hardware thoughts

wilholt
Posts: 18
Joined: Thu Aug 11, 2016 5:47 am

hardware thoughts

Postby wilholt » Tue Aug 23, 2016 10:03 pm

Hi all,
I have been running amahi for a few weeks now - started out on a dual core AMD x2 5000+ with 4gig ram which worked well. I wanted more power for my son to run a minecraft server, so after a few days I upgraded to a core2duo e6600 powered system with 8gig of ram, the max this board can carry.

It has been ok, but I cant help but thinking I should move some pc's around and put some other hardware into use.

I have sitting here in my cupboard an AMD AM3+ motherboard and FX-8120 cpu with 16gig of ram. I also have a kids gaming machine with an AMD a10-7860k, 8gig of DDR3 ram and HD 7850 gpu. the AMD a10-7860 was intended to go into a HTPC build, but it hasnt worked out that way, and instead I will probably end up building a system with an onboard hvec decoder. The a10-7860 also tends to get its fair share of blender work (as my son does a heap of rendering).
Note: I have a separate i5 r9-290 gaming machine, and my wife and kids and I all have laptops, so other than rendering/mild gaming the a10 doesnt see too much use. I also have some other parts lying around like a GTX250 and HD5450 gpu.

The way I see it, there is three ways I could go with this:

Option 1:
Keep things the way they are, but build a system with the AMD FX8120 and put the HD7850 from the a10-7860 into it to use as a blender rig.
Pros - not many changes, easiest to implement.
Cons - no benefit to the amahi/minecraft server.

Option 2:
replace core2duo amahi server with the FX-8120 cpu/ram. Use the HD5450 gpu in it as it is very low power gpu (17w)
Pros- powerful server hardware
Cons- FX8120 cpu high power usage, so server power usage doubles. No increase in blender/rendering power.

Option 3:
Replace core2duo amahi server with a10-7860k. replace a10-7860k with fx-8120.
PRO: lower power usage on server (45w cpu/gpu), increase server threads to 4, faster single core performance compared to e6600.
Con: have to do a lot of moving components/systems.

Any other options anyone comes up with would be good too!

Available parts to play with:

CPU/MB/RAM combos
AMD a10-7860k / 8gig ddr3-2400 - with windows 10 licence.
AMD fx-8120 / 16gig ddr3-1600 - with windows 7 licence.
AMD Athlon x2 5000+ with 4gig ddr2
intel Core2Duo e6600 with 8gig ddr2 - with windows 7 licence

GPU's
AMD HD 7850 2gig
Nvidia GTX250 1gig
AMD HD 5450 silent 1gig
Note: core2 duo and a10-7860k have built in gpu if being used for server duty.

Over to you guys - what would you do?

End state:
Server that can run minecraft / amahi
PC that can render with blender/photoshop/lightroom and play some games
Small utility pc that can play some light games / web games
PC to drive a projector for video and powerpoint at 1024x768.

one final question if anyone is reading still: does fedora / amahi benefit in any way from the AMD HSA / OpenCL on kaveri?

wilholt
Posts: 18
Joined: Thu Aug 11, 2016 5:47 am

Re: hardware thoughts

Postby wilholt » Fri Aug 26, 2016 5:44 am

So I ended up getting old of a second hand i3-3220 with 8gig ram - in the process of putting amahi onto that.

The amd 8120 w/ hd7850 is now the blender rig,
with the a10-7860k reverting back to its inbuild GPU.

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