Building A High End Quadro FX Workstation 89
An anonymous reader writes "FiringSquad has an article detailing some of the differences between building a high-end workstation and a high-end gaming system. They go into things like ECC memory, and the difference between professional and gaming 3D cards. The Quadro FX 2000 coverage is particularly interesting -- the system with the Quadro FX 2000 was never louder than 55 dB!"
Re:ECC Memory? (Score:5, Informative)
RTFA Read The F**king Article!
"Two to twelve times each year, a bit in memory gets inappropriately flipped. This can be caused by cosmic rays flying through your RAM or a decay of the minute radioactive isotopes found in your RAM - the impurity need only be a single atom. Most of the time, this flipped bit is unimportant. Maybe it's a flipped bit in unallocated memory, or maybe it just altered the position of a pixel for a fraction of a second. If you're unlucky though, this flipped bit can alter critical data and cause your system to crash. In our situation, a flipped bit could potentially alter our results significantly."
Quoted from the second paragraph of the fourth page.
Not entirely surprising (Score:5, Informative)
But "honest-to-goodness computation" (numerical analysis,
However, most if not all of the points in this article are quite informative - did YOU know the difference between Athlon XP and MP. I thought I mostly did.
And his choice of ECC RAM - Two to twelve times each year, a bit in memory gets inappropriately flipped
We come to the video card - a hacked GeForce isn't the same thing as a Quadro - bet some of the FPS freaks might be a little surprised, but the GeForces and Radeons aren't made for this sort of stuff. No real surprise, if you think about. But, as he says, why not a FireGL? Everything comes back to the lesson of the day: know your task. And boy, he certainly does.
Anyway, enough of regurgitating some of the finer points of this great article. Read it for yourself. And don't post comments about how 1337 your Radeon 9700 Pro or Ti4800 is. Know your task.
Re:ECC Memory? (Score:5, Informative)
- If you're aiming for stability, you try to remove all such possible causes; even if Windows will crash once a week, there's no point making it worse by risking memory failure.
- Even if your machine doesn't crash, a flipped memory bit could invalidate your data results by altering a crucial figure. In some cases, it's not important, but a flipped bit at the higher range could alter a conclusion significantly and you wouldn't notice.
Depending on your target audience, the latter may be more important than the former.ISV Certification (Score:5, Informative)
If it's not ISV certified it doesn't do you much good, as for as a workstation goes.
From Ace's Hardware:
When you look at the typical price ($4000-$6000) of a workstation built by one the big OEM's you might ask yourself why you or anyone would pay such a premium for a workstation.
In fact if you take a sneak peek at the benchmarks further you will see that a high-end PC, based upon a 1400MHz Athlon, can beat these expensive beasts in several very popular workstation applications like AutoCAD (2D), Microstation.
Yes, it is possible that you are better served by a high-end PC, assembled by a good local reseller. Still, there are good reasons to consider an OEM workstation.
Most of the time, a workstation is purchased for one particular task, and sometimes to run one particular application. Compaq, Dell and Fujitsu Siemens have special partnerships with the ISV's (Independent Software Vendor) who develop the most important workstation applications. In close co-operation with these ISV's, they verify if the workstation is capable of running each application stablely and fast. In other words, you can ask the OEM whether or he and the ISV can guarantee that your favorite application runs perfectly on the OEM's workstation. ISV certification is indeed one of the most critical factors that distinguishes a workstation from a high-end desktop.
Secondly, it is harder to assemble a good workstation than a high-end PC. Typically, a PC is built for the highest price/performance. A lot of hardware with an excellent price/performance ratio comes with drivers which do not adhere strictly to certain standards such as the PCI and AGP standards. Even if this kind of hardware might comprise stability in very rare cases, it is unacceptable for a workstation.
Last but not least, workstations come with high-end SCSI harddisks and OpenGL videocards which are seldom found in high-end PC's. Workstations are shipped with ECC (Error Checking and Correction code) memory and can contain 2GB to 4GB memory. High-end PC's typically ship with non-ECC memory and are - in practice - limited to 512MB (i815 chipset) - 2GB (AMD760).
Re:Easy (Score:2, Informative)
I just cant agree with that statement - its more a 'drivers written to function better in games' than a better graphics card. The one in the article uses a Quadro FX and I know lots of other people who use a 3dlabs Wildcat series - both of those cards wipe the floor with 'gaming' cards in 3d rendering for things like cad/3d studio/maya
Re:SGI should be put out of its misery (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What Changes for a Linux Math Machine? (Score:3, Informative)
If they had higher-end NVIDIA graphics cards, they could also be very good OpenGL development/visualization stations, using Linux. Port all that SGI code with very little effort...
Biggest problem I'm still having is the system sounds like a 747 taking off and I've had official AMD CPU fans burn out on me. I would still love to get a bit more oomph out of this though if there are any suggestions.
I'd use aftermarket fans, I thought AMD's fans were cheesy (to use a technical term;). If you want a good product, I recommend the PC Power and Cooling [pcpowerandcooling.com] Athlon CPU cooler. PCP&C generally has top-quality products (great choice for power supplies as well).
You should probably start going for DVD/RAM drives also, lots more capacity for backups...
One final thought on numerics - you might want to compare some of the commercial compilers with gcc. For instance, Microway resells [microway.com] a strong line of commercial compilers. The Portland Group compilers, in particular, look promising.
Re:What Changes for a Linux Math Machine? (Score:3, Informative)
See 2CoolTek [2cooltek.com] for this gear. I've been buying from them for years and highly recommend them.
You could go with one of those Vantec fan speed adjusters (handles 4 fans) instead of variable-speed fans... might be a better choice in your case.
Perfect tower: one of the Lian-Li aluminum cases, probably an extended length model (extra 10cm of space). See NewEgg [newegg.com], etc. Actually, they've got the cooling gear too.
Re:ECC Memory? (Score:1, Informative)
I believe SRAM cells are less likely to have bits flipping than DRAM cells (but don't take my word for it). That said, AMD's Hammers will have extensive error checking for cache. L1 data cache is ECC protected, L1 Instruction cache is parity protected. The unified L2 cache fully ECC protected, including separate ECC for L2 tags. The integrated memory controller supports Chipkill ECC RAM.
Re:high end workstation? (Score:3, Informative)
A raid with 4 drives might be more usefull 4*30 = 120/MBsec which begans approaches the ATA limit in Eide. Newer drives comming out will probably hit the ata limit soon in raid and only scsi can keep up. For a single drive scsi is not worth it.
Its strength will not show unless you run very heavy i/o bound applications. I agree that SCSI is supperior. I can't picture an engineer swaping out his hard drive while rendering a scene so swapping support is important only in the server arena.
Your post just repeated mine in saying the emphasis on a workstation is not i/o bound and scsi is not worth it unless its in raid. Price is important in this day and age of shrinking IT budgets the scsi myth is being exposed. A sigle scsi drive is not that much faster or reliable then an IDE.