[clug] Which to go for?

[Ben Nizette]

On 16/01/2010, at 8:22 PM, Andrew Janke wrote:

>>> 
>>> Nothing can beat a core i7 920 at the moment for bang for your buck.
>>> An i7 is essentially 8 cores in a single cpu with hyperthreading.
>> 
>> Hmm.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i7_microprocessors#.22Bloomfield.22_.2845_nm.29
>> 
>> That's about $307.826 AUD and market price is ~$350.
>> 
>> Also, how about the Mobo then? Thanks.
> 
> I use Core i7 920's (overclocked to 3.0Ghz with the stock cooler) on
> MSI motherboards with 6GB of DDR3 RAM with a OCZ Vertex 30GB SSD for
> cheap linux clustering work.

This is another point: I was thinking of going SSD but for my workload I'm glad I didn't.  Going from HDD to ramdisk only got me ~10% gains so I imagine SSD would be somewhere in the middle, for me, not worth the extra $$.  This seems odd to me as I'd have picked big project compilation as being a particularly IO-heavy workload but clearly it's not.

So who's got an SSD, what's your workload and what kind of performance gains do you see?  Does anyone have a good home/office/workstation use case for SSDs or is it more limited to, I donno, big databases or large media streaming servers or something?

	--Ben.