I want to upgrade my current PC (Dell XP, SP 3 Core 2 Duo, 32 bit 2.4 Mhz) to a Windows 7 Quad Core 64 bit 3.2 Mhz with perhaps 8Gb or more RAM. I understand that Centrino and ? (can’t remember the name) are best for chess analysis. I’d prefer to keep the cost under US $ 3,000 but am willing to go up to $4,000.
I’ve looked at the Dell Alienware Aurora, but I don’t know whether the Intel X58 (Intel Core i7 960 3.2 GHz 8 MB cache) is right for chess analysis.
Can anyone help me find a place (probably online) to buy such a computer?
$3000 is a lot to play with. I’d recommend going with one of the boutique builders like Cyberpower or Digitalstorm or Ibuypower. For that much, you could even get a computer with the new 6 core intel i7. You could get a 2nd tier graphic card and save $200 to $300 off the price.
You wouldn’t need more than 8 gigs. Unless your doing video editing or really large photoshop files (or if your a real power user, doing virtualization), it would be difficult to get much out of more than 8 gigs of ram.
Chess engines really don’t get much out of massive amounts of ram. Its been proven that a smaller hash file and a good endgame tablebase is more efficiant than using really large hash table.
I know I could easily get the parts off of Newegg and have a local shop put it together and still come in well under $3000, although I’d be using air cooling and not a overpriced high end graphic card.
If you want liquid cooling, you’re almost forced to buy from one of the boutique builders, since it would end up costing way too much for a local shop to do it. Right now, they’re offering free upgrades to liquid cooling.
I had the same question as the previous poster. I am not a computer expert, but I have a ~$1,000 2-year-old laptop (Dell) that I purchased for engineering work. When I recently got Fritz 12, I loaded it on and used it without any problem. I can’t imagine paying hundreds (or: thousands!) for hardware upgrades in the present day-and-age of PCs, as well as the efficiency and capabilities of Fritz.
Come on…perfect 3D! This is like buying a custom carbon fiber bicycle. You may not need it, but you WANT it. I just wish I had $3,000 to spend on anything. We were flooded out last week and we’re installing a $10,000 high efficiency boiler today. There goes my discretionary fun(d). However, heat and hot water will be nice after 10 days.
Fritz or Rybka on a decent laptop these days is as strong as the Deep Blue engine that beat Kasparov 13 years ago. Very few people ever need more from their program, unless you’re looking for novelties to beat Topalov or want a 4000 blitz rating on ICC.
If your really interested in the high end chess engine market, Rybka Forums is the place to go. Although its heavily weighted toward Rybka, the forum members are really up on what makes a good chess computer.
Unless your looking at building an overpriced cluster setup, you can actually get some pretty good results from a much less expensive setup.
Also, the price of computers have dropped a lot in the last few year. My build came in at about 2 grand in 2005, but for a comparable system today (That would have double the RAM and a cheap CPU is at leasat 3 or 4 times better), for about $600.
For $2000, I could easily have a top end system thats still comes at a reasonable price.
I’m going to wait at least a year before I get a new system though. I’m hoping that the price of 4 gig ram goes down a lot. Currently it would cost me about $800 for 16 gigs of ram.
I did recently get a new graphic card though. The old one died. The new one cost 1/3 the price, and uses 1/4 the electriciy, and is about 4x faster. Although you won’t mistake it for a gaming card, I just needed one that could run 2 monitors.
I bought my computer at a garage sale five years ago for $120, monitor included. It works great, and Fritz is strong enough on it to help me improve. Anything that you get in your target price range will easily give you top-level analysis from those chess programs.
Thank you all for your helpful comments! I’m happy to hear that you think I can have an excellent chess analysis computer for $2000 or less! I’m all for that!
What I wanted essentially was a computer that would do faster analysis than mine currently does. For example, it recently took 34 hours to analyze 19 candidate moves at 19 ply. I’d love to reduce that to “overnight.” I use the ChessBase Infinite Analysis feature a lot because I’m interested in seeing both the ranking that Deep Rybka 3 (or whatever engine I’m using) gives to the candidate moves-- this includes the poorer moves that lower-rated players might play – of an opening, as well as the suggested line of play for each candidate. This information is seldom given in opening books, which usually choose only the “best” lines as analyzed by grandmasters and masters. Studying the recommended replies to the “poorer” moves gives me lots of ideas of how to take advantage of such moves. As I go through the various lines of play that the engine has come up with, I gain a much greater understanding of the tactical aspects of the opening. Of course, chess engines don’t help much in teaching a positional understanding; for that I have to look elsewhere. But then I play openings that lend themselves to tactics and depend much less on positional understanding. So I’m very happy with the lines of play that DR3 suggests.
Dell XP, SP 3 Core 2 Duo, 32 bit 2.4 Mhz desktop (I bought it two years ago)
I was just reading the thread in the Rybka Computer forum about the new Intel 6-core processor. I then took a look at the Intel website intel.com/performance/deskto … config.htm .
The Core i7 980X sounds good. Although I have been using home computers since 1980, I have always bought them from a dealer and have never built one myself, so I know next to nothing about the technical aspects. I know enough to put in a graphics or a sound card, but that’s it. Am a retired English teacher, not an engineer. So most of the discussion on the Rybka site was way over my head, but it was interesting to learn what they’re talking about.
