Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 07:09:24 11/02/99
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On November 02, 1999 at 09:55:02, Enrique Irazoqui wrote: >All this thing about Tiger-Crafty and Junior-Crafty gives me an excellent >pretext to get a machine with 2 or 4 processors. Problem: 2 or 4? Given the >difference in price, is it really worth it to get Pentiums instead of Celerons? >Is it true that the PIII-600 is unreliable? How much ram? 256Mb x 2 or x 4? :( > >One more thing: I guess I will need NT. Will CB programs, CP and Shredder 4 run >well in NT? > >Thanks, Enrique First, you are correct. NT is the only choice. Second, quads are pricey, and they _must_ be PIII/xeons, which are currently selling for about $1,000 per _chip_. To buy a quad box, expect to spend about $12,000 US bucks. A good dual Celeron can be put together for under $1,000 US, wo that might well be the right way to go, from a reasonable price point of view. The nice thing about a 'dual' is that you can play engine vs engine, ponder=on, and not have any funny stuff going on. There is one caveat: duals have poor memory bandwidth. It is possible that the two programs _can_ interfere with each other to an extent, if one is very small and one is very large. The large one can suck up most of the memory bandwidth and slow down the small one that usually almost fits into cache except for hash stuff. I think that in another 2-3 years quads will be 'down' in price. Right now they are the cream of the crop for server applications, and the prices are being held unreasonably high as a result. IE the PIII xeon doesn't cost much more to build than the newer PIII's (coppermine). Supply and demand still works, it seems. :)
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