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!"
interesting (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:ECC Memory? (Score:3, Interesting)
Either you just haven't recognized when it happened, you don't work with any significant number of computers, or you've been INCREDIBLY lucky.
Memory isn't perfect. If your uptime is important, you need ECC.
Easy (Score:1, Interesting)
1. workstation == better processors
2. gaming system == better graphic cards
Biased? (Score:4, Interesting)
The article carefully explains the choices made. However, we find the following line at the end of it:
Special thanks to AMD, NVIDIA, TYAN, and Ryan Ku at Rage3D.com for helping me with this project.
Well, maybe they had no influence at all, but then how come that most of the chosen products match this 'special thanks' line?
Re:Easy (Score:2, Interesting)
You may like to read the article. This is a scientific visualization workstation being built with a seriously nice Quatro FX graphics card.
The author even benchmarks UT2k3 on it, and the scores are.. umm.. impressive.
What Changes for a Linux Math Machine? (Score:2, Interesting)
The information on GPU's was great, if your running in windows and doing visualizations, but most of science doesn't use Windows. They started their projects on Big Iron Unix and are now moving to linux.
Our current spec out looks like this:
2 Athlon MP 2400
Tyan Tiger MPX
We were using Thunder, but found we didn't need the onboard SCSI so moved to tiger. After the fits I've been having w/ Gigabit cards and the AMD MP chipset though I'm considering going back to the Thunder for built in gigabit.
2Gig Kingston ValueRam EEC RAM (its what tyan suggests)
120GB WD Spc. Ed. 8M cache HD
Additional Promise IDE controllers for new HD's when needed.
Generic TNT2 or Gforce2 Video. (they are just math boxes)
Plextor ide CDRW
Still looking for the prefect tower.
Extra case fans.
The CPU's have been changing over the last year or so as the MP's get faster, And we have moved from 1 to 2G of ram.
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.
Re:MP3 Playback? (Score:1, Interesting)
And as far as "Is there something magical about MP3s?," I think he's talking about standard wave output support in linux instead of enabling 5.1 surround, midi, game-port, ect. for a minimal make-the-linux-user-happy driver support.
Re:SGI should be put out of its misery (Score:2, Interesting)
"These systems were around $40,000 when first released. Each R12000 400MHz has a SpecFP2000 of around 350-360 and so it's approximately equal to an Athlon 1.2GHz. The caveat is that the SpecFP2000 benchmark is actually made up of a bunch of other, smaller, tests. For computational fluid dynamics or neural network image recognition, the 400MHz SGI CPU is 2.5 to 5 times faster than the Athlon!"
WOW! 2.5 times faster than a 1.2Ghz Athlon!? Man, you'd almost need a $168 2.4 Ghz Athlon [pricewatch.com] to keep up! I wish they made them!
P.S. The 3.06 Ghz P4 is just under 1000 on the SpecFP benchmark [specbench.org].
Lets see, the last generation that we have SPEC numbers on for SGI is the 600Mhz R14K. It clocks in at 529 PeakFP compared to 656 Peak FP for the 2.4 GHz MP that was used in the benchmark. That's about a 20% difference in Speed. The original CPU's that he was dealing with, the R12K 400 and the 1.2 K7 are 407 and 352 respectively. That actually gives the SGI a lead by about 15%. Now if the 2.5x increase in an application holds true, I'd say the SGI is still a good deal if you can afford it. Now granted I don't have $40,000 to spend on a workstation, but there are plenty of companies who are willing to spend the extra $30,000 once to get double the performance out of their $60,000 a year engineers for the next two or three years. Also, as is pointed out in the article, the P4 is insanely optimized for SPEC. It's numbers have no real meaning to most realworld applications. If you want to get right down to it, SGI can give you 512 CPU's run through a single Infinite Reality module. No one would actually do this, but it's nice to dream about it once in a while
Re:What Changes for a Linux Math Machine? (Score:1, Interesting)
Fortran 90 is still the main scientific programming langauge (along with c and matlab). Intel make a very good P4/Xeon compiler. Be interesting to compare it to say NAGs comiler or the Portland Group one that runs on my office machine on both Intel and AMD.
