Dual Woodcrest stories?

[audioboffin]

I'd like to hear tales of performance and costs of building dual Woodcrest (Xeon 5100 series CPUs) based machines. So far it seems it's going to cost more to build a machine than to buy say an Apple tower with a pair of 2.66 gig Xeons (especially once I factor good low noise fans and a decent case. Especially interested to know if anyone in Australia has build a dual Woodcrest PC for use with PT LE.

Cheers

[audioboffin]

*bump* no one running dual Woodcrests in a PC with PT LE?

[FatBelly]

I can't speak for anyone, but it seems that the performance increase and price of Conroe processors have satisfied many, when it comes to LE.

As you stated the cost to build a Dual Woodcrest based system is more than buying a MacPro.

Apple must have purchased a very large quantity of Woodcrest's to be able to sell the MacPro at that
price.

What are your thoughts?

[bb_aus]

was cheeper to buid a duel xeon than buy a mac pro when i worked it out

[audioboffin]

At the moment it's looking like $1300 each + GST for the CPUs, about $800 + GST for mobo, adding RAM, hard drives etc and a case, the cost is starting to get up there. Looks like the best bang for buck with the Apple Intel quads is with the quad 2.66, for around $3600 AU and possibly upgrade to faster quad core CPUs when the price drops.. anyone else got any pricing recently?

[bb_aus]

well heres how i worked it out, these were quckly looked up price from local store, im sure you could find better.
XEON 5130 DUAL CORE 2.0GHz 2 $545.40 $1,542.00 (2.33 GHz 5140 costs $771.00)
INTEL 5000V 1 $613.50 $613.50
KINGSTON 2GB KIT (2x1GB) DDR2 Memory 1 $394.90 $789.80
System disk WD 80GB SATA 1 $76.90 $76.90
Audio disk Seagate 160GB SATA2 2 $97.80 $195.60
DVD-RW 1 $82.00 $82.00
ATI Radeon x1950XT 512MB DVI VIVO PCI-EX 1 $720.00 $720.00
XP Professional OEM 1 $234.81 $234.81
Keyboard & Mounse 1 $50.00 $50.00

Total $3,458.51 $3,909.71 for 2.33GHz both include 2 audio hard disks
mabey a bit more for a different mobo and duel layer DVD RW, but you could also go for a cheeper video card.

mac pro duel 2 GHz 2GB (4x512) ram 160GB HDD $3880, $4,379.00 for duel 2.66GHz with 2GB RAM. then add on extra for audio hard disks, possible more RAM etc, if you want it to come with an extra hard disk its upwards of $4K. apple will also slug you an extra $200 for every OS update
not the big differences there once were between mac and pc but mac is still more expencive. of course if you can get any discounts from apple, such as academic disconts it might come in at a better price.

[audioboffin]

Thanks BB_Aus

I am actually wanting to go a bit quicker than the CPUs you listed.. and the current Apple deals for around $3600 for a quad 2.66 seem fairly common. I'm not sure where you got the pricing on Apple OS updates?

I'm very interested to hear from anyone running bootcamp and XP on an Apple quad.

Cheers

[bb_aus]

sorry didny have a price for a 2.6 listed but with that level of processor i dont see alot of need to spend the extra chash. i believe most people runnign quads are running opteron 265 (1.8GHz) or 270 (2GHz). was why i was look at the 2.3Ghz processors.

mac prices i listed are what is listed on the apple store

where can you get a duel 2.6Ghz mac pro for $3600? i assume that would be teh standard config with only 1GB RAM. appart from academic pricing i dont know of anywhere that gives decent deals on mac

[audioboffin]

For me it's all about plugin grunt. I'm running the music production kit, with the number of tracks I seem to max out every machine I use, hence CPU power is important to me.. and I'm certainly looking forward to running 2 x quad cores in the future! That Apple price is from a music shop I deal with quite often, I've seen similar prices on eBay as well as other Apple shops that I walk into and ask for a price. A gig of RAM is all I need, I'm just doing audio, no virtual synths etc.

[sunburst79]

I would just like to point out that the Apple comes with a warrentee and tech support. The Updates are free via Apple's website. Operating system Upgrades seem to run 79.00 US.

Its really hard to beat the Macs price point.

Digi will fully support your Mac, They may or may not support the hardware you spec and assemble your self.

Check the compatibily documents for what's supported under the operating system your planning on running