Need powerful engineering workstation - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: David Spicer
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: April 04, 2016, 10:33:25 pm
content: I am looking for a seriously grunty Linux/BSD box, i.e. 4 core Xeon, maybe even two. Win things can be run in a VM. The box will be partly server, partly workstation. I used to go to Dell for things like that, but they seem to have gone down the toilet. Pushing Win7 and win10 at me. No thanks.I spoke to a nice enough person at Dell, and described my needs. But no one ever got back to me.Does anyone know a supplier that will assemble a powerful desktop engineering box?. Two Xeon, Big HDD, SSD, 16GB all the usual power engineering things? Solid works, Cadence, Xilinx tools and so on.I can go and buy the bits, and make it myself, but I really don't have the time. Who makes computers nowadays? I am concerned too, as I am hearing horror stories about Hard disks and EFI that won't let you install BSD/Linux and so on. I don't know if they are true, but rumours like that are very discouraging.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 05, 2016, 12:07:18 am
content: I bought a Dell Precision 5000 series tower model last year for a similar purpose. It is so extremely quiet that I needed some time to adapt to the absense of noise in my office. Also I added an SSD and extra hard drive myself. I did buy the Windows 8 in order to have a paid Windows 8/10 license to go with it but that was optional during the selection process. AFAIK only the higher end Dell models offer Linux as an OS choice hence you can deselect Windows.I second the suggestion for the NVidia card. This seems the only option left for video cards with good support for Linux. I have used Matrox cards for many years (15 or more) but their Linux drivers have not been updated for several years now (since 2009) so I had to switch.

author: David Spicer
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: April 05, 2016, 01:04:00 pm
content: Many thanks to you both. Excellent advice. I used to build PC's for a living, but that was back in the day. I know how they go together, but basically I'm ten years out of date. Had luxury of working for a big company in Taiwan, that just put the good stuff on my desk. The chinese don't believe in compromising on workstations. New one every year and so on. Nice!Things like PSU requirements and cooling were no brainers back then, but I'd guess that's changed a lot.Agreed about Nvidia. Need pixels but not game performance. Engineering needs two big monitors and preferably a third for a doc reader turned thru 90 degrees.That Dell pizza menu thing seems to have disappeared. Nice while it lasted.Had no idea you could get such massive Xeons. Tonzas Fun.So thanks, I'll start drawing up a spreadsheet.David

author: ChunkyPastaSauce
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 05, 2016, 01:21:40 pm
content: Xeon E5-1650 v3 (3.5Ghz, 6-core...OCable to 4+ GHZ but I dont)64 GB RAM, EEC, DDR4 2133MHz, operating in quad-channelFirePro W8100 workstation card with 8Gb ECC (This card is certified of solidworks, which you mention)ASRock X99-WS workstation motherboardDark Rock Pro heat sink (huge but almost no fan)EVGA 850 G2 PSU (quite and highly rated)Corsair Carbide 330R Titanium acoustic absorbing case$2000 1 year ago.For prebuilt, I took a look at the 5000 series dells last week... they look reasonably price to me.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 05, 2016, 02:16:11 pm
content: Regarding the number of cores: also look at what your processing workload does. FPGA synthesis is still a single core process (using 2 cores is actually slower on my PC!) so it might make sense to go for less cores and more GHz. For that reason I choose the 4 core 3.7GHz Xeon for my PC.

author: MrSlack
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 06, 2016, 09:38:03 am
content: HP sell nice workstations. Z840 goes up to 44 Xeon cores, 1TiB of RAM, 10 drive bays. Full official support for Linux (RHEL, SuSE, Ubuntu)Expensive but they last literally forever. I've got a Z620 an it's a wonderful bit of kit.