Building A High End Quadro FX Workstation

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!"

ECC Memory?

[Proc6]

Can someone tell me why ECC memory is a good idea? I don't think I can remember in all my years of computing a machine crashing due to a memory error, or a machine not crashing because ECC memory saved it. Maybe I wouldnt know if it did, but, I've always felt like ECC memory was slow, more expensive, and necessary about like UFO insurance. Personally Id rather have regular memory, that taco's the machine completely when there's a problem, so I know there's a problem, than I would ECC constantly correcting memory errors without my knowing, untill I go to leave on vacation, then the whole DIMM gives out.

I Am Not A Memory Expert though.

Re:Biased?

[sweede]

perhaps the author of the article did research and picked out the componants of the system BEFORE contacting vendors and buying them.

you dont order food or car parts without knowing what is there and what you want/need do you??

Oh, and if you also notice that the rest of the site is based on new hardware reviews and performance, you'd think that they would have good experiances with what works and what doesn't.

If you went out and researched companies or people for a project you where doing, would you not include them in a `special thanks to' section of the paper?

Re:Biased?

[vivIsel]

Welcome to the world of "hardware review" sites. Bias is their collective middle name.

Re:Easy

[sql*kitten]

1. workstation == better processors
2. gaming system == better graphic cards

Not as simple as that. A games card will trade precision for speed, because precision is less important if you are updating the scene dozens of times a second anyway. If two walls don't meet perfectly for 1/60th of a second, who will even notice? A workstation card will trade speed for precision - you cannot risk a mechanical engineer missing an improperly aligned assembly because of an artifact created by the graphics card, or worse, breaking an existing design because an artifact shows a problem that doesn't exist in the underlying model.

Re:ECC Memory?

[rtaylor]

It's subtle corruptions most people worry about. If you're doing financial transactions, you do everything you can to ensure that 4 doesn't turn into an 8 accidentally.

Re:ECC Memory?

[e8johan]

Large simulations (such as this, or car crash simulations, etc.) take days, if not weeks to run. Since the ECC ram isn't 100% slower (i.e. time of fast memory times two is more than time of ECC memory) there is no need to run it twice.

Anyhow, if the two simulations differ, you'll have to do it a third time to check if you get a match, and still you only know that you are *likely* to have gotten it right. With ECC the chance of getting it right increases.

Re:ECC Memory?

[kperrier]

Wouldn't running the tests twice be a better way to ensure this kind of thing doesn't happen?

So, if it takes 4-6 DAYS for a test to run, you want to run it again to verify the results? They don't have the time to do it again. Take this from some one who manages a 190 node Linux cluster. We use this for seismic data processing. Our processing run times are 3 to 4 days, each and there are multiple runs for each job. We have project schedules that we need to meet, and running each step in the processing schedule twice is not an option.

Depending on what you are doing, the money is better spent on the front end for quality hardware, than to double the time for a project to process the data. You could double the initial cost of the hardware, have two clusters and run the tests in parallel and compair the results. This may be the best thing to do, depending on what you are modeling/processing, but its much cheaper to invest in the quality hardware up front.

Kent

"two sticks of RAM instead of one for Redundancy"

[Zak3056]

Did anyone else see a logical disconnect between his assertation that two sticks of RAM were better than one because if one failed, the machine could still operate while they waited for a replacement stick... and yet he chose NOT to use RAID?

Even worse, his choice of drive was a single WD 80GB IDE drive? WTF? There's a reason the warranties on those things just dropped to a year!

Re:high end workstation?

[Billly Gates]

He mentioned in the article about his budget. Have you looked at the price of scsi drives? Tiny 20-gigs $400 each! Ouch.

Scsi is not faster or more reliable then ide unless its in Raid. So if your going to do scsi then you might as well buy not 1 but 4 drives for raid. That adds up. If your doing alot of i/o requests in parrallel then scsi is faster because it can offload the tasks and que them from the controller. A single app will not do this unless its a database or other server oriented application. I notice a bigger increase in performance from a faster processor but this is because I do not run a server. A workstation with lots of ram has the bottleneck in memory, cpu, and graphics card. A server on the other hand is different.

More emphasis should be on the processor and video card for any workstation purchase.

I agree with IDE-RAID if the job can not be interrupted because of a failed drive but 4 drives are expensive but still alot cheaper then scsi. Also worth mentioning is using bigger storage capacities with the ide from the amount of money saved. Keeping critical jobs is not as important as it use to be because engineers like their other white collar associates never store the finished jobs on their own drives. They rather use a network share when they are done. You would be a fool to store your work on your own drive since the file server backs it up on tape. Workstations typically run win2k today rather then unix so this means they can use NT and Novell file servers.