Decided it is time to share a bit about the workstation I have been building for awhile now. I will update this thread in awhile.
The "Old" Workstation
The previous workstation was built almost two years ago. It was a rock solid build but needs have changed. This would have been a simple swap, but I decided to "go bigger" and moving to a larger 12x13" motherboard meant a new chassis since the previous one was pushing it:
Just barely enough room for the SATA connectors.
Old Workstation Specs
Reason for the new build
New Build
Certainly there were a few things I would have loved to have done with the build, but in the end, it is important to right-size workstations a bit. The NVIDIA Quadro K4000 is awesome since it uses only 80w. That somewhat offset the fact that the Intel Xeon E5-2687W chips are power hungry. One item that I will look into is moving to something more like dual E5-2630 chips for significantly lower power consumption (190w combined TDP v. 300w).
Specs
For those wondering, the reason for the dual port Mellanox 56gbps IB card is that I am strongly considering re-wiring for IB both to the lab and to the pfsense appliance.
Thermals
In 2014 we will be officially adding thermal imaging to our testing. Decided to snap a quick image of the workstation under load. Fairly solid results as the max temperatures are in the 50-55C range at the hottest spots. Well under what we would want to see.
I did get some comments mainly saying the ASUS motherboard is running hot. As one can see, the temperatures max out at 50-55C. For comparison, a Intel Xeon E5 processor has a max operating temperature of over 80C so these ICs are easily fine. The other big note is that the single slot cooler on the NVIDIA Quadro K4000 has a cold zone near the rear of the card. The front of the single slot cooler shows it is dumping heat into the chassis. Since the GPU was under load in this picture, it is expected and cooling is working properly.
A word on the easiest workstation transition ever
The "Old" Workstation
The previous workstation was built almost two years ago. It was a rock solid build but needs have changed. This would have been a simple swap, but I decided to "go bigger" and moving to a larger 12x13" motherboard meant a new chassis since the previous one was pushing it:
Just barely enough room for the SATA connectors.
Old Workstation Specs
- Intel Core i7-3930K
- Corsair Carbide 500R
- Corsair H100 Cooling
- 64GB DDR3 (8x8GB)
- AMD Radeon HD6970
- Crucial M4 256GB OS SSD and various SSDs
Reason for the new build
- Needed more than 64GB DDR3 - I have been using Hyper-V quite a bit recently and even with Dynamic memory, using applications like Photoshop CC alongside a host of Hyper-V machines meant I was actually using most of the 64GB
- Wanted to right-size GPU and networking. The current GPU was too much for what I use the machine for. Networking was still provided by dual 1 gigabit network connections
- No longer use 3.5" storage locally, even for backups
- The parts were finally available
New Build
Certainly there were a few things I would have loved to have done with the build, but in the end, it is important to right-size workstations a bit. The NVIDIA Quadro K4000 is awesome since it uses only 80w. That somewhat offset the fact that the Intel Xeon E5-2687W chips are power hungry. One item that I will look into is moving to something more like dual E5-2630 chips for significantly lower power consumption (190w combined TDP v. 300w).
Specs
- Dual Intel Xeon E5-2687W
- Supermicro SC732 Chassis
- Cooler Master Hyper 212+
- ASUS Z9PE-D8
- 128GB (8x16GB) DDR3 1600MHz ECC RDIMMs Samsung
- NVIDIA Quadro K4000
- (Coming soon) Mellanox 56gbps FDR IB/ 40GbE
- Crucial M500 960GB SSD
- Seasonic 650w 80Plus Gold power supply
For those wondering, the reason for the dual port Mellanox 56gbps IB card is that I am strongly considering re-wiring for IB both to the lab and to the pfsense appliance.
Thermals
In 2014 we will be officially adding thermal imaging to our testing. Decided to snap a quick image of the workstation under load. Fairly solid results as the max temperatures are in the 50-55C range at the hottest spots. Well under what we would want to see.
I did get some comments mainly saying the ASUS motherboard is running hot. As one can see, the temperatures max out at 50-55C. For comparison, a Intel Xeon E5 processor has a max operating temperature of over 80C so these ICs are easily fine. The other big note is that the single slot cooler on the NVIDIA Quadro K4000 has a cold zone near the rear of the card. The front of the single slot cooler shows it is dumping heat into the chassis. Since the GPU was under load in this picture, it is expected and cooling is working properly.
A word on the easiest workstation transition ever
