I am putting together a small proposal for 3 boxes to be used by myself and the two other lead developers for our company. I am interested mainly in recommendations for CPU/motherboard combinations but RAM and video configuration (SLI, No SLI, PCI-X, AGP) are of significant concern.
We use our development machines for building high performance visual simulations (e.g. video games for scientific and military applications). I have a dual Xeon/3Ghz box now and I like it a lot but I am highly interested in a dual core processor as a replacement.
Here is a summary of the capabilities our applications can benefit from:
*) Multithreading - Client/server applications, batch processing of number crunching processes.
*) High FSB bandwidth - We typically upload massive quantities of data to the GPU from RAM (vertices, textures, etc...)
*) Large Video RAM - Prolly gonna go with the 7800 GTX 512Mb
*) High FPS in a number crunching context - Need as fast a CPU as we can afford.
*) Heavy Disk Access - We deal with some massive terrain databases and they typically drag us down when we open up a new dataset.
*) Decent audio - We do 3D sound but our typical app has no more than 6 or 7 sound effects plus an ambient background sound or music clip running at a time. Onboard Mobo is preferred.
*) Need at least 4 5 1/4" bays, two 3" bays.
I'll post more reqs if I think of any ...
Budget will be somewhere between $2500 to $3500 per box. Note that we do not need Kbd/Mouse/Monitor/Speakers.
Thx for tips in advance ...
Ice