computer upgrade time.

It takes 7 hours to PAR for a V6000 at 83% utilization (28,400 slices). Bill

I've been thinking about using a Zalman Reserator fanless watar cooling kit when I upgrade my machine to an Athlon 64 X2 4400+ (dual core 2.2 GHz), but I haven't tried it yet so I can't personally confirm the claims.

I've been happy with Zalman's other products, though. I'm using their CNPS7000B-Cu heatsink/fan on a Athlon 64 3500+, and it does a great job of keeping the temperature down without much noise.

But the X2 uses a lot more power (up to 105W, IIRC), and I suspect that the Reserator will be able to keep it cooler than the CNPS7000B-Cu would.

Zalman recommends distilled water for the Reserator. I wonder whether it's a good idea to add something to inhibit growth of microorganisms, like a tiny amount of bleach? If the thing is working properly, the water won't get hot enough to kill all the critters.

Eric

"Eric Smith" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news: snipped-for-privacy@ruckus.brouhaha.com...

Use alcohol. NOO. It would be a waste!! ;-)

Regards Falk

I've just upgraded to a 3GHz Prescott Pentium 4 system. Prior to this I'd used dual-processor systems, but the hyperthreading feature seems to let me run small stuff painlessly while a simulation or route is running. And speed is good, too.

Sad to say, it doesn't meet your "no space heater" criterion. The Prescott CPUs run very, very hot.

Bob Perlman Cambrian Design Works

Car anti-freeze?

John

Howdy Ray and Bill,

Config: 3.2 GHz P4, XP Pro, Dell PWS360, 2 GB RAM. Files stored out on a network drive.

Results: It takes 3 hours for timing driving MAP + PAR to spit out an LX25 (10.8k slices) design at 91% LUT utilization, using 6.3.3i. 7.1i takes noticably longer if global optimization is turned on.

According to

Have fun,

Marc

The new Opterons actually have relatively low power dissipation requirements. You may want to consider 2 of the Opteron 252s (single core 90nm devices) as they have fastest clock speed and lowest power consumption requirements.

Here are some benchmarks of the new Opterons:

Daniel Lang

Hi Ray,

I personally use an Athlon XP 3200 with 2GB and plain old parallel IDE disks

- I don't think that RAID performance helps me with P&R that much. Mind you, so far I've worked on designs up to the 20K1500E and the 2S60 - I guess I'd need a bit more when designing for something bigger.

Take a look at http://

Alienware PCs are fast and reliable, and even though they're designed for gamers, they should do a good job running Modelsim and PAR as well. Also, I must say that they have sublime taste in casing - which after all does matter since you'll be seeing that thing under your desk for the next few years.

As to the OS - it's completely up to you. I'm a Linux fan, and the whole Altera kit runs at the same speed under Linux as under W2K, with Modelsim running around 10% faster than under Windows. SOPC Builder is faster by a (subjective) factor 2 under Linux.

I haven't tried webpack under Linux yet - so much to do, so little time...

Just my $.02

Best regards,

Ben

Hi Ray,

I use the following heatsinks:

I use this on a 3.x GHz P4 dual system, and they work great. I got a super quiet $5 fan with it, and no problems.

I use this case:

and it comes with two very very quiet fans. The biggest feature of it is the way the disk drives mount and are easily removeable. It comes with a four carrier drive bay that allows access out the side. You may not like the neon blue lights, or the clear sides, but ignore them...it's a really nice case. Has front USB ports as well.

I also use this power supply:

which is sufficiently quiet.

As far as motherboard and memory goes, well, they really don't make much noise, so I believe any of your liking that fit this case will do, and I'd also recommend one that has at least a PCI-Express 16x video slot, if not also a 4x and a few PCI slots.

Regards,

Austin

I am well impressed with the Athlons we run. I am looking at the new X2s when they really become available in a couple of weeks. For a single thread type application like most of the current tools the Athlon FX55 would probably do slightly better but having something in reserve on a dual is great to have. The Intel equivalents in the main run hotter and need louder, or more sophisticated, cooling. In a couple of years I expect software to make better use of dual processors given the number of single chip dual cores coming into the mainstream market.

I would suspect your disk drives are a good part of your noise. Our RAID arrays make a reasonable racket. If you move to IDE arrays your will probably suffer some performance drop but you should be able to find some less noisy disk drives to take your noise down.

If your monitors are CRT then go LCD. CRTs would probably contribute a several hundred watts to your room heating our CRT pairs certainly do. We are also run LCD pairs and these are very impressive and all new monitors we buy will be LCD.

If you run XP and are really desperate consider running a remote desktop. Put the noise powerful machine in a suitably remote place and use a second low power, low noise, machine as your display machine. You can do similar things with Linux etc too but I am no expect on their implementations and limitations of running remote shells. Other practical things we do is to use full tower cases and put them under desks or behind noise baffles. Does not get rid of the heat but the perceived noise goes down.

