[clug] Which to go for?

[Ishwor Gurung]

Hi Ben,

2010/1/16 Ben Nizette <bn at niasdigital.com>:
>
> On 16/01/2010, at 6:33 PM, Adam Baxter wrote:
>
>> What would be your reason for discounting say, the i7 920?
>
> Yeah i7's where it's at.  I just got the baby i7, the 860, but it'll compile an (embedded) linux kernel in ~45 seconds and an AVR32 allmodconfig in ~5min.  A buildroot build takes about 6 minutes (which builds binutils, gcc, uClibc, gcc again (this time including C++), Linux kernel and a full, albeit basic, root filesystem's worth of tools).

That's amazing the whole build (compile+link) in 6 minutes!

> By comparison my old P4 3.6Ghz took 15 minutes to do the small kernel, 1.5 hours to do the allmodconfig and 3 hours to do the buildroot build (the non-linear scaling between the P4 and i7 comes from the kernel build not being able to fully parallelise the linking stages).
>
> These speeds are off a normal WD Black HDD, you can get another ~10% again building off a tmpfs though you'll need a good sized block of RAM to make that realistic.
>

Yeah ramdisks are generally faster and yeah i'd need to spend a bit on
ram as well.

> Regarding mobo, I've heard the one to go for for 900-series i7s is the Foxconn Flaming Blade.  For the 800 series i7 like I've got, get the Gigabyte P55A-UD3R.  Good upgrade path with USB3.0, SATA 6GB/s, good overclocking and monitoring options and plenty of everything else.  The only downside to the UD3R is that badly placed caps lead to aftermarket heatsink brackets taking a bit of plier action to sit right.

Very helpful! Thanks. But I am pretty sure I wouldn't need SLI bridge
as it'd just run off elcheapo graphics (I wouldn't do game on it).
Rest of the features are very good.

--
Regards
Ishwor Gurung
Key id:0xa98db35e
Key fingerprint:FBEF 0D69 6DE1 C72B A5A8  35FE 5A9B F3BB 4E5E 17B5