New machine buy
 

Hello all,

I am thinking to buy a new machine for cfd and i would like your opinion regarding hardware. I found these three machines on ebay, (Please note that i am based in europe and i cannot buy from US as this will add tremendous customs costs), and i would like your opinion on them.

The first one is an hp with 8 hex core Xeons and 96GB of ram. The processors run at 2.26GHz but they have a turbo boost mode at 2.8. So here we have a total of 48 cores and 96GB of RAM the processor number is L5640

The second is again an hp but with 8 quad core Xeons(model number X5560) at 2.8 GHz with 192GB of RAM so here we have 32 cores.

The third one is a Dell Blade Enclosure with 10x 1950 blade servers. Each blade has 2 quad core Xeons(E5345) and 16GB of RAM. So in total we have 80 cores and 160GB of RAM.

I was thinking to buy the Dell enclosure because it has the most cores but the hp's processor are newer and might be more efficient especially the hex cores. Which of the three do you think it will perform better..?

Actually in about 6-8 months i will probably buy one more machine in order to make a small cluster.

Here are the links...

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Dell-Power...item1c2a7b57ed

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HP-SL2x170...item1c3b5d3374

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HP-Prolian...item1c3b5d3536

Thank you in advance

That first machine (the Dell) is an antique. It'd be better for heating your home than running CFD simulations.

Between the other two, the L5640 has faster RAM, more cores, and is one generation newer than the X5560. If you don't need the extra RAM in the X5560 then the L5640 will probably be faster.

Hello Jon,

I would be more than happy to see your second hand hardware....!