John Adair Enterpoint Ltd. - Home of Broaddown2. The Ultimate Spartan3 Development Board.

Hmm, water cooling might let me put a radiator in another room.

I'll second that. In fact, I neglected to mention in my other post that the system that I described is nowhere near me. It's in the server room and I control it via XP's Remote Desktop. In fact, I have three Remote Desktop sessions open to different Windows XP boxes doing FPGA builds this very moment. Screen refresh is as if you were sitting in front of the machine - good enough to use Model Sim. Standard VNC doesn't even come close, especially when connecting from home via VPN.

Has anyone done any ISE runtime comparisons between Linux and Windows on similar or identical machines?

Marc

Performance and not sounding like a vaccume cleaner are going to be exclusive, you can't do both.

However, a suggestion: Make sure the computer has DVI output, run a

The other option, as mentioned, is remote desktop. But (big but), putting graphics through the net frankly, uhh, blows.

In terms of architecture, a dual processor Athlon 64 would probably be better than the dual processor P4: The AMDs have lower memory latency, and the dual processor system will have 2x the memory bandwidth of a

One other option would be a small form factor Shuttle system. It won't be as good on P&R as its only single processor, but it will be quite WHEN you aren't doing P&R.

Nah. Use water-wetter.

It's an anticorrosion agent without the ethylene glycol:

Actually, you can just have the radioator on the case. Since the radiator is significantly larger, you can use a much bigger, slower, high volume but low speed fan which is generally quieter.

I forgot abotu water cooling in my earlier post. Yeah, if you want quiet and power, you're gonna have to water cool it and probably either build it yourself or pay throguh the nose for a L337 WA73R C00L3D N1NJA GAM1NG RIG.

Dual core chips are the latest 'hot thing', so you might want to track that, and decide if they are mature enough to move to, or wait a few months. ie right now, with both 64 bit and Dual core as recent crests, is not an ideal time to expect rock solid systems. If you do not HAVE to move asap, I'd wait a few months. AMD do claim to be on schedule for 65nm in 2006 :)

-jg

My present FPGA dev "system" is a Dell P4 2GHz laptop (512 MB RAM) with a crummy 5400 rpm drive. A 60% utilized XC2V1000 with incremental P&R takes about 3-4 minutes. While par.exe is running, nothing else works unless I reduce par's priority to "Below Normal".

I will be getting a new one in a week or so, which has an AMD Athlon64

My home computer is an Athlon64 3000 (Winchester core), 1GB RAM. The idle CPU temp is between 38 and 40 degrees, depending on the ambient temp. On-load temp is 44-46 degrees. I use an inexpensive heatsink with this CPU, and there's no problem. There are many fans (front fans included), but I use SpeedFan to adjust their speed automatically. I dont know how true this is, but I have heard that using an Al. chassis will tend to keep your box cooler. Here is a link to one such (pricey) chassis:

-Jim

Just bought a 3.6 G P4 system. My supplier provides a 'hush kit' - a very large fan on the cpu, a big extractor fan for the case, and lots of adhesive/lead stuff stuck on panels to stop them resonating. The cleverest thing is a big inlet and duct on the case side - this ensures that the incoming air is directed to the right place on the motherboard etc. Serial ATA 7200 Maxtors are reasonably quiet - at least they don't have that annoying whine. The overall result is an acceptable 'white' noise (at a cost of 50 pounds). The next step would be to change the fan on the graphics card ...

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Avoid WaterCooling, it needs a lot of work. I think you are a professionist, so you can't loose time to work on your water cooling system. It needs really lot of time and experiments to configure and tune up a good system. It needs V3 radiators, a cpu waterblock, a chipset waterblock, gpu waterblock, hard disk waterblock, a very good pump, or 2-3 pumps, Kilometers of tubing, a reservoir, distilled water and anticorrosion kit.

Tubes must be used with series or parallel.

And you could use peltier to cool your cpu, but in this way you need also a dedicated power supply.

I have used it when studying at university: lots of troubles... even if my processor was overclocked from 1700+ to 2200+ with peltier cooling.

I was obliged to open case 1 time at month to tupe up system... too much time...

Instead I suggest:

Thermalright XP-120 for CPU with a quiet 120x120 fan or XP-90

and some fans into case with a system to regulate the amount of volts, Sunbeam Rheobus Kit, tipically a range from 5v to 12v, so you could decide the amount of noise.

Use those fans to send air out of case, don't use them to send air into case. In this way you can avoid that hot air runs inside case without going out.

I can also suggest some sites where you can obtain informations:

PS: sorry for my terrible english.

Marco