Looking for a new rig? Look no further.

[YegaDoyai]

I have found the current be all and end all MOBO/CPU combo.

Surprisingly the CPU/MOBO combo is under £1000 which i think is a first for bleeding edge kit but here are the juicy specs

Dual dual core, not a typo, put two dual core chips on one mobo.
Quad SLI, yup 4 PCIe full size slots for 4 graphics cards
12, 12! SATA headers
+ everything else you'd expect from a top of the line asus
silent cooling, twin gbps lan, 8 channel audio, eSATA etc etc.


and here is where you can buy it

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-193-AM&groupid=701&catid=6&subcat=803


EDIT:
Only for pimps, it is actually outperformed in the majority of tests by the top of the line dual cores from intel. Wait for the K8L cores.

Further edit:

Under full load the processors and MOBO ALONE can chew through more than 500W!!!! 1kW PSUs are kinda needed here.

[CaNNoN_FoDDa]

In case you were wondering, the picture that overclockers have up isn't actually of the motherboard they are selling (think it's an M2N32 Pro) Edit: It is now, they updated it. A picture of the actual motherboard and the specifications can be found here (http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=136&l3=486&model=1530&modelmenu=2) (for those who can't be bothered making the trip themselves).

You'll note that it has 2 cpu sockets and 12 SATA ports, rather than 1 and 9, and has PCIe.

http://www.asus.com/999/images/products/1530/1530_l.jpg

Pretty

Edit: Asus website is down again (they like doing that) so the above picture and link might not work til their admins get their shit together.

[Stakhanov]

You'll note that it has 2 cpu sockets and 12 SATA ports, rather than 1 and 9, and has PCIe.

I did, indeed, notice that. really. :lol:

[LastChanceHotel]

You know, I think I have one of these machines (or one pretty similar) in the server cluster I look after somewhere, only it contains Opterons instead of Athlons :)

It contains two dualcore Opteron 265 processors, 4GB of RAM, and three 74GB Raptor's in RAID 5.



4x of the following

model name : Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 265
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 1793.883
cache size : 1024 KB

4GB of RAM...
MemTotal: 3936052 kB
MemFree: 238732 kB

...and perhaps most disappointingly...

VGA compatible controller: Trident Microsystems XGI Volari XP5 (rev 02)


Still, that mobo/cpu combo you linked to looks shit hot. Have you tried pricing some of the dual/quad/octo socket Core 2 Xeon systems?

Jan

[DAve]

You know, I think I have one of these machines (or one pretty similar) in the server cluster I look after somewhere, only it contains Opterons instead of Athlons :)
Do you still have the Opterons & plans for the server upgrade, Jan?

[YegaDoyai]

totaly different jan, the 4x4 is specific to the consumer processor stuff and has none of the groovy memory sharing and other stuff that makes the Opteron viable and decent for server operations. Hence why the opteron is still selling well, even though at the consumer level the AMDs are solidly outperformed.

[LastChanceHotel]

Do you still have the Opterons & plans for the server upgrade, Jan?

They were 2.8Ghz Xeons rather than Opterons (otherwise they would've been used long ago!), and the current 2.4ghz Athlon XP server is doing nicely :)

When the time comes, we'll probably buy a £60 ebuyer bundle special - eg motherboard, processor and RAM all in one combo. We don't need anything fast at all - the most strenuous thing we do is host Sourceforts, which absolutely flogs the server at an astonishing... 20% CPU usage! Even a full complement of people on CSS only averages around 15-20%.

Still, the Xeons I have are looking less favourable with the very high prices of dual/quad Xeon motherboards. We'd spend as much getting just a mobo as we would getting a whole bundle by the looks of it!

Jan