Help with picking parts

[phenious]

Hey guys, I've been out of the loop when it comes to building AMD machines for sometime now but my Current machine is giving me some greif when rendering for long periods so what does that mean????

UPGRADE TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

SO!

What I need from you all is to help me! I have picked out the base system as follows:

Processors:
(2x) AMD Opteron 250 Troy 1GHz FSB Socket 940 Processor Model (Dual CPU Baby!)

OR, would it be better to use an X2 processor?

Motherboard:
ASUS K8N-DL Dual Socket 940 NVIDIA nForce4 Professional Extended ATX Server Motherboard

Memory:
(4x) CORSAIR XMS 1GB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) ECC Registered System Memory Model CMX1024RE-3200

Video Card:
ASUS EN7800GTX/2DHTV/256 Geforce 7800GTX 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16

Hard Drive:
74GB WD Raptor 10,000RPM
(As well as all the other stuff I already have)

Power Supply:
PC Power & Cooling 510 SLI-PFC ATX12V 510W Power Supply

Case:
Lian Li PC-73SL Silver Aluminum Server Computer Case


See anything that wont work together? Do I have a big enough Power Supply ect? Also is ECC correcting RAM with the little increase in cost? I have read its probably wise choice when using more than 4GB of RAM. Feel free to sugest alternative parts as well. Thanks guys I would like to order this badboy Monday morning BTW, the main use of this rig will be video editing and content creation. Lots of multimedia duties and I often have Photoshop, Premiere, and Encore DVD all open at once and sometimes After Effects.

[nwo75200]

You're one sick, powerhouse freak!

That's basically all I have to say about that
j/k
ok, here goes....

Why are you going with s940 instead of 939? I mean if you're a gamer and looking towards the future, I would go with an X2 instead.

But I hear that Opertons run really cool and are OC freaks, so that should be good

I really don't like the whole 4GB RAM idea, I think it's overkill, but it would be great if your mobo and CPU fully supports it. What I mean by that is that you should make sure that when you put all those 4 sticks in there, most likely they're going to downlock to ddr266 or ddr333 speeds with 2T timings, that's what happened to me, there's nothing you can do to fix it. As long as the 4GB will work and play nice with your CPU & mobo, I see no reason why not to go for it, even though I think that 2GB is optimal these days.

For the case, I would recommend a Lian-Li with the removable mobo tray, and also because it's aluminum so it should keep stuff cooler

I'm not too sure about that PSU though :/ Got a link to it?

You really don't need an overkill PSU, your system won't use much more than 24A from the 12v rail, which is less than 300W under full load. A nice 400-500W PSU with dual rails would be nice.

[phenious]

Well I looked around for a base system by building stuff from VoodooPC and Alienware and then started looking around from there, lemme go look at other 939 Mobos, do they support Dual CPUs and all that good stuff?

[nwo75200]

OK, so now that you have the links in I can conclude that obviously your mobo will support the RAM, and so should your CPUs, after all, they are server CPUs created to handle well over any desktop RAM limit.

That PSU also looks very fancy, looks like it's a 650W PSU (most PSUs use their ratings as max output or somewhat close). Looks very good, top notch, without a doubt.

s939 does NOT support dual CPUs, there are no s939 dual CPU mobos, and there probably never will be.

[mike_sanfil]

Well if you need alot of power for rendering, why not go with intel?

[phenious]

Well I have gone with intel before but AMD seems to have the price right and the proper idea with Dual CPUs. I am switching the RAM to ECC and buffered, I was informed that is a good idea and or requried.

[nwo75200]

Oh yeah, last time I checked, s940 only uses ECC buffered RAM

It's probably a good move by you that you switched it

Note that ECC RAM is a bit slower.... at least it was when I checked out this Corsair explanation on RAM:
http://www.corsairmicro.com/corsair/...707/index.html

Long, and possibly boring as well as annoying, but very useful nonetheless.

[EXreaction]

My only question...why are you going with a 7800 GTX?

[nwo75200]

Quote:

Originally Posted by EXreaction

My only question...why are you going with a 7800 GTX?

My only question for you.... why not?

[phenious]

Games?