Comments on future workstation build

HACO

HACO

HACO

Soldato
Joined
6 Oct 2009
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Location
London
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.
 
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?
 
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.
 
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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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.
 
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).

 
stulid said:
The Superflower probably wont even spin up making it even more silent then the BeQuiet.
Click to expand...

idle is not important as it will be in full load almost 24/7. I'm sure at around 1000w all fans speed up and a high quality fan would show its value.

By the way, I just made a thread for the watercooling stuff of this build, so any comments there are highly appreciated :)

Watercooling parts for workstation build
 
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