the later ones will have an AM3 socket). personally I use an AMD X2 6000+ but I will upgrade to a Phenom later if needed.
about the RAM: the max. RAM on XP is 4GB, but how much can be really utilized depends on the mainboard, on some mainboards you can only use 3 or 3.5GB if you have 4GB installed. but actually 2 GB is a good value, more RAM will not give you a remarkable performance plus.....only if you run multiple processes where each one consumes a LOT of RAM it makes sense (XP can assign max. 2 GB RAM to a single process).
about RAM/g-card: depends on the mainboard. if you use an onboard g-card it'll use parts of the system RAM, how much depends on the mainboard/BIOS setting. on the mainboard I recommended you can set the used RAM for the g-card in BIOS, and if you use a discrete g-card you can turn the shared RAM off too of course (additionally the mainboard has the "hybrid-SLI" feature where you can use the onboard- and the discrete g-card in SLI mode). so the rumor that 2 GB goes to the g-card generally when using 4 GB of RAM isn't true....
here it is:
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Mot ... uctID=2887
it's the best mainboard you can get for the price (I payed 139 euro), I have spent weeks with reading reviews and comparing benchmarks before I decided to get this one. it has an awesome performance and stability, and if you want to overclock your system it has loads of features for this. a RAID controller is onboard, I am running a RAID5 with 4 SATA2 HDDs.
about the CPU: the mainboard has a AMD AM2+ socket, so you can use AMD X2 and Phenom CPUs (even the early Phenom2 ones, the later ones will have an AM3 socket). personally I use an AMD X2 6000+ but I will upgrade to a Phenom later if needed.
about the RAM: the max. RAM on XP is 4GB, but how much can be really utilized depends on the mainboard, on some mainboards you can only use 3 or 3.5GB if you have 4GB installed. but actually 2 GB is a good value, more RAM will not give you a remarkable performance plus.....only if you run multiple processes where each one consumes a LOT of RAM it makes sense (XP can assign max. 2 GB RAM to a single process).
about RAM/g-card: depends on the mainboard. if you use an onboard g-card it'll use parts of the system RAM, how much depends on the mainboard/BIOS setting. on the mainboard I recommended you can set the used RAM for the g-card in BIOS, and if you use a discrete g-card you can turn the shared RAM off too of course (additionally the mainboard has the "hybrid-SLI" feature where you can use the onboard- and the discrete g-card in SLI mode). so the rumor that 2 GB goes to the g-card generally when using 4 GB of RAM isn't true....