With matlab it depends on what you are doing (FPvsINT and memory bandwidth again)
high end workstation? (Score:3, Interesting)
Western Digital 80GB Caviar with 8MB Cache
Why would you use a single IDE HD when you have SCSI built in the motherboard? In my experience storage upgrades always provided tremendous speed improvements. Disk access is always a big bottleneck. If your going to have a "high-end" workstation, you need at least SCSI, preferably SCSI RAID. If you want to go barebones, at least have IDE-RAID with a really good backup plan.
And WTF do Quake 3 benchmarks have to do with a workstation?
Re:"two sticks of RAM instead of one for Redundanc (Score:3, Interesting)
Also many scsi drives are less reliable then ides. Hu?? This is because scsi drives typically spin at higher revolutions so they tend to fail more. Higher capacity drives are more prone to defectives and data corruption. The lower capacities typically are more reliable. Ask any admin how often they replace scsi drives on various raids? The fastest and biggest ones from what I read here on slashdot fail every 2-6 months! Quantums I heard fail on a weekly basis on some of the more questionable units. The newer ones seem to be the worse.
I have been doing computers since 1991 and I have never seen a hard drive fail. I only use ide. I believe part of the reason is I use to upgrade my drives every 2 years and until recently did not run my systems 24x7 like servers do. For the last 2 years I have been running 24x7 without any problems. Like you I would still select scsi assuming its for critical level work and money isn't an issue. I would pick Ide if raid was not needed since scsi is not more reliable unless its in a raid-5 configuration. Most workstations use alot of graphics and cpu power. Server applications tend to bottleneck at the hard drive. So hard disk performance is not really a factor unless the application runs of memory and swaps to the drive. Scsi vs Ide benchmarks show that they are almost identical in speed unless lots of i/o requests go to the drive in parrellel. Most cad apps today easily stay within the 2 gigs of ram. I know exceptions exist but they are rare.
However I would try to stay within 7200 rpm and not go above 10,000 for the drive. Your asking for trouble with the higher speeds not to mention do not really provide an increase in performance more then single percentage points in alot of benchmarks. Another benefit also with going with slower rpm drives is that they are alot more quiet.
Scsi is nice because it offloads alot of i/o processing to the scsi card. For any database or crtical application where raid is needed its the only way. For a graphical workstation for non critical use (artist or grunt level engineer) price and huge storage might be a bigger factor as well as reliability. Scsi without raid is not more reliable. I know a few raid workstations exist but raid is almost exclusively used in servers and is expensive for a desktop. Most engineers save their work on a network share. I guess you have to take in the cost of a hard drive failure. Yes engineers are sometimes expensive but not more then any guy in sales or marketing in a big corporation. You might as well give everyone raid.
Re:MP3 Playback? (Score:3, Interesting)
Confirmed in my my experiences with an AWE64 and a dual 533Mhz Celeron setup. I moved to a Santa Cruz Turtle Beach - no problems.
And as far as "Is there something magical about MP3s?," I think he's talking about standard wave output support...
Many card/driver combinations are supposed to be able to recognise the kind of data put through them. The Santa Cruz, for example, had a 'Hardware MP3 accelerator' option in the control panel. I really don't know how they recognise it though - by instinct I'd agree that surely the waveform has been decoded by the main CPU anyway? Be interested to hear from anyone who knows more about this point.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:ECC Memory? (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, it's been a while but don't most non-ECC memory use parity bits? So that a single flipped bit will be noticed...hence the isolated blue screens of death/ kernel panic on very rare occasions. Or is a parity bit what passes for ECC these days?
Well written, but weak article (Score:4, Interesting)
However, he pretty much dumps his chosen hardware in our laps by the end of the article without much explanation. It feels rushed almost.
There is way more out there than Tyan, who cares what google uses. What about dual channel DDR? What about the fact that Xeons and newer P4s have HyperThreading?
He starts slow, then in a few paragraphs blurts out some mystery hardware he decided to go with. Then babbled about Geforce VS Quadro for the rest of the article.
Oh well, he's a good writer. Better luck next time.