Build your own Kray anyone?

[Stevienics]

Retards.

It took a whole bunch of them to knock two big ones down, but can a bigger retard build one??? What am I talking about? Towers of course.

I am an ex-splitter so I have all the dexterity skills of Pete Docherty wearing boxing gloves and trying to roll a rizla, but I think (admittedly because I feel a bit guilty cos of VF's post) that I could at least push plug A into socket B and build myself a PC Tower.......but not just any one.

My Missus is running a programme caled STATA which needs the power of a dozen Krays to run it, or it grinds the current Acer effort to a stop. It runs multi-variable analysis with cosmic sized datasets.....so it has to be good.

Any starters for ten? (I bought the idiots guide today)

 

[Teh Wal]

Eeeerrrrmmmm, have you been at the booze cabinet again? I, for one, haven't got a clue what you're asking. DT_Xtremez_21:

 

[Stevienics]

Eeeerrrrmmmm, have you been at the booze cabinet again? I, for one, haven't got a clue what you're asking. DT_Xtremez_21:

Yes, well, I should have placed it in Computers, being as that is what I am trying to build.

 

[pie sandwich]

Building a computer is easy, I ve done a fair few, and even now build servers for internet hosting in the commercial sector.
So any probs just ask, but if you blow it up it's not my fault DT_Xtremez_30:

 

[beowulf]

I built one when I was in uni as the local moody electronics store and dodgy copies of Windows made it cheaper than buying one.

There are some magazines out there on how to do it. There will be plenty on the internet but the one saving thing is this:

Due to standardisation of components no two different components will have the same interface to the motherboard. That is, your memory will have a physically different shape from the graphics card which will differ from the plugs used to mount the HDD.

Pretty much if you are not a mong and not bashing bits together with a hammer "because you know what you are going and this is the way it SHOULD go together" then you are not going to go far wrong.

What OS you going for?

 

[Ex-Bay]

At the risk of treading on the toes of a real expert I commend the following points for consideration.

Which version of STATA is running ? Will Windows 7 run it ?
[check it first ]
How much RAM is associated with it ?
(see STATA's web page;
you don't need a great deal, apparently)
In thinking about a new tower, I suggest at least a twin-core CPU (AMD OPteron, for example), and a 64-bit OS.
Get a pair of big HDDs. 1T for data.
Twin DVD /RW
Twin Floppy disk (I know it's not fashionable, but I don't want to use a multi-MB thing for a small file.)

Good Luck

 

[shettie]

"Build your own Kray anyone? " I thought this was going to be a thread on how you can genetically modify your kids into being an east end gangster.... It's a "CRAY" you div! http://www.cray.com/Home.aspx

 

[252]

"Build your own Kray anyone? " I thought this was going to be a thread on how you can genetically modify your kids into being an east end gangster.... It's a "CRAY" you div! http://www.cray.com/Home.aspx

Have just spoke to Ronnie and Regg(from the grave)and they think you is being dissrespectfull.

Expect a knock at the door later tonight!DT_Xtremez_32:

 

[Stevienics]

I built one when I was in uni as the local moody electronics store and dodgy copies of Windows made it cheaper than buying one.

There are some magazines out there on how to do it. There will be plenty on the internet but the one saving thing is this:

Due to standardisation of components no two different components will have the same interface to the motherboard. That is, your memory will have a physically different shape from the graphics card which will differ from the plugs used to mount the HDD.

Pretty much if you are not a mong and not bashing bits together with a hammer "because you know what you are going and this is the way it SHOULD go together" then you are not going to go far wrong.

What OS you going for?

Windows: Office supporting XP pro

 

[Stevienics]

At the risk of treading on the toes of a real expert I commend the following points for consideration.

Which version of STATA is running ? Will Windows 7 run it ?
[check it first ]
How much RAM is associated with it ?
(see STATA's web page;
you don't need a great deal, apparently)
In thinking about a new tower, I suggest at least a twin-core CPU (AMD OPteron, for example), and a 64-bit OS.
Get a pair of big HDDs. 1T for data.
Twin DVD /RW
Twin Floppy disk (I know it's not fashionable, but I don't want to use a multi-MB thing for a small file.)

Good Luck

The dual core CPU should be sufficient but I feel the need to overkill and go for the quad version, witht he associated motherboard with the LGA775 adaptor,supporting 6 ram and with a simple eide drive controller. As you say it's not about graphics and gaming so the visuals are not as important as the speed. No way I would touch an AMD again.

Do I really need a terrabyte of data storage? I know it helpd with the speed but I thought the bigger CPU cache and BUS speed would be the more important.

 

[beowulf]

The dual core CPU should be sufficient but I feel the need to overkill and go for the quad version, witht he associated motherboard with the LGA775 adaptor,supporting 6 ram and with a simple eide drive controller. As you say it's not about graphics and gaming so the visuals are not as important as the speed. No way I would touch an AMD again.

