ATI x850 PCIe - Anyone used this?

[Faladarea]

I am looking to upgrade my computer and I am pretty solid on the following:

P5GD2 Deluxe (http://usa.asus.com/products/mb/socket775/p5gd2-d/overview.htm) (Going to put the P4 3.6 and clock it up to 4GHz).

ATI x850 (http://www.ati.com/products/radeonx850/specs.html)

Going to slap 4GB RAM in this and setup 4 300GB drives in a RAID 5 array for 900GB online storage.

This machine is for mainly:

EQ2 (http://everquest2.station.sony.com/#home)
Lightwave (http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/product/index.html)
Beowulf (http://www.beowulf.org/) Test bed using 6 VMWare (http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop/ws_features.html) RH9 (http://download.fedoralegacy.org/) sessions (for Parallel SW dev testing).

My question is if anyone has any experience with the x850. Curious as to what folks think about this card.

[DocBobo]

*cough* There's nothing bad to say about this setup.
I highly doubt you will find anyone who already uses a x850, since they are quite new and even more rare to find.

I own an AGP x800 XT, and all I can say is: these cards are damn fast.

Do you plan to buy the x850 pro or xt version? According to the specs I could find the x800 xt is faster than the x850 pro because it has more pipelines (pro: 12, xt: 16)

[Faladarea]

I will be going for the 16 version. I know the card is new - Just released this month I think. I am seeing the 12 pipeline going for about $500 and the 16 for about $800 in general.

Supposedly ATI is attempting to increase availability on this card based on the bad rap they got for limited availability of the x800 when it came out.

[Chewbenator]

Ogle, so many features it makes my old computer look like toothpaste. And thats just the video card. I don't think you can go wrong with this one, especially if you are going with the 16x, very nice.

[Tinnax]

Not related to the card, but if you are going to get 4 sata drives, why not raid 5 them? Sure, less space, but shouldn't it be faster? Or is the problem that you can't do the dual boot thing on raided drives?

[Faladarea]

Actually I intend to do SATA for the raid. And not the onboard SATA controller on the ASUS board as it uses a software recovery tool but rather a dedicated HW controller for this.

4 300GB drives in a RAID 5 array for 900GB online storage

Dual boot is not an issue. The RH9 nodes run in VMs. Basically the configuration is 4 slave VM nodes and a single master node.

It will bridge off of the master into my network (having the master node dual homed) and an isolated V-network between the nodes and the master.

[GorBash]

You may have already read this review, but just in case here it is.

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041215/index.html

Here's a comparison run against other PCI-E cards.

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041222/index.html

Your planned setup looks nice, I hope you enjoy your new system!

[Faladarea]

Interesting that the 6800 outperforms the X850 in all of the 1600x1280 tests. I run 1280x1024 as a general rule.

I have heard nothing but horror stories about the 6800 when used with EQ2 and as such I decided to look at the 850. I know plenty of folks have had great results with the 800 so I was hoping to find someone that has actually used it with EQ2.

I also know that the 850 can be overclocked to a decent degree as well so that will help too :)

I would have considered the 800 but reaserched indicates that the PCIe implementation of that card was an early one and does not leverage the technology to the same degree as the 850 does.

[GorBash]

The 6800 appears to be causing the techs a few more trips to the coffee maker. :D It might have to do with how the cards handle the shaders in the coding. I don't know, but most of the problems are with the newer cards (6800's or XT800's) and they all use the latest vertex shader technology.

PCI-E is the upcoming way to go. The current products don't offer much more than the AGP versions, but that will change soon enough. So many choices...so little money. :D

[Mutton]

I'm interested to know how you're going to use this in a beowulf. Are we looking at just one node of a private cluster or is this a private node on a public cluster?

Also, I'm currious to know why you're going for a 2.4 platform over a 2.6.

[Faladarea]

Lets go back to what I posted in my first post here:

Beowulf (http://www.beowulf.org/) Test bed using 6 VMWare (http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop/ws_features.html) RH9 (http://download.fedoralegacy.org/) sessions (for Parallel SW dev testing).

I have bold faced the purpose of this system for you. Its purely for doing parallel S/W dev. 6 virtual Linux machines running on one box. They have their own private 1gb network that runs between them and the master node is dual homed into my network.

So, to answer your first question, its a private virtual cluster. I will initially run it with the Knoppix/MOSIX distro to do initial testing.
http://bofh.be/clusterknoppix/

[Mutton]

Sorry, I misunderstood you were going to use this machine to build a virtual beowulf. The way your first post was worded lead me to think it was going to be part of an acual beowulf. Sounds like a fun project, I hope it's successful for you.

Yet it does occur to me that for about the same cost you could easily pick-up 6 PIII's, there-by eliminating any problems introduced by VM-ware (aka a more stable testbed) and atleast double if not triple the processing power of your cluster and you wouldn't be hard cap'd at 4GB shared between 7 virtual machines. But then I suppose you wouldn't have a high-end win-tendo.

As for your question about the Video card, I read alot of gripes people have with the way the closed ATi driver set handles Enchanced AGP in Xorg. But if your not doing anything graphical outside of windows or have a more ATi supported xwindow system then it really doesn't matter.
//edit
oh wait you're going to be doing all your 3d work in Windows. nm...

[Faladarea]

For the parallel dev tasks, the 6 VMs should work good (I hope). I am not running any X on any of them so memory will not be an issue.

Yet it does occur to me that for about the same cost you could easily pick-up 6 PIII's,

The logistics of having more machines in my cramped home office as well as the cooling issues preclude me going that route.

[ravaa]

ew...why redhat? Why not something with real package management like debian/ubuntu, gentoo, or (better yet) freebsd? :D

[Faladarea]

Well I am actually going to try to go with the knoppix I listed above - if that dont fly I will go to debian.

Personally, I would be pure Linux if not for the need to run Lightwave and of course EQ2 or whatever the MMO du jour might be that hooks me in. Until these platforms are available under Linux I will be running Windows. And, yes, Windows is evil (http://news.com.com/2102-1071_3-882846.html?tag=st.util.print)!

[ravaa]

I hear you more than you know Faladarea. If it wasn't for EQ2 I would be 100% FreeBSD. Have you tried running lightwave under wine?

[Faladarea]

I did indeed try it under wine. LW8 is slow running on an overclocked P4 4GHz...Wine just exaserbated that :)

[ravaa]

Ouch lol.