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Budget Systems for GnuBG

Posted By: Michael Petch
Date: Tuesday, 9 June 2009, at 3:50 a.m.

Recently I ran into Neil Kaz. on a free site, and he was curious about how I was producing fast 2ply cube/checker play after matches were complete. An interesting discussion occurred among a variety of people.

Last year I put together a middle of the road server system with 2 Quad Core processors running at 2.83ghz on a 1333mhz FSB. I needed a new server for my business (not related to Gnubg) but I also knew that GnuBG would be considerable faster.

I'm a geek who learned his lesson long ago that your generally further ahead by buying middle of the road equipment that has been on the market for some time. You generally pay the premium for the latest and greatest. For me, I temper the thirst for speed with my pocketbook. I could buy the latest and greatest, but I'd rather spend the saved money on other things.

During the discussion Neil Kaz. asked where he could buy a system that would run GnuBG. Neil wanted a system he didn't have to build himself and should pretty mich work out of the box.

Dell has such systems. I do not work for Dell, nor do I have stock in the company (outside of mutual funds). I present this information as a starting point for those who might want to build their own, or buy a complete system. Dell sells server systems, and Desktop systems. I originally pointed Neil at server (tower) systems but there are Desktop systems that will support 2 Quad processor systems (Tital of 8 cores).

One such system is at http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=us&cs=04SP1&l=en&m_11=VB31E&oc=bwdwhap&s=bsd

If you configure this system with 4gb of Ram, and 2 - 2.83ghz Quad core processors you can get a complete system (including Windows Vista Ultimate, and 19" Monitor) that has a price point under $4000USD. 2.83ghz is middle of the road. You can go upto 3.33ghz (Each core will run that much faster) but you pay a price for each speed increase. You can save money with slower processors. Each processor has to be of the same speed/cache size (The Dell site will tell you if you mismatched a processor).

The spec for a functioning system with this configuration is $3782USD:

Quad Core Intel® Xeon® Processor E5440 (2.83GHz,2X6M L2,1333) Genuine Windows Vista® Ultimate Service Pack 1, with media, 32, ENG Quad Core Intel® Xeon® Processor E5440 (2.83GHz,2X6M L2,1333) 3 Year Limited Hardware Warranty with Next Business Day On-Site Service 256MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX570, Dual Monitor DVI Capable Mini-Tower Chassis Configuration 4GB, DDR2 SDRAM FBD Memory, 667MHz, ECC (4 DIMMS) 16X DVD+/-RW w/ Cyberlink PowerDVD™ and Roxio Creator™ Dell Ed C1 All SATA drives, Non-RAID, 1 drive total configuration 250GB SATA 3.0Gb/s,7200 RPM Hard Drive with 8MB DataBurst Cache™ Dell 19 inch™ E1909W Widescreen Flat Panel Resource DVD - Contains Diagnostics and Drivers No Speaker option USB Entry Quietkey, No Hot Keys New Dell USB Optical Mouse with scroll, All Black Design No Floppy Drive My Services & Warranties No Onsite System Setup Also Included Windows Vista™ Ultimate

The other option is to start with a unit above with a single processor (rather than two), and buy a second processor at a later date. This would save you $1200. You could take the specs of such a system to a local computer geek who may be able to build something similar for less.

Like anything when you buy a system a year from you'll be able to buy systems with more cores and better processors. You can keep holding off and keep waiting and waiting. I know that a system with these specs has kept me happy for 9 months, and should last my business at least another 5 years.

Please note: If you run Snowie with this system above it will only be as fast as approximately one core running at 2.83ghz. The best option for Snowie users (until/if there is an Upgrade) is to buy systems as fast as you can get them (overclockign can help) but thats beyond the cope of this post.

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