Tried the NVidia Quadro, which doesn't have a separate power connector. Same issue, solid black underscore before any boot options or screen and it never gets past it.
If it's a wattage issue, would upgrading my power supply help? @thecreativeone91 @MattSpeller
@MattSpeller said:
You won't regret it, and if you need any help I'd be happy to lend a hand. OC'ing is dead simple compared to the old days.
I might just take you up on that, thanks.
That's super strange, it should work a treat with any PCI-e gfx card. Perhaps a setting in the bios is doing something dumb? Are these known good cards?
Edit: Do these cards (5750?) require extra power connectors or do they pull it all from the PCIe slot?
They all required the extra connector ( including the 5750 ), but I plug that in and it seems fine and the fans spin ( and of course it works on the 5750 ). The cards that failed were semi-mainstream seeming ones from BestBuy or NewEgg. I'll pull out the Quadro from the Precision and see if it boots later tonight.
@MattSpeller said:
@creayt Massive overkill commence: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/zYM9ZL
6c 12t (overclock this hard)
Though I have no expertise w/ OC-ing at all, and it's been probably 7-8 years since I assembled a rig myself, the T5810 has arrived and its performance is very disappointing, on top of that the SSDs are plain jane and generic looking SATA. So it's going back to Dell and I'm going to get savvy on self-assembly and go your suggested route.
I think I'm going to wait for the new processors in August, and spend the time up until then learning how to do all of this stuff again.
In the meanwhile, does anyone know how I can tell ahead of time what graphics cards will be compatible w/ my T110.2? It has a Thermaltake Tr/2 600W power supply, but none of the modernish cards I tried would boot. The pre-boot screen would sit and hold a solid underscore on a black screen or flash the underscore.
Thanks!
@technobabble said:
Love the look...care to supply the name or a link to it?
Antec S10. I think it's only a month or two old, but presuming I can remove that Antec logo it'll be the first DIY computer case I've ever seen that's actually sexy.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129224
@MattSpeller said:
@creayt Massive overkill commence: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/zYM9ZL
So it looks like to do dual M2s on these mobos you have to use a PCIe add-in card for the 2nd. So to get a RAID out of that would you need to do a software one in Windows? Is there a better option?
@MattSpeller said:
@creayt Massive overkill commence: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/zYM9ZL
Excellent options and a ton of stuff I'm going to look into! Thank you very much.
@thecreativeone91 said:
I looked between the Dell Percision T series and the HP z800 when getting my current workstation (24 cores). I end up getting the HP platform it was more flexible had way more SAS and SATA ports and better all around build quality.
Thanks for the tip. It sounds like I'm better off performancewise ( given my lack of a need for mass storage at least ) w/ M2 and PCIe options.
What's your processor model if you don't mind my asking? How has having so many cores worked out for you? What do you do with that monster?
@MattSpeller said:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/DELL-POWEREDGE-R510-2-X5660-24GB-RAM-H700-12-BAY-/171833967783?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item28021a44a7 - Edit: better deal on this one and it includes a not shitty RAID controller. It does not include drive caddies so keep that in mind.
Throw some more RAM at it and fill it full of cheap SATA drives in OBR10 - I'd suggest the cheapest 1TB drives (or whatever is cheapest $/GB) - the more drives you have running the faster your RAID10 will be.
Install VMWare or whatever other flavor of hypervisor floats your boat and you're off to the races. With the one I linked above you've got 12c 24t to work with - that'll easily do way more VM's than you'd need, your only limitation will be how much RAM you stuff in it.
Ahhh, I see where you're going with this. I should mention that:
I work from home full time in a tiny apartment and don't have an ability to set up a rack or anything.
I have the luxury of not needing much drive space or having a concern for redundancy at all. I use version control and any media files I deal with locally are testing images so I'm fine w/ 256GB total, comprised of a single drive or a Raid 0.
If I do go the separate route I do have this T110 available to run VMs off of, which does fit in my closet ( where it lived before I ditched my Retina iMac a week or two ago ).
I'll be developing/rendering off of a NetGear A6210 wifi adapter ( currently what the T110 is using ), and have no other choice but to go wireless w/ my 2 new puppies around. Do you think developing off of VMs served off of a separate box ( which can be hardwired to the router ) over wifi could introduce enough latency that the responsiveness might suffer? I'm already a stickler for instantaneousness, I'm not sure I could deal with that on every save, switch, test, repeat. The VMs won't be performing major workloads simultaneously with the exception of if I run the private betaware from home, in which case that'd be always on. So the 8t of the Xeon E3-1240 v2 might be ok.
