Manipulators
I think it’s now obvious that AMD’s now the best way to go CPU-wise for single-CPU boxes, and the most promising chipset looks to be nVidia’s.
Asus looks to be the first with a good SLI motherboard, and I really like the extra PCI-E slots, but I haven’t seen anything on how well non-games may use SLI.
I wish there was an nForce 4 Ultra Shuttle or other SFF… ’specially with SLI. Of course having only 2 RAM slots keeps most SFF systems from being perfect VFX workstations.
Not quite positive which is the best way to go for a dual CPU workstation, as soon as there are PCI-E AMD duals available it’ll be obvious, and even until then they’re still probably ahead because of the price advantage… plus the great advantage of the extra RAM slots the dual Opterons have. Now that’s a real workstation: 8GB RAM! Only thing is you have to be using XP64 to use the extra slots at all (and to access >4GB). I wonder how big the performance penalty is from having both CPUs have to rely on the first one’s memory controller in the meantime…?
Opterons are Lightwave render-slayers. I want some. Gimme!