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Building A High End Quadro FX Workstation

Posted by Hemos on from the making-it-faster-and-better dept.

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!"

5 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. ECC Memory? by Proc6 · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Can someone tell me why ECC memory is a good idea? I don't think I can remember in all my years of computing a machine crashing due to a memory error, or a machine not crashing because ECC memory saved it. Maybe I wouldnt know if it did, but, I've always felt like ECC memory was slow, more expensive, and necessary about like UFO insurance. Personally Id rather have regular memory, that taco's the machine completely when there's a problem, so I know there's a problem, than I would ECC constantly correcting memory errors without my knowing, untill I go to leave on vacation, then the whole DIMM gives out.

    I Am Not A Memory Expert though.

    --

    I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!

    1. Re:ECC Memory? by e8johan · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Large simulations (such as this, or car crash simulations, etc.) take days, if not weeks to run. Since the ECC ram isn't 100% slower (i.e. time of fast memory times two is more than time of ECC memory) there is no need to run it twice.

      Anyhow, if the two simulations differ, you'll have to do it a third time to check if you get a match, and still you only know that you are *likely* to have gotten it right. With ECC the chance of getting it right increases.

  2. Re:Biased? by sweede · · Score: 3, Insightful

    perhaps the author of the article did research and picked out the componants of the system BEFORE contacting vendors and buying them.

    you dont order food or car parts without knowing what is there and what you want/need do you??

    Oh, and if you also notice that the rest of the site is based on new hardware reviews and performance, you'd think that they would have good experiances with what works and what doesn't.

    If you went out and researched companies or people for a project you where doing, would you not include them in a `special thanks to' section of the paper?

    --
    I follow the SDK and GDN principles.. Spelling Dont Kount, Grammer Dont Neither
  3. Re:Biased? by vivIsel · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Welcome to the world of "hardware review" sites. Bias is their collective middle name.

  4. Re:Easy by sql*kitten · · Score: 3, Insightful

    1. workstation == better processors
    2. gaming system == better graphic cards

    Not as simple as that. A games card will trade precision for speed, because precision is less important if you are updating the scene dozens of times a second anyway. If two walls don't meet perfectly for 1/60th of a second, who will even notice? A workstation card will trade speed for precision - you cannot risk a mechanical engineer missing an improperly aligned assembly because of an artifact created by the graphics card, or worse, breaking an existing design because an artifact shows a problem that doesn't exist in the underlying model.