Question About Server Computers: Can They Be Used As A Super Computer?

[Guest stereogames]

Hi. The other day I noticed something strange on ebay. A motherboard with 2 processor ports, and 8 ram slots. I was wtfing until my friend told me is was a sever motherboard. This aroused many questions! Would i be able to use this machine with 16 gb of ram, 2 quad cores, and an 8800 GTX? If so, would it even make a difference with teh extra processor? Will I even be able to use this as a regular computer?Is my under where clean? Please people, help me answer these questions, and feel free to give me anything else i should know about servers!

[Nemo]

It would certainly be an expensive way to build a "regular" computer.

 

Assuming your post is serious and you have legitimate questions, other than the state of your underwear, then you would need to provide more information about the particular board. Some, but not many, server boards do offer PCIe slots than would support an 8800GTX card, but you probably would want to look at a workstation-class board instead of a true server board. Most servers have no need for top-end graphics and often come with onboard video as eschew discrete graphics cards altogether. As for the 16GB of RAM, yes most boards with 8 DIMM slots will support that as long as you have an OS that can address that much memory space. As for supporting dual quad-core processors, that's certainly possible for newer boards, but once again depends on the particular model.

[hardnrg]

I'm going to go ahead and say no... you can't use it as a "super computer", because you don't use anything that would make use of 8 cores, probably not even more than 2 cores... based on what you have said.

[Waco]

I'm going to go ahead and say no... you can't use it as a "super computer", because you don't use anything that would make use of 8 cores, probably not even more than 2 cores... based on what you have said.

What he said.

 

For most stuff that's not written explicitly for multi-computing 8+ cores is a total waste.

[Verran]

I'm going to go ahead and say no... you can't use it as a "super computer", because you don't use anything that would make use of 8 cores, probably not even more than 2 cores... based on what you have said.

To elaborate more on nrg's comment...

 

Yes, you could build this "super computer" to the specs you described. The specific board you're looking at may or may not work, but there are boards out there that will. But the problem is that 8 cores does you no good, nor does 16GB of RAM. There are quite a few games using two cores now, and even a few using four, but none that I know of use eight, and I can't see them being developed any time soon. The number of gamers running eight cores is incredibly small, so why develop for it?

 

All in all, once you built it, you probably wouldn't see much improvement over a regular quad core system with four gigs.

[CanadaGUY]

You could run a mighty nice gaming server on that, if you wanted to though now to get yourself a T3