I haven’t switched sides, really… but four cores for AU$330 was too much to resist. 🙂
I’m doing the cascading hardware trick… But instead of buying the new top-end rig and finding something to do with the surplus gear, I found something new to do with my existing desktop and had to replace it. AMD’s 4×4 stuff looks good, but by the time I got two CPUs, a Socket F board and some new RAM I’d be in for around AU$1500 which I just can’t justify at the moment.
A colleague at work posted that the Q6600 was at his fave online store for AU$340. Not believing this could be true, I went to my fave online store — which has a shopfront just down the road — and saw it for AU$330.
Beads of sweat started to form on my upper lip… My left eyelid started to twitch uncontrollably… Well, not really, but I’m sure you know the symptoms of Shiny Mania!
So I have some Intel kit again (not counting laptops). The last Intel chip I bought was a thermonuclear 2.4GHz Pentium 4, and it’s actually running the system that will get replaced in this project. Ever since I bought my first Athlon I’ve wanted to be AMD-only, but it seems that the performance gong belongs to Intel right now. I’m confident that AMD will get it back with the next Opteron generation, and that will likely be what I replace the current Opteron server with one day. For now, I’ll console myself with building a system in an architecture called “amd64” on an Intel chip. 😉
I’ll save the details of the buildup for another set of posts (what I’m building now is the P4 replacement, not the new desktop) but I will say this: It’s Quick. And it’s got four cores.
Crossed Wires 