Does this PC configuration make any sense?

[communist]

Workstation for Graphics / Animation using following components:
Dual Xeon 3.06 Ghz (HT enabled)
Iwill Motherbord ( http://www.iwill.net/product_2.asp?p_id=33 )
1 GB RAM (PC 2100)
Multiplicator : 23
nVidia Quadro FX

The main thing that is puzzling me is does it make any sense to deploy a Dual Xeon system with such a weak memory / motherboard configuration (FSB of 133Mhz (266 or 533?!))
Even my aging 2600+ runs at 166MHz (333). Wouldn it be much better to have a lower multiplicator and way faster board & RAM? (At least in the AMD world, dunno about Intel stuff hence the thread).

Thanks for any help :)

[Smile2]

I don't see anything wrong with it.

for creating Animation/Graphics, its really really CPU hungry, even using a decent Desktop PC, sometimes it would takes hours - days to render a frame. Using Xeon with its high amount of cache reduce the requirement for much RAM.

[theReal]

Using Xeon with its high amount of cache reduce the requirement for much RAM.But faster RAM would definitely be better, I guess.

It says -Dual Channel PC2100/PC1600 DDR SDRAM even my outdated box (Athlon XP 2700, Via KT333 chipset) has PC2600 CL2-2-2 RAM...

[Smile2]

Cache is much much faster than RAM speed, there where the money goes.

bigger cache is much more important than faster RAM in this case.

[Soulhunter]

Hmm, Id go 2GB of RAM! I have 1GB, and the last time I played with stuff like Maya n' Poser, I got a lot "not nuff memory" or "system runs out of resources" messages when rendering complex scenes... :\


Bye

[theReal]

Cache is much much faster than RAM speed, there where the money goes.

bigger cache is much more important than faster RAM in this case. Well okay, but cache is only a few megabytes even in the best case while RAM is a thousand megabytes or more. Graphics programs also use a lot of RAM and so the transfer speed from RAM to CPU/cache and back can be a significant bottleneck.

[Smile2]

Yes, of course faster RAM always would be better to the system. Most likely the budget already been spent for the Processors and Motherboard so you can't get much better from the RAM anymore.

[communist]

Thanks for the replies - so the RAM is indeed a bottleneck even though the rest of the machine is up to the task.

[GraDy]

Might be a bit late, but why not go for a AMD X2? Should be cheaper than a "real" SMP system, and almost as fast. Those Xeons seems pretty dated (there are newer ones), and having PC3200 instead of 2100 should help quite a bit. My guess is that and X2 would be cheaper, too.
And cahce is no replacement for RAM. The cache is used for very small files that are used often. RAM is used by programs to store temporary data (this is a grave simplification).

[lcksg]

Get Iwill DH-800 & Xeons 2.4GHz. These Xeons can easily overclock to 3GHz. It'll save you a lot of money. Get DDR400 memory & maybe watercooling (Xeon fans are very noisy). This solution is cheaper than AMD X2.