I appreciate all of the help! This is very educational.
@MattSpeller said:
$0.02 - wait until august when Intel launches their new CPU's and you'll get a better deal on their current lineup or move up to the new stuff
Are these the v4s or something totally new? I can't say I'm up to date at all on the processor market.
@MattSpeller said:
@creayt http://pcpartpicker.com/p/TTkpYJ
Easy upgrade to 128gb of ram later
6c 12t CPU
absolutely sick m2 ssd "Sequential Read: 1170MB/s, Sequential Write: 930 MB/s, Random Read (QD=32): 122K IOPS, Random Write (QD=32): 72K IOPS"other storage is what servers are for
you'll need to research a gfx card that's suitable for what you're doing. I put in a GTX970 as it's $/performance is obnoxiously good.
also needs psu, case, etc etc.
That's pretty epic, and cheap! I'm definitely going to comb over this stuff and do a ton of Googling. That M2 drive is epic ( even if I don't get how it can put up those numbers w/ what Amazon says is a 5Gb/s connection. Thanks!!
@MattSpeller said:
@creayt I wouldnt run VM's on your render box unless it's a type 2 hypervisor like virtualbox - also VM's are what servers are for.
I think the main argument for using VMs on your workstation as a developer is so that the development environment you're coding and testing on can more exactly resemble your code's final deployment situation, not to mention the ability to experiment w/ scary things and then reverse them in one fell swoop. I know there are a lot of articles on it, but up to this point I've never done it myself full-time.
@Dashrender said:
The problem with running a hypervisor is that you're not meant to SIT infront of it anymore, generally.
For example, if you installed ESXi (any version) you can't actually work directly on the machine, you'd have to have another machine to remote into the server from.
I don't know how this will work if you decided to go with Hyper-V? Even if you went with Windows 2012 R2 server instead of Windows 8.1 Pro, I have no idea how responsive the system will be on the local display.
Thanks.
To clarify, I don't mean running Hyper V Server as my host OS. I mean Windows 8.1 as the host, which supports running Hyper V atop it. It just adds the Hyper V management tool and enables VM creation and management, so it's a supported use case for 8.1, in fact it's just a few clicks to turn it on:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/hyper-v-run-virtual-machines
@MattSpeller said:
I agree with Scott, seems like a reasonable $/gear
For your usage scenario, especially hosting stuff & VM stuff, I'd split you off into a slick render box and a server. I can suggest some gear if you'd like that will blow your mind.
Please do!
Pretty new to professional workstations and want to get some feedback from any peeps here that have made purchases like this ( maybe even recently ).
My goals/requirements:
I'm a responsiveness snob. It's what keeps me from using OS X or being able to not tear my hair out on a dual-core. My end-game with any new computer purchase is to get as close to 0 ms as possible on my budget for all non-long-running tasks.
I run a full web development stack w/ a web server, various app servers, a handful of databases. Planning to start virtualizing more and will be digging into learning Linux ( Docker and containerization is the first super compelling reason I've come across to finally dig into it past the shallow end ) in the next year. I'd prefer to do so from inside Windows and try out a handful of different options, at first at least.
I multitask way too much, it's unavoidable at my job. Main developer of a very small company where I need to pinball around between departments and make various things happen as quickly as possible, I'll often be carrying on 3-4 simultaneous Slack conversations and working on 3-4 separate codebases with a thousand windows and tabs open, and it's only going to get more complicated moving forward w/ a new virtualization workflow. I have hit various usage scenarios ( though it's not a daily thing ) where 16GB, in past experience, proved to not be quite enough RAM, hence the what may seem like overkill quantity of RAM in my configs.
Cores. As you'll see below, the workstation I'm looking at purchasing has way too many cores for a mortal like myself. That said, I've been working on a hot new web app for a very long time now and am thinking of hosting its perpetual private pre-release at my home, where I have very high speed fiber. If I do that, it'd be extremely nice to not have to maintain a separate system and to just port-forward to my workstation and be able to monitor everything about the usage all from the same box, hence where I think an excess of cores and RAM might come in handy.
My lifelong dream is to get into industrial design and make some things. I toyed around with 3D modeling a bit in college on a few leisurely nights, but have never invested time into it, and plan to in the next year. Hence the desire for a rig that can handle that kind of workload ( my 5750 most definitely can't ). My knowledge of 3D modeling and ID software is pretty limited, so for all I know an abundance of cores might come in invaluable here too ( or it may be 100% graphics card, IDK ).
