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."

Comments

What a waste

[icebike]

Windows Server 2008 Standard was installed, so the Four quad-core Opteron processors (appearing as 16 processors) will yield about the same performance as four single core processors.

Windows simply can't make effective use of that many processors. Oh, it will keep them busy, mostly chatting among themselves.

Anything over 4 on a windows platform is mostly a waste unless you go to the trouble of setting affinity of specific cores to specific virtual machines. (Which windows does not make trivial).

Re:What a waste

[icebike]

Why not do some research, where you will find I was being generous.

http://weblog.infoworld.com/labnotes/workflow-transaction-times.html

Re:What a waste

[icebike]

Realistically, the NT kernel has something like a 1% overhead, if that, especially for CPUs other than the primary. User-mode applications can cheerfully use 100% of each core, the kernel will not get in the way,

That's the most ridiculous thing I've seen on Slashdot all month.

You think just because task manager doesn't show you kernel time that its not doing anything?

Go back ad read the rest of the article.

Until Vista and Win7, Even Microsoft admitted that Windows was a poor platform for multiprocessor utilization. This was largely due to spinlocks.

Windows 7 is way better than Vista in this regard, and Vista is better than XP/2k. Win7 is expected to scale to 256x without wasting too much resources.

Re:Where have I seen this before?

[McKing]

Ummm, where is it said that Chewbacca lives on Endor? The Ewoks live on the forest moon that orbits the gas giant Endor. Chewbacca is from Kashyyyk. If he lives anywhere (i.e. has a home), it is on the Millenium Falcon.

(My dog's name is Chewbacca, how lame am I?)

Oh great more Mac propaganda

[Mike Buddha]

Great, now we'll be hearing from all the Mac-fanboys how much more cost-effective Macs are because they've got lower TCO than this $16K monstrosity. From previous experience, we'll be hearing about this for the next 10-15 years.

Re:For my fellow USians....

[Massacrifice]

It's United States of America, people! That makes us Americans.

Start by giving your country a REAL NAME instead of an acronym and then we'll stop calling you USians. The name "America" reprensents MUCH more than the "country with no name of its own that stands between Mexico and Canada". If you have to go back to your #$%^& constitution drawing board to refactor it, then so be it. NMFP, USian.

If you want to be called a Yankee, why not go with "Wankistan"? Oops! I meant... "Yankiguay"! Then you'd have a small reason to stir shit up in south america, being a virtual neighbor of Paraguay and Uruguay.