Comments on future workstation build

HACO

HACO

HACO

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This is a heavy load workstation with specific types of computations/analysis.

So I've done most of my research and I've come this far:

YOUR BASKET
2 x Intel Xeon E5-2650v2 2.60GHz 8-Core with Hyperthreading & Turbo (Socket 2011) - Retail £899.99 (£1,799.98)
1 x EVGA GeForce TITAN Black Edition 6144MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card (3790-KR) £799.99
1 x Kingston HyperX Beast 64GB (8x8GB) PC3-17100C11 2133MHz Dual Channel Kit (KHX21C11T3FK8/64X) £479.99
4 x Samsung 1TB SSD 840 EVO SATA 6Gb/s Basic - (MZ-7TE1T0BW) £449.99 (£1,799.96)
1 x Asus Z9PE-D8 WS Dual Socket C602 Chipset (Socket 2011) DDR3 Motherboard £419.99
1 x PNY Nvidia Quadro 2000 Graphics Card - 1GB - GDDR5 SDRAM £419.99
1 x Enermax Platimax 1350w '80 Plus Platinum' Modular Power Supply (EPM1350EWT) £399.95
1 x Corsair Obsidian 900D Super Tower Case (CC-9011022-WW) £299.99
1 x LSI 3Ware SAS 9750-4i SGL Controller Card - (OEM) RAID £274.99
1 x Samsung 256GB SSD 840 PRO SATA 6Gb/s Basic - (MZ-7PD256BW) £179.99
Total : £6,895.02 (includes shipping : £16.85).




Just some points:

  • I already have the Quadro, just added it because I'll be installing it.
  • I run four Samsung 840 Evos in RAID 0 on the LSI for workspace. Samsung 840 Pro for OS.
  • I have a 10 Gbps ethernet PCI-E card.
  • I haven't chosen watercooling parts yet.


Any thoughts or comments? This is my first pro workstation build.
 
Hi,

A massive to start the day is good thing. :)

I thought i new a lot about workstations but i am wondering why you need a TITAN and a Quadro? Surely the Quadro is enough.

Why 4 1tb SSD's (no problem with them) and 1 256GB one?
 
Thanks. I need CUDA performance from the Titan since its much faster in CUDA performance than that Quadro.

I thought I'd install the OS and applications on the 256GB SSD and connect it directly to the motherboard, and use the LSI controller to RAID0 the 1TB SSDs for a 4TB workspace to do I/O operations during the analysis and computations. I could run the OS from the raid array too but I think since there's heavy I/O on the array during the analysis it would be simpler to have the OS and apps running separately, also in case one of those 1TBs fail I wouldn't lose the OS/apps/configurations. Does it make sense?
 
I''ve drafted up an alternative for you.

YOUR BASKET
2 x Intel Xeon E5-2640v2 2.00GHz 8-Core with Hyperthreading & Turbo (Socket 2011) - Retail £749.99 (£1.00)
1 x MSI Geforce GTX 780Ti 3072MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £499.99
4 x Samsung 1TB SSD 840 EVO SATA 6Gb/s Basic - (MZ-7TE1T0BW) £449.99 (£1.00)
1 x Kingston HyperX Beast 64GB (8x8GB) PC3-14900C10 1866MHz Dual Channel Kit (KHX18C10AT3K8/64) £439.99
1 x Asus Z9PE-D8 WS Dual Socket C602 Chipset (Socket 2011) DDR3 Motherboard £419.99
1 x LSI 3Ware SAS 9750-4i SGL Controller Card - (OEM) RAID £274.99
1 x Phanteks Enthoo Primo Full Tower Case £199.99
1 x SuperFlower Leadex Platinum 1000W Fully Modular "80 Plus Platinum" Power Supply - White (NESF-011) £149.99
1 x Samsung 250GB SSD 840 EVO SATA 6Gb/s Basic - (MZ-7TE250BW) £139.99
Total : £5,445.08 (includes shipping : £16.85).



First off, The Xeon's. Same cores, same Threads, Lower clocked, Cash in pocket.

GPU (this is a big point). As Joey stated, SP (single point) and FP (Floating Point) Performance are major factors in this sort of work so the Q 2000 becomes a bit irrelevant, as these power hungry gaming cards are so good at it now.

That be said, the TITAN black isn't the way to go..

If you look at this: http://gpuboss.com/gpus/GeForce-GTX-TITAN-BLACK-vs-GeForce-GTX-780-Ti

The FP performance of the BLACK is very very close to that of the 2/3 priced 780ti.
They also have the same amount of processing cores (another big factor is a workstation)

Next, Case.. Yes the 900D is nice, but the primo is a stunning case as (if not more) capable than the 900D, my favorite Big budget case.

PSU, a 1350W (and a £400 at that) PSU is Massive Massive Massive overkill for that rig, you don't even need 1000W but this will let you add another 780ti in if you want.

