Anyone Running Dual i7s?

[threekgtman]

Hello All,

I am in the business of video editing and special effects. I do a lot of rendering which is why I need a high powered processor. I was looking to buy a server motherboard and run dual i7s. Has anyone done this (Im sure they have) ? I plan on running Vista 64 on it. Are there any problems I should be aware of when running two processors or a server motherboard? Thanks for all/any of your help guys!

 

[wuzy]

Dual LGA1336 use Xeon w55xx series. They are compatible with motherboards made for i7 (with X58), but has multiprocessor support and support for ECC RAM.
To have multiprocessor support they use chipset different from X58 which only supports one LGA1336.

Supermicro motherboards for dual LGA1336 is a place to start.

 

[cjl]

Make sure you get the Xeon 5500 series, not the i7. The i7 does not support multiprocessor setups.

 

[threekgtman]

Thanks for both of your help. Would two Xeon 5500 be better than one i7 in terms of being able to make more calculations? I would assume they would be better...thanks again for your help.

 

[MU_Engineer]

Thanks for both of your help. Would two Xeon 5500 be better than one i7 in terms of being able to make more calculations? I would assume they would be better...thanks again for your help.

It depends on your program. Two Xeons are faster than one i7 if your program has more than four threads since two Xeons give you eight processing cores versus the Core i7's four. However, a Xeon 55xx of the same price as a Core i7 is going to have a significantly lower clock speed and thus not be able to run single-threaded applications as quickly. Since only one core is running, the extra four cores in the other Xeon 55xx are of no help. Basically, go for the Core i7 if you are running programs with four or fewer threads and dual Xeon 55xx if you are running programs with more than four threads.

 

[threekgtman]

Thanks, I greatly greatly appreciate your answer!