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Building A High End Quadro FX Workstation
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!"
RTFA Read The F**king Article!
"Two to twelve times each year, a bit in memory gets inappropriately flipped. This can be caused by cosmic rays flying through your RAM or a decay of the minute radioactive isotopes found in your RAM - the impurity need only be a single atom. Most of the time, this flipped bit is unimportant. Maybe it's a flipped bit in unallocated memory, or maybe it just altered the position of a pixel for a fraction of a second. If you're unlucky though, this flipped bit can alter critical data and cause your system to crash. In our situation, a flipped bit could potentially alter our results significantly."
Quoted from the second paragraph of the fourth page.
Let's face it - the main focus in a games PC is a blindingly fast GPU that can do umpteen hundred frames/sec at 1600x1200x32 or whatever, so you also need your system to be able to give the data to your video card as fast as possible. (Sound is another consideration, but not quite so major).
...) doesn't use a GPU too intensively, except for displaying graphical data, for which the high-end OpenGL cards are ideal. The main focus here is CPU's performance in doing complex numerical tasks, not just passing data to the AGP slot. And let's face it, multiple-CPU PCs don't necessarily do anything for gaming, but they're great for this sort of stuff.
... If you're unlucky though, this flipped bit can alter critical data and cause your system to crash. In our situation, a flipped bit could potentially alter our results significantly. Geez.
But "honest-to-goodness computation" (numerical analysis,
However, most if not all of the points in this article are quite informative - did YOU know the difference between Athlon XP and MP. I thought I mostly did.
And his choice of ECC RAM - Two to twelve times each year, a bit in memory gets inappropriately flipped
We come to the video card - a hacked GeForce isn't the same thing as a Quadro - bet some of the FPS freaks might be a little surprised, but the GeForces and Radeons aren't made for this sort of stuff. No real surprise, if you think about. But, as he says, why not a FireGL? Everything comes back to the lesson of the day: know your task. And boy, he certainly does.
Anyway, enough of regurgitating some of the finer points of this great article. Read it for yourself. And don't post comments about how 1337 your Radeon 9700 Pro or Ti4800 is. Know your task.
This sig intentionally left bla... dammit!
Who's got the whiteout?
"These systems were around $40,000 when first released. Each R12000 400MHz has a SpecFP2000 of around 350-360 and so it's approximately equal to an Athlon 1.2GHz. The caveat is that the SpecFP2000 benchmark is actually made up of a bunch of other, smaller, tests. For computational fluid dynamics or neural network image recognition, the 400MHz SGI CPU is 2.5 to 5 times faster than the Athlon!"
WOW! 2.5 times faster than a 1.2Ghz Athlon!? Man, you'd almost need a $168 2.4 Ghz Athlon to keep up! I wish they made them!
P.S. The 3.06 Ghz P4 is just under 1000 on the SpecFP benchmark.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
The article carefully explains the choices made. However, we find the following line at the end of it:
Special thanks to AMD, NVIDIA, TYAN, and Ryan Ku at Rage3D.com for helping me with this project.
Well, maybe they had no influence at all, but then how come that most of the chosen products match this 'special thanks' line?
- If you're aiming for stability, you try to remove all such possible causes; even if Windows will crash once a week, there's no point making it worse by risking memory failure.
- Even if your machine doesn't crash, a flipped memory bit could invalidate your data results by altering a crucial figure. In some cases, it's not important, but a flipped bit at the higher range could alter a conclusion significantly and you wouldn't notice.
Depending on your target audience, the latter may be more important than the former.If it's not ISV certified it doesn't do you much good, as for as a workstation goes.
From Ace's Hardware:
When you look at the typical price ($4000-$6000) of a workstation built by one the big OEM's you might ask yourself why you or anyone would pay such a premium for a workstation.
In fact if you take a sneak peek at the benchmarks further you will see that a high-end PC, based upon a 1400MHz Athlon, can beat these expensive beasts in several very popular workstation applications like AutoCAD (2D), Microstation.
Yes, it is possible that you are better served by a high-end PC, assembled by a good local reseller. Still, there are good reasons to consider an OEM workstation.
Most of the time, a workstation is purchased for one particular task, and sometimes to run one particular application. Compaq, Dell and Fujitsu Siemens have special partnerships with the ISV's (Independent Software Vendor) who develop the most important workstation applications. In close co-operation with these ISV's, they verify if the workstation is capable of running each application stablely and fast. In other words, you can ask the OEM whether or he and the ISV can guarantee that your favorite application runs perfectly on the OEM's workstation. ISV certification is indeed one of the most critical factors that distinguishes a workstation from a high-end desktop.
Secondly, it is harder to assemble a good workstation than a high-end PC. Typically, a PC is built for the highest price/performance. A lot of hardware with an excellent price/performance ratio comes with drivers which do not adhere strictly to certain standards such as the PCI and AGP standards. Even if this kind of hardware might comprise stability in very rare cases, it is unacceptable for a workstation.
Last but not least, workstations come with high-end SCSI harddisks and OpenGL videocards which are seldom found in high-end PC's. Workstations are shipped with ECC (Error Checking and Correction code) memory and can contain 2GB to 4GB memory. High-end PC's typically ship with non-ECC memory and are - in practice - limited to 512MB (i815 chipset) - 2GB (AMD760).
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.