I know nothing about RAID cards so didn't touch that..

Do you want a spec for fully watercooling it too?
 
Thanks guys. I need the Quadro for some CAD software that specifically require Quadro drivers (it's not just for pure CUDA performance), besides I already have it :)

As far as Titan vs 780 Ti goes, I need the FP64 performance that Titan delivers (FP64 performance is locked to 1/24 of FP32 on 780 Ti and to 1/3 of FP32 on Titan) which is basically the only reason Titan exists so Titan is the way to go for me. http://us.hardware.info/reviews/523...review-gpgpu-benchmarks---double-precision-fp

I may get the Xeon E5-2640v2s instead but I'm not sure yet. They're 17% cheaper and are 23% slower.

I'm undecided on 900D and Primo, they're both excellent but I guess I've always had an obsession with 900D but the white Primo is just so sexy so I may get that instead.

About PSU, I may add one (or two) more Titans (or Titan equivalent in Maxwell) down the road so I'm just happy to invest there.

I'll have another thread on the watercooling stuff later on after I finalized all the parts.
 
HACO said:
I need the Quadro for some CAD software that specifically require Quadro drivers (it's not just for pure CUDA performance), besides I already have it :)
Click to expand...

Ah well if you own it already then great! I have a few comments.

1. Echoing what Doomed said - the Quadro 2000 has a TDP of 62 W, the Titan has been measured around 250 W, and a 2650 v2 has a TDP of 95 W. Ignoring for a moment that TDP != power draw in real world, that means you probably only need 600 W for one Titan, and maybe 850-1000 for two. Getting a £400 1350 W PSU is overkill, a waste of money, and will waste more power than a correctly-spec'd unit. I'd go for one of these today, and a larger one in the future if/when you need it:

1 x Antec EA 650w '80 Plus Platinum' Power Supply £95.99
1 x Enermax Platimax 750w '80 Plus Platinum' Modular Power Supply (EPM750AWT) £169.99
1 x Seasonic 760w '80 Plus Platinum' Modular Power Supply £139.99
1 x Seasonic 660w '80 Plus Platinum' Modular Power Supply £113.99

2. I wouldn't be buying 64 G of memory lightly, but you've done plenty of research so I'm sure you've figured this out. I do some pretty extreme 3D visualisations on a 32 G machine and it's been sufficient (and when it's not I use a 200 G cluster!).

3. Four TB of SSD storage (£1800) is again a waste of money IMO. I'd much sooner go for a 100-500 GB SSD (like the EVO in your list) plus several conventional disks.

If you've got 6 grand to burn on a workstation then go for it of course, but I'd personally cut a couple of grand off with the above changes.

Edit: just noticed you have the SSD array already (bet it's fast!).
 
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Thanks. I see the point for the PSU and I can change it. I did a calculation here and added all things (including fans/pump for watercooling) it summed up to 850w so those below 1000w are clearly out. And that's only with one Titan. It goes up to 1079w with two Titans.

4084568287.png
So I guess if I wanna go cheaper on PSU the choice would be something like these:

YOUR BASKET
1 x Corsair AX1200i Digital ATX '80 Plus Platinum' Modular Power Supply (CP-9020008-UK) £299.99
1 x Seasonic X-Series 1250w '80 Plus Gold' Modular Power Supply £239.99
1 x EVGA SuperNova G2 1300W '80 Plus Gold' Modular Power Supply (120-G2-1300-XR) £229.99
1 x BeQuiet Dark Power Pro P10 1200W '80 Plus Gold' Modular Power Supply £219.95
1 x SuperFlower Leadex Platinum 1200W Fully Modular "80 Plus Platinum" Power Supply - White (NESF-013) £215.99
Total : £1,220.90 (includes shipping : £12.50).

 
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Regarding the 4 x 1 TB SSD's. Have you considered some Western Digital RE4 drives, then combining with Intel Smart Response Technology, using say a Samsung 840 pro as the cache? It would save a lot of money and in real world there would be little difference in performance.

I also would not want to trust 4 SSD's in Raid 0, it only takes one to fail and you'll loose everything. If you use Intel SRT you can afford to go stripped and mirrored with RE4 HDD's and still be saving money.
 
Those calculators always add in a bit of extra :) Someone here used 2 GTX 780's, an i7 and a tonne of HDD's, stress tested it all and only pulled something like 620W so a good 1000W should be good enough.
 
JasonM said:
Regarding the 4 x 1 TB SSD's. Have you considered some Western Digital RE4 drives, then combining with Intel Smart Response Technology, using say a Samsung 840 pro as the cache? It would save a lot of money and in real world there would be little difference in performance.

I also would not want to trust 4 SSD's in Raid 0, it only takes one to fail and you'll loose everything. If you use Intel SRT you can afford to go stripped and mirrored with RE4 HDD's and still be saving money.
Click to expand...