Do I really need a terrabyte of data storage? I know it helpd with the speed but I thought the bigger CPU cache and BUS speed would be the more important.

You also need to think about the RAM as well. For the most part when looking at scaling the cheapest and simplest thing to get a performance boost is to whack in some more RAM. All processing takes place from RAM and info needs to be uploaded there first. This takes processor time. Lots of RAM means fewer trips to the disk to load the instructions.

The disk space (on a tower/desktop at least) is easily expanded with a second or third hard disk and given that it tends to be a pound a gig it is cheap to alter later on.

I would also make sure that the quad core is worth it. There will come a point that the software will be unable to make use of the extra parallelism due to predicates. I see the website says that more cores makes it run faster and it will but how much faster based on maxing out on parallel tasks? If you are really into performance an ROI analysis on the dual v quad may be in order.

For crunching I would say that processor and RAM are the things you want to be spending your money on. And then once the OS is installed make a user profile just for STATA to keep background processes and day to day services (like IM) to a minimum.

 

[Stevienics]

Magic, thanks for that. After all, you are talking to a man who likes spanners. Would you recommend a higher spec of video card to ease that fucntional load from the CPU as I have read?

 

[beowulf]

I have never had much time with PC games so I have always just used whatever has come to hand. Don't go down the road of massive card with gigs of space capable of rendering Wesminster Abbey in a tenth of a nano-second. If you are looking for standard Windows UI rendering then a decent but not extravagant card will do you fine.

These days the CPU delegates to the graphics card so imagine how little work it will have to do to move the progress bar along as it is crunching the numbers. And then buy accordingly.

 

[Shugster]

Beowulf has given out some top tips.

The only thing I would add is to make sure that the motherboard, cpu, ram etc all, "match", one another.

ie. It's no good fitting a mental speed processor to a relatively slow motherboard, otherwise the cpu may have to wait for the motherboard to come along and get the processed data etc....

So make sure your bus speeds are compatible so the possibility of bottlenecks are reduced.

 

[Ex-Bay]

Have a good long look at the STATA website and study its requirements; it might be worth asking them for practical advice. For what I saw, it does not require acres of RAM.

The problem, as I see it, with a quad-core CPU is the operating system's ability to use more than two cores to do the difficult sums. I doubt that the 64-bit XP (a vital part, I feel) could handle more than two, and I'm not sure about Win 7, either, but I could be convinced.

The latest version of the Cray computer (XE6) uses lots of AMD Opterons, so someone believes in AMD. I've never had any trouble with them and I currently have two; an Athlon 64 and an Phenom 2.

You might also like to consider this one:-
http://www.cray.com/Products/CX/Systems.aspx

Whatever else you do, I suggest a bit of research.
Good Luck

 

[Entropy]

If you have some time on your hands and you really want a supercomputer then you could have a go at this.

http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/cluster/?p

 

[beowulf]

Just imagine xHamster running on that!

 

[metimmee]

Have a good long look at the STATA website and study its requirements; it might be worth asking them for practical advice. For what I saw, it does not require acres of RAM.

The problem, as I see it, with a quad-core CPU is the operating system's ability to use more than two cores to do the difficult sums. I doubt that the 64-bit XP (a vital part, I feel) could handle more than two, and I'm not sure about Win 7, either, but I could be convinced.

The latest version of the Cray computer (XE6) uses lots of AMD Opterons, so someone believes in AMD. I've never had any trouble with them and I currently have two; an Athlon 64 and an Phenom 2.

You might also like to consider this one:-
http://www.cray.com/Products/CX/Systems.aspx

Whatever else you do, I suggest a bit of research.
Good Luck

I did some testing of software we'd written on a quad core Intel running on XP pro, worked a treat with all cores playing nicely together. If I remember correctly, Win2K does not have the extensions to manage multiple cores. Win7 certainly can manage multiple cores or processors.

 

[Stevienics]

The main consideration, on balance, was driven by a bang per buck budget x-referenced against my own rank ignorance of "invisible hydraulics". This being the case, we have the following:

• Bundled ECS G31T-M7 Mobo with dual core celeron processor plus 1Gb memory (discarded)(£107)
• Samsung 1Tb SpinPoint F3 Desktop Class HD103SJ Hard Drive (£44.70)
• Kingston 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 RAM (£65.50)
• Casecom 350W PSU 12Cm fan PSU (£14)
• CD 22x rewriter (£12)
• My old MSI case, speaker (broken, as it happens) and Graphics card (MSI FX5200-TD128).
• Windows 7 ultimate Op System (£90)

Done the bench test on the installed Mobo, just waiting for the new PSU and lets see what this thing does. Let you know

...........its an adventure, and for sure I am learning a hell of a lot.