Subject: Re: CCL:Short Budget

From: "art'" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 23:43:06 +0100

Hi,

FIC is now shipping their first motherboard supporting the DDR memory technology
and the Socket A Athlon and Duron processors.  It will support older and newer
Athlons with 266MHz FSB. The AD11 supports up to 1GB of PC1600 or 2100 DDR SDRAM
via two DIMM slots. The AD11 also features; AGP 4X, ATA 100 and integrated audio.
The price is about $200. That is a new product, and I have no news about the
benchmarks of its tests.

DDR memory shoud be very quick as  r/wr functions are performed in another way from
SDRAM's. The 1.2 GHz Athlon is about $ 280 and mauch cheaper than PIII or P4 ....
and Athlons usually have higher performance about 20 %. Espetially in floating
point intensive calculations.

Here is only my opinion, but the price/performance for Athlons is better. The save
money you can use in obtaining good SCSI system if presume high HDD usage during
calculations.

good luch
Arturas Z.

Yubo Fan wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I prefer a dual pentium III 933MHz with 1GB SDRAM (I don't think PC800 RDRAM is
> much faster than PC133  SDRAM and the bus speed of PIII/933 is 133 MHz). I list
> the prices of the most important components for your calculations.
>
> 2 PIII/933 $500
> 1GB SDRAM(4x256MB) $450
> MSI 694D VIA Dual Socket 370 motherboard $140
> 40GB ATA100 Hard Drive (7200 rpm) < $150
>
> others: monitor, video card, network card
> housing, mouse and keyboard
>
> So, you can build two dual PIII/933 w/1GB memory Linux machine as I suggest. Of
> course, you just need one monitor for them. You can remote-control them when
> you run QM jobs on them. Remember, this type of computer is very good for DFT
> calculation. Don't try POST-SCF calculations (ie CCSD) on them, or you will be
> very disappointed.
>

---

From: Yubo Fan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2001 17:22:23 +0000

> The price is about $200. That is a new product, and I have no news about the

I don't think DDR memory is much faster than PC133 SDRAM. You can find the comparison
data on the homepage of www.amd.com. CPU is always the most important for
calculations.

> point intensive calculations.

I agree Athlon is faster and cheaper than PIII but there isn't dual processor
supported motherboard available now. Maybe two months later, this type of motherboard
is available commercially. Double speed is always better than 20% faster.

> money you can use in obtaining good SCSI system if presume high HDD usage during

SCSI hard drive is nearly useless for DFT calculations, I think. PC is not good for
POST-SCF calculations. So, you shouldn't waste money on SCSI system. Spend your fund
on CPUs and memory.

--
============================================================
Yubo Fan                   Email: [email-masked]
Department of Chemistry    Tel:   1-979-845-7222
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX 77843
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