Solved Recommendations for new workstation

achix said:
yes greek prices.
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Could you please point us to whatever store site(s) you are looking at?

achix said:
PSU was midrange. What can go wrong with it?
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"Midrange" would be something 80+ certified, this one is merely one step above "I'm feeling lucky" tier. On the positive side, if that Russian-language review linked above is to be believed, this is a typical CWT (a relatively reputable OEM manufacturer) PSU, so you aren't at risk of being electrocuted or dying in a fire. On the negative side, its has the cheapest possible capacitors and stuff, so its ability to work 24/7 under any significant load (the key "workstation" attribute) is questionable. Probably makes quite a bit of fan noise as well. Voltage regulation is not great, but that part is somewhat overrated. I believe the rule of thumb used to be that excellent voltage stability is important for overclockers and everyone else should be happy with the ATX spec, but now that everything is auto-boostable I honestly have no !@#$%^& idea what that means in practice.
 
I had similar problem several months ago. My old Phenom II 1045T@(Gigabyte 790gx/16GB DDR2/Radeon6970) machine started reporting problems with memory. Decided to built a "new one", but not to spend too much money on it. My requirements were: as many cores/threads as possible (development/virtualization), as much RAM as possible (development/virtualization), at least 3.5GHz core frequency (decent compilation times), at least SATA3 capable (I didn't care for NVME), graphic card 4K capable (development).
My first idea was buying some 1st gen Threadripper 1920x 12c/24. It's price was reasonable ~$300 but the price of motherboard twice that much. I gave up. There were also another thing I didn't quite like. All the motherboards, extension cards around were made for "gamers" with "preferred" RGB aesthetics - which I'm not fan of - it's a distractor for me. I'm aware that I can turn it off - but then why spend money on feature I don't like/use. I was looking for boring looking parts. I spent some time researching, looking for hardware dedicated for servers/workstations - mainly Tyan and Supermicro, server processors and so on. I decided on ancient Tyan S7010 (~$100) motherboard, two Xeons X5690@3.46GHz/6c/12t (each $50), 48GB DDR3 ECC@1333MHz (~$100, yes server memory is cheaper and comes in bigger sticks), Nvidia Quadro K2200 (~100$), and because Tyan S7010 is only SATA2 capable I had to bought additional HBA (LSI 9212-4i - $30). Additionally I bought new PSU Seasonic Focus 750W (~$150) and two brand new SSD disks 256GB for /root and 500GB for /home (both WD, green and blue respectively) (~$100 for both). The only thing I have left from my old machine was chassis - ancient Chieftec (BH-01B-U3-OP) - it's heavy, ugly, without cable management holes or nice tampered glass but with Extended ATX (SSI EEB) support.

I use this machine for programming with 4k@40" TV/monitor with tiling window manager (xmonad) - no need for additional monitors, no additional distractors.

Instead of regular UPS I bought solar inverter 😅 with additional 100Ah accumulator and embedded it in my desk - no fancy UPS management/control but I can work for hours when I'm cut off power.

Final words: I'm not claiming it's the only and the right way to build "new workstation" . It's defnitely not. It's just a funny (and to some extent risky option - no guarantee for most of components) for building decent machine for even more decent money.
 
shkhln said:
That's nice, but Ryzen 5800X will outperform both of them simultaneously at most (all?) tasks.
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For 3x/6x bigger price and not giving 3x better performance - but it's not important, I want to avoid discussion about newer CPUs being faster - yes, they are.
 
It depends on whether you care about noise and/or power consumption or not. Raw performance indeed is not the point.
 
My recommendations: use ECC RAM, buy an AMD CPU, go with an NVIDIA graphics card, use zfs-mirrored NVME system disks.
 
achix said:
www.plaisio.gr
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https://www.plaisio.gr/anavathmisi-...afikon/zotac-vga-geforce-gt-1030-2-gb_3625699 for 130 € is obviously better than GT 730 for 140 €. (You don't need VGA, do you?) The latter card is a Kepler card, which means it's going out of support somewhere around 2024-2025. Nvidia typically provides support for 10-12 years since the corresponding architecture release year.

Alternatively https://www.plaisio.gr/anavathmisi-...apphire-vga-radeon-rx-6400-pulse-4-gb_3951979 at 190 € might be worth it purely from the longevity viewpoint. (Assuming it actually works, which is not a given with AMD's GPUs.) I don't think it's supported on FreeBSD at the moment, though.
 
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