Parts for temporary new workstation which gets to become a gaming PC once Zen 3 Threadripper is available:
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X
Noctua NH-D15
ASUS Prime X570-Pro
4x 32GB G.SKILL 16-22-22-42 DDR4 3600
Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB
Fractal Design Meshify 2
Reusing an existing GPU and PSU.
Conversation
It gets to inherit a reference design GeForce 1080 Ti and 80 Plus Titanium PSU (EVGA SuperNova T2 850W). GPU can be replaced later when it gets to stop being a workstation.
Nice that I was finally able to get new CPU and other parts at proper retail prices. Chip shortage sucks.
2
6
Replying to
Why not spread your storage over multiple SSDs, partly raid 0, partly mirror?
1
Replying to
I've never had an SSD fail, let alone a high end one with high durability NAND and higher quality parts. It would be a major inconvenience but not a major problem beyond wasted time.
RAID only makes things worse with a high-end NVMe SSD. Already insane overkill performance too.
1
I prefer having fewer things that can go wrong and from my perspective, redundancy via RAID only adds more that can go wrong. If the SSD is going to fail, I need a new SSD anyway, and I'd rather just deal with that. I don't want to deal with another layer of latency/complexity.
1
Replying to
Look at the specs for samsung.com/semiconductor/.
5GB/s sequential write, 7GB/s sequential read, 1,000,000 QD32 IOPS, 60,000 QD1 IOPS.
It's immensely overkill for my needs. I need the Pro line because huge amounts of data is written but the performance is really not a factor.
1
It's substantially faster than the Samsung 960 Pro 2TB in my old workstation but that won't make any difference.
Having 128GB of memory means there's a massive amount of cached data and plenty of space to buffer writes.
Latency is something that does matter a lot though.
1
RAID hurts latency and IOPS. It's not really suited to the age of high-end NVMe drives. It's also really hard to actually be I/O bound with this kind of drive.
Latency is what really ends up bottlenecking performance for I/O for anything that I'm likely to do, not the rest.
I currently have 64GB memory and a 10 core / 20 thread CPU. For most of the workloads, upgrading to 128GB memory and a 16 core / 32 thread CPU will primarily provide a bunch of additional cache.
There's a downgrade from quad channel to dual channel RAM but it's much faster RAM.
1
This is only a temporary workstation until I can get a Zen 3 Threadripper CPU with 64+ cores hopefully around August/September. I didn't want to put a huge amount of money into Zen 2 Threadripper and I've been unable to actually get the parts that I wanted for a couple years.
Replying to
Good to know, Im resurrecting a development WS myself next week based on 2010-ish HP CAD CAM stations still laying around. If that doesn't perform I need to save up for what you did here.
1
Replying to
Basically, if you have mostly CPU-bound tasks, it's very wasteful to make far more threads for them than you have cores. You really don't want to be context switching. Data is ideally almost always cached and there's generally enough write buffer that write latency is irrelevant.
2
Show replies