Subject: Re: [Fwd: CCL:Short Budget] (fwd)

From: Eugene Leitl <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2001 12:41:09 +0100 (MET)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 17:24:43 -0500
From: Velocet <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: [Fwd: CCL:Short Budget]

On Tue, Mar 13, 2001 at 10:15:36PM +0100, [email-masked]'s all...
> 
> 
> -------- Original Message --------
> From: "Familia Esguerra Neira" <[email-masked]>
> Subject: CCL:Short Budget
> To: [email-masked]
> 
> 
> Hello all,
> 
> 
> I would like to ask for your advice on buying a PC for running gaussian 98
> and gamess-us jobs under Slackware Linux 7.1. My budget is U$4000 and I
> have been looking at Dell computers for the fastest machine I can get with
> this money.
> 
> I am undecided on whether to buy a dual pentium III 933MHz or a single
> pentium IV 1.5 GHz processor both with 1Gb PC800 RDRAM; if any of you out
> there has any information as to which of this two options would work
> better, or other suggestion on how to invest my money in order to obtain
> the fastest performing machine I would greatly appreciate it.

Remember, G98 thrashes cache and so needs high speed bandwidth to ram. All my
tests have shown that the Thunderbird 750 is the best value for the money with
its 133MHz bus for the jobs we're doing. If you are doing smaller molecules,
they might fit in L2 cache, especially on the larger cache on P3's. However,
without benchmarking your exact jobs its hard to tell.  The extra money for
Thunderbirds at higher speed in my tests have indicated that its not worth the
money (even when extra cabinet space/network infrastructure is included in the
cost, along with cost of mainboard, ram, etc). For the $ in fact, few things
are as efficient in terms of Mhz speed vs speed of calculation as my
Celeron450 for G98 stuff that we're working on - only the Tbird 700 and 750
are as 'efficient' per Mhz as the Celeron. The cpu sits idle, basically,
wait stating to death, while ram fetches the next hunk of data. Need
a really fast bus. This is why 133Mhz bus dual CPU boards dont hold high
hopes for me for what we're doing. I have yet to get back results from
DDR tests for comparison.

/kc