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Who does a good job building custom PC's in Melbourne

Started by David_c, August 26, 2015, 10:11:18 AM

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David_c

Hi,

After 5 years my PC - which was a nice box in 2010 with dual Intel Xeon CPU's (quad core), 8GB RAM, 500GB HD etc - needs replacing. I'm putting together the spec which will be a twin-CPU again (maybe 4 CPU's if the motherboards and CPU's are cheap enough), 6 or 8 cores, load of RAM and so on.

Could anyone recommend a good place in Melbourne to get this system built? TECS did custom builds for me previously but they've had some personnel changes. Don't know how they are with custom builds now.

Thanks

David

AusTerror

PC Case Gear is the best place to go.

There is no need to go dual socket these days.  There are plenty of multi core CPUs available.  However, when I have needed to build high performance workstations previously, for the ultra high end, I had to order from overseas.  No one in Australia stocks that sort of stuff without adding a few zeros to the end of the price.

AMD is the cheapest and best way to get more cores than you need.  However, GPU cores are more useful these days.  I do a lot of photo editing and my software uses the GPU for a bunch of tasks.  Having 24 CPUs is for sure faster than 8 or 12, but there is a big cost and power usage difference.

I'd go with some hardware that has a 5 year warranty and not worry about dual or quad sockets.

When I was working at 2k Australia, we never had xeons on the desks, or Quadro cards.  Too expensive and in most cases slower.

David_c

Just responding to AusTerror's points.

I've spent a lot of time doing software performance work on modern architectures in single multi-CPU boxes and clusters.

a/ For a number of reasons, parallelisation performance on multiple CPU's is different to performance on multiple cores. Hence my interest in having a multi-CPU box.

b/ There are a number of local customised PC suppliers who will build systems with multiple CPU's. TECS have done a nice job working with me to establish the system specification. But I did find a number of other local companies that will do this work.

c/ Can't comment re AMD as I haven't used their kit. I use the Intel performance analysis suite so I'm cautious about possible incompatibilities between tools and CPU. The Intel tools provide analytic granularity down to counting number of executions of a particular instruction.

d/ GPU's can be useful if you have an application - massively parallel with relatively small amounts of state and data per thread is a good start - that matches GPU characteristics. I'd recommend careful consideration of application characteristics and system price when considering GPU's vs multi-CPU, multi-core Intel systems.

e/ The number of CPU's and/or cores that can be usefully deployed for an application will depend heavily on how well the application can be parallelised. This in turn will depend on the nature of the computation, memory available, data size and so on. If the application is built serial then no amount of extra CPU's will help it run faster. This might sound self-evident but many sites aren't familiar with parallelisation as they've been relying on increased clock-speed for extra performance. Now that's slowed down parallelisation is becoming more relevant.

f/ Whether an application will run better on Xeon's etc is dependent on the nature of the application, how it's been built and how much optimisation has been done. In my experience there is often opportunity to improve software performance by a well-organised software performance process. Sometimes by orders of magnitude.

AusTerror

If you know exactly what you need, which you seem to, why not build it yourself?

6 core 12 thread Xeons are cheap on ebay.  A mainboard is not too hard to find and then you just choose the amount of RAM you want. 

I bet you could use the same case and PSU you currently have and just replace mainboard, CPU and RAM.