I prefer air-cooled to water-cooled and stability to overclocking. I don’t want to have to make any modifications. KISS is my motto. (grin)
Oh, you asked why I wanted that big a system. Well, I’m not really sure what kind of system I need. I just want the chess analysis of Infinite Analysis to go a lot faster than it does now. So I’m in the process of learning what’s available. I welcome any suggestions.
I don’t know that Fritz or Rybka (the two programs mentioned so far) do the kind of multi-threaded parallel processing of chess positions that would take advantage of a quad core system, much less a six-core one.
If that’s true, then what you’re looking for is probably a faster clock rate and (possibly) more memory if that’s how it holds ply levels. (If it has to save that data on disk, that could be a major limiting factor.)
Do you have Fritz (separately) as well as ChessBase? Since at least version 9, there’s a separate Chess Benchmarking tool that can be used to measure performance. It might be helpful to run that tool and post the results. I found one small thread about that elsewhere. (In that forum, those computers were about 5 times as fast as mine. ) It’s a separate program, but can also be run in F12 from Engine->Testing->Chess Benchmark.
It surprises the stuffing out of me that ChessBase doesn’t offer up the benchmark program as a free download… In my Fritz 12 install it’s in Program Files x86 → ChessBase → ChessProgram12 as a separate exe file, 452K. (And the tech note above notes that they made it portable on purpose to be able to take it with on a flash drive to test machines before puchase… )
Thanks for the information! I ran a series of tests. Here are the results of the Fritz Chess Benchmark (version 4.2).
Dell Intel Core 2 Duo desktop, Dimension 9200 @ 2.4 GHz, 2GB RAM, 32 bit, Windows XP,SP3 Home.
Running the Fritz 12 engine in the Fritz 12 GUI –
FIRST TEST:
Logical Processors found: 2
Processors to use: 2
Relative speed: 7.12
Kilo nodes per second: 3415
SECOND TEST:
Logical Processors found: 2
Processors to use: 1 (I manually changed the 2 to 1)
Relative speed: 3.57
Kilo nodes per second: 1715
Here is the same test, but with the DEEP Fritz 11 engine in the Fritz 12 GUI.
FIRST TEST
Logical Processors found: 2
Processors to use: 2
Relative speed: 7.07
Kilo nodes per second: 3393
SECOND TEST
Logical processors found:2
Processors to use: 1 (changed manually from 2 to 1)
Relative speed: 3.58
Kilo nodes per second: 1716
I then ran the Fritz Chess Benchmark again, this time running the Deep Fritz 11 engine in the Deep Fritz 11 GUI. Here are the results.
FIRST TEST
Logical processors found: 2
Processors to use: 2
Relative speed: 7.05
Kilo nodes per second: 3383
SECOND TEST
Logical processors found: 2
Processors to use: 1 (changed manually from 2 to 1)
Relative speed: 3.57
Kilo nodes per second: 1713
I don’t have the Fritz 11 engine; it didn’t come with the Deep Rybka 3 (= Deep Fritz 11) GUI. So I can’t test it.
I then ran the Fritz Chess Benchmark again, this time running the Deep Rybka 3 engine designed for multi-core/multi-processor use in the Deep Fritz 11 GUI. Here are the results.
FIRST TEST
Logical processors found: 2
Processors to use: 2
Relative speed: 7.08
Kilo nodes per second: 3396
SECOND TEST
Logical processors found: 2
Processors to use: 1 (I again changed this manually from 2 to 1)
Relative speed: 3.57
Kilo nodes per second: 1713
I found the results of these tests rather disconcerting, since they showed no appreciable speed up for the multi-core/multi-processor engines – which means, I assume, that it is a waste of money to buy the “deep” versions of the engines. Fritz 12, an engine designed for use with a SINGLE processor, showed the best results (but not that much better) with the dual core processor. I would need to test the Deep Fritz 12 engine for a more accurate comparison, but now I wonder whether it is really worth paying over $100 to buy it just to test it out.
I indulged myself with a Dell Studio XPS from Costco online a few months ago – one of their specials that live for a brief time and then disappear. It’s got a i7 dual quad core (4 real, 8 logical) processors, 12 gig of RAM and a terrabyte of disk – a decent graphics card. Cost about a grand. Using all 8 processors in the test you mentioned (via Fritz 11), it got 20.88 relative speed with 10,020 Kilo nodes per second. Using 1 processor, it got 4.23 relative speed with 2031 Kilo nodes per second.
I normally use the deep version of Rybka under the Fritz UI. When doing a blunder check, all 8 cores are banging away via the CPU monitor gadget that you can invoke from W7 – let it run a while and you hear the fans come on.
Nice! I just customized an ideal dream system supported by Dell – Alienware Area-51 ALX with the new Intel Core i7 980X Extreme Edition processor (6 cores, 12 threads, 12 Mb cache, @3.33 MHz). Price came to $8,443. Ha! 'Course, I had added all the goodies. If I got just the i7 980X processor and the basic stuff, it would probably cost about $3000.
Although you won’t mistake it for a gaming card, I just needed one that could run 2 monitors.
) It’s a separate program, but can also be run in F12 from Engine->Testing->Chess Benchmark.
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