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Subject: Re: Building a Computer

Author: scott farrell

Date: 17:37:45 12/29/03

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On December 29, 2003 at 17:06:32, Miguel A. Ballicora wrote:

>I am considering the possibility to build a computer for chess, for my own
>program (http://www.msu.edu/~ballicor/gav).
>My program is bitboard based but still uses structures of 32 bits; however,
>going to 64 bits ints should be easy. So, it is very tempting to me to buy a 64
>bit AMD. What motherboard should I consider? what CPU? FX or not? Opteron? any
>other hint?
>
>The more options you give me the better because I have to consider the price.
>I would like to have something fast but I would not pay double to get 10%
>increase in performance, for instance.
>
>Dual would be nice, because I plan to develop an SMP engine in the future, but
>it might wait if it is too expensive.
>
>How about hard drives? any suggestion?
>
>Are any compilers that produce binaries that take advantage of the 64 bits?
>GCC? Intel?
>
>If the hardware is compatible with Linux much better because I plan to use that
>OS for other scientific programs.
>
>Thanks a lot.
>
>Miguel

maybe some people would be nice enough to benchmark your code on their machine
for you, so you can have some idea before spending $$$. Or you benchmark say the
current crafty on your current machine, and compare that to other's benchmarks.

I run a athlon 2500xp overclocked to 3200Xp with 400Mhz RAM. It is fast, damn
fast.

RAM speed _does_ make a difference, the 333mhz - 400Mhz RAM gave me about 10-15%
speedup. Bandwidth doesnt matter as much as latency. A few people would contend
all chess programs are memory latency bound - I agree.

Scott



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