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What Does a $16,000+ PC Look Like, Anyway?
justechn writes "Tom's Hardware has an article about custom PC maker Puget Systems, who had just finished a custom $16,000 PC for one of their clients. So what exactly goes into a $16,000 system? How about: Four quad-core Opteron processors, 32 GB of memory, Windows Server 2008, Asus Xonar DX PCI Express sound card, 3Ware 9550SX-8LP SATA 3 Gb/s RAID controller, Two Western Digital 300 GB VelociRaptor hard drives in RAID 1, Two 1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F1s also in RAID 1, and Four 1 TB Samsung SpinPoint F1s in RAID 5. Puget went with MagiCool's Xtreme Nova 1080 radiator, Nine 120 mm fans, Four Koolance CPU blocks, Koolance combined pump and reservoir unit, and Cooler Master Stacker 810 case. In addition to all that hardware, it also runs very quiet and very cool. The temperature of the CPUs is 36 C at idle, 45 C at load."
You'd think that for $16,000 they could have put a couple SSDs in there.
Well, who has time to read the summaries anyway?
If you want to see a $16,000 computer why not just go to the Apple online store? You should be able to get there pretty easily by maxing out a Mac Pro. :)
The RAID5 is probably planned for longer term bulk storage since it can be a tad slower than Raid1.
RAID 5 isn't worth it. If you want to put four drives in a RAID, use RAID 10. Writes are faster on RAID 10 than on RAID 5, and if two drives fail, there's only a 33 percent chance of needing to restore everything from backup, compared to 100 percent for RAID 5.
Wow, it's fugly... for $16,000 it should have a case that's the equivalent of a Ferrari, or maybe a black Murcielago, not a dune buggy based on a VW Beetle.
I know the looks don't matter, but, this still looks like someones case mod they made in their basement out of old PC's and some jiffy markers.
This is how departmental IT is done. Or, at least, it's how it *should* be done.
I notice that you didn't buy two identical machines so that if one went down, you could fail over.
This is not how IT is done. Or at least, not how it should be done.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The best part is, they did the whole job for $16,000 without making the finished product even somewhat appealing. The case is hideous. They didn't even try to make the gigantic fan on the side look like anything other than a calloused tumor.
Actually, they could have gone to a MUCH larger diameter fan, with a lower rotational speed, and still moved a lot more air with a lot less noise.
Besides, in 5 years an el-cheapo box will have the same performance. Or for less they could have built 3 supercomputers supercomputer.
Also, they made a couple mistakes. Firstly they used 75W Opterons (8350) instead of 50W ones like in my list above (8350 HE) - pretty stupid considering their whole focus was to build a silent system ! Secondly instead of 10k RPM drives they should have used SSDs which are much cheaper per IOPS. Thirdly since they didn't build it with more than 32GB RAM, why pick an expensive mobo supporting 128GB ? They could have saved $400 by choosing one with fewer memory slots supporting "only" 64GB.