Current setup: a mutilated T110.2 that I Frankensteined
Xeon E3-1240 v2 ( 4 cores, HT, 8MB cache, 3.4-3.8 Ghz )
32GB DDR3 1600
Radeon 5750 Pro ( you can laugh, it's the only card I could get to run on this motherboard that could support 3 monitors, 3 other much more current and higher-end ones just killed the ability boot when plugged in )
Add-in SATA III card w/ 2x Samsung 840 Pros in a Raid 0
Price: $1038 on sale w/ about $70 in add-on cards ( SATA III and USB 3, graphics card was left-over from another system and free ) and I had the SSDs leftover from other projects.
The system I'm leaning towards: Precision T5810
Xeon E5-2697 v3 ( 14 cores, HT, 35M cache, 2.6-3.6 GHz )
32G DDR4 2133 ECC
Quadro K2200
2x 512GB SSDs ( these may be PCIe, the refurb listing doesn't specify )
3 Year Hardware Service with Onsite/In-Home Service After Remote Diagnosis
Windows 8.1 Pro license
The price after taxes and a massive coupon is a little over $4k.
So my questions are:
Is $4k a decent price for this hardware given my preference to not assemble my own? Can I do much better? If so how/where?
Is it pretty capable of handling my requirements above? I believe it can take a 2nd K2200 card, so if that's the one weak point I could theoretically pop another one in, I think Dell sells them for under $500.
Does anyone see any glaring misallocations of $ with this setup? Would I be better off buying a cheaper setup w/ a professional graphics card and going w/ something like the new Intel PCIe SSD? Do I desperately need an add-in RAID card? Is the K2200 overkill? Underkill?
What am I missing? Fast processor, ample RAM, professional graphics card instead of a gaming one for a decent modeling station. Is that about right?
Scott recently schooled me on how installing a type 1 hypervisor silently converts the host os to a VM behind the scenes and accompanies a performance hit. If I want to run Hyper V, is that going to reduce the host vm's performance to the point that I can feel it? If that's the case am I better off running a 2nd box ( probably my current T110 ) for all virtualization?
Do you think I'll feel a responsiveness drop going from the baseline 3.4 Ghz to 2.6? I'm very, very scared of that scenario.
Any general feedback that may benefit me on this. I'm definitely a newb to hardware in a lot of ways.
Thank you!
@Dashrender said:
For someone who needs to work in landscape mode more often than portrait I could definitely understand the dilemma. His setup probably wouldn't be good for a video editing station. Instead you'd want a seamless pair of monitors, or just one super larger, super high resolution display.
Definitely agree. For video editing you almost desperately need a single 4k or preferably 5k monitor.
@Dashrender said:
I wonder how much eye/neck strain you'll end up with because you are looking up higher than normal?
I have users who complain about the width of two wide screen monitors, having to swing their head left to right and back to see everything.
I realize there is no perfect solution. I read last week that it's suggested to sit more to the left of your displays as it will cause you to be looking more straight ahead at the left monitor (assuming that's the default) and glancing to the right as needed, potentially causing less neck stress.
That's the beautiful thing about these particular monitors. I ordered a few different models and tried them all for a day in a portrait setup like this. At 27 inches each and 2560x1440, you can sit back very far from them and still read small text comfortably ( at least I can, I have 20/20 according to my eye exam about 6 months ago, I realize that might not be the case for many ). 24-5 inch versions might work well for most people, but I'm very tall while sitting down and find this a perfect fit. I don't really move my head at all while I'm using them, you just dart your eyes around.
@thecreativeone91 said:
I couldn't deal with having the borders of the monitor bezel going through my horizontal space of the normal monitor like that.
I think you're thinking about it wrong. The horizontal space of each monitor is identical to that of a Retina MacBook Pro. You don't use them as one single monitor, you use them as three separate monitors, for segregating and partitioning resources in order to better iterate them or see multiple things at the same time.
@Minion-Queen said:
I have often wondered if that would be more useful or not. Still trying to decide though...
It's extremely useful for web browsing and coding. The only time I ever need a wide aspect ratio is when doing graphic design or database queries returning mass quantities of fields. For literally everything else the portrait orientation is spectacular, allowing you to scroll and scan much less while giving you a much more clear and present feel for the scope of any content ( which just feels great ).