Thanks. Yeah I've considered RE4 drives (or VelociRaptors), I had them in the past. They will make insane bottleneck as I'm not using this to simply store large files. There will be huge amounts of I/O from the drives during the work so HDDs are absolutely out. Reliability is not an issue as I load up the arrays before the work and store the results on a file server (with 10 Gbps Ethernet). If one fails I will swap it with a new one and all is good. There won't be any data stored on this workstation permanently. The array is just a temporary workspace :)
 
Shivy011 said:
Those calculators always add in a bit of extra :) Someone here used 2 GTX 780's, an i7 and a tonne of HDD's, stress tested it all and only pulled something like 620W so a good 1000W should be good enough.
Click to expand...

The cost difference between 1000w and 1200w is very minimal considering the overall cost, and I may add another GPU down the road so I guess it's worth spending £40-50 extra on the PSU, that's less than 1% of the overall cost.
 
A £7000 professional workstation PC which isn't in a fancy Lian Li chassis? :eek:

What is this?! :p
 
HACO said:
The cost difference between 1000w and 1200w is very minimal considering the overall cost, and I may add another GPU down the road so I guess it's worth spending £40-50 extra on the PSU, that's less than 1% of the overall cost.
Click to expand...

If you put it that way, then yeah go for it :D


(3 Titans? NOM.)
 
HACO said:
I did a calculation here and added all things (including fans/pump for watercooling) it summed up to 850w so those below 1000w are clearly out. And that's only with one Titan. It goes up to 1079w with two Titans.
Click to expand...
HACO said:
The cost difference between 1000w and 1200w is very minimal considering the overall cost, and I may add another GPU down the road so I guess it's worth spending £40-50 extra on the PSU, that's less than 1% of the overall cost.
Click to expand...

That calculator has a large safety factor build in, perhaps 10-20%. Only you know how likely the extra GPUs are, but if the second Titan isn't happening any time soon I'd still recommend an Enermax or Seasonic 750 W, as swapping out a PSU isn't that hard. If you're likely to get a second/third Titan within say a year or two then 1000-1300 W now would save you some hassle.

Have you considered bandwidth to each card with 3 Titans?

HACO said:
They will make insane bottleneck as I'm not using this to simply store large files. There will be huge amounts of I/O from the drives during the work so HDDs are absolutely out.
Click to expand...

I'm so curious what you're running that IO latency is such a severe bottleneck, yet you need 4 TB of scratch!
 
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acme15 said:
A £7000 professional workstation PC which isn't in a fancy Lian Li chassis? :eek:

What is this?! :p
Click to expand...

I just can't get myself to like the looks of Lian Li stuff :(

joeyjojo said:
That calculator has a large safety factor build in, perhaps 10-20%. Only you know how likely the extra GPUs are, but if the second Titan isn't happening any time soon I'd still recommend an Enermax or Seasonic 750 W, as swapping out a PSU isn't that hard. If you're likely to get a second/third Titan within say a year or two then 1000-1300 W now would save you some hassle.

Have you considered bandwidth to each card with 3 Titans?
Click to expand...

Second and third cards are likely to happening within 6 months maybe, not a couple of years so I guess I'll just get the ~1200w PSU.

acme15 said:
I'm so curious what you're running that IO latency is such a severe bottleneck, yet you need 4 TB of scratch!
Click to expand...

It's big data financial analysis at Terabyte scale, but not the kind that needs lots of memory, for that we have clusters (64GB is fine here), the kind that needs lots of I/O operations which are best done locally on SSDs.
 
Thanks for the help everyone. Everything finalized.

YOUR BASKET
2 x Intel Xeon E5-2650v2 2.60GHz 8-Core with Hyperthreading & Turbo (Socket 2011) - Retail £899.99 (£1,799.98)
1 x EVGA GeForce TITAN Black Edition 6144MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card (3790-KR) £799.99
1 x Kingston HyperX Beast 64GB (8x8GB) PC3-17100C11 2133MHz Dual Channel Kit (KHX21C11T3FK8/64X) £479.99
4 x Samsung 1TB SSD 840 EVO SATA 6Gb/s Basic - (MZ-7TE1T0BW) £449.99 (£1,799.96)
1 x Asus Z9PE-D8 WS Dual Socket C602 Chipset (Socket 2011) DDR3 Motherboard £419.99
1 x PNY Nvidia Quadro 2000 Graphics Card - 1GB - GDDR5 SDRAM £419.99
1 x Corsair Obsidian 900D Super Tower Case (CC-9011022-WW) £299.99
1 x LSI 3Ware SAS 9750-4i SGL Controller Card - (OEM) RAID £274.99
1 x BeQuiet Dark Power Pro P10 1200W '80 Plus Gold' Modular Power Supply £219.95
1 x Samsung 256GB SSD 840 PRO SATA 6Gb/s Basic - (MZ-7PD256BW) £179.99
Total : £6,712.50 (includes shipping : £14.75).

 
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