What Does a $16,000+ PC Look Like, Anyway? 495
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."
Where have I seen this before? (Score:5, Funny)
But can it play Crysis? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:But can it play Crysis? (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry, but while most of the gear meets the spec, the graphics card (a GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB) is far below the quad SLI triple GPU-on-a-card, 32GB of shared GDDR8 RAM (for Ray Tracing, of course) on a special bus with 120TB/sec throughput minimum spec for the next version of Crysis.
Re:But can it play Crysis? (Score:5, Funny)
If you have to ask, you can't run it.
Re:Where have I seen this before? (Score:5, Funny)
Really makes you wonder, what's that sound card for, considering they're running windows server and all.
Oh I'm sorry, it's there because it's expensive. My bad.
Re:Where have I seen this before? (Score:5, Funny)
This way when the server is crashing, instead of beeping it can yell out.
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Flamebait? Really?
Dude builds a $16,000 server that for all we know is just going to sit there and look cool, as well as run the occasional solitaire game. He deserves to be flamed.
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Re:Where have I seen this before? (Score:5, Informative)
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If that was the aim (personally I doubt it) then it's pretty retarded move. Once you get beyond the really budget stuff spending a lot of extra money only buys you a little extra usefull life.
I bet he could get a machine of half the power and similar characterists for less than half the price. If we assume software bloat tracks capability at a given price point and that in turn tracks moores law than a doubling in computing power only buys you an extra 18-24 months.
More than doubling your expenditure to ext
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Really makes you wonder, what's that sound card for, considering they're running windows server and all.
I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.
Server can use 4 cpu sockets vista / xp can not (Score:5, Informative)
Server can use 4 cpu sockets vista / xp can not.
As for the sound card just to have basic sound? some 2 and 4 cpus board don't have on board sound / crap on board sound.
Why choose Server 2008? Easy. (Score:5, Funny)
...Why would anyone choose to run Windows 2008 Server as their desktop OS...
Well, rumor has it he was going to run Windows Vista, but quickly realized that even $16K worth of hardware still only rates a 4.3 on the Vista perform-o-meter.
...and if this is not a desktop then why the fancy sound card?
Again, that's an easy one. Have you ever heard how beautiful a BSOD on Server OS is these days? No? That's because no one puts sound cards in servers anymore. You should check it out one time, rumor has it they actually hired John Williams to write the score for a page fault. Damn thing is even THX-certified.
This build is like Chewbacca, who is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk, but Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it; that does not make sense. I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense!
Yup, we're all in agreement. While they were at it racking up the $$$, they should have just contracted Porsche to design the damn case. Would have likely broke the $20K "barrier"
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There is also one other advantage of Windows Server 2008: Software RAID. I can have the OS mirror onto two drives without any dedicated RAID controllers, and can have a RAID array. Of course, there are plenty of inexpensive hardware RAID controllers out there, but when I had a controller glitch on me and fail the entire contents of a multi-terabyte RAID 5 array, I went to software RAID, and other than using a bit of CPU on a core for disk I/O (calculating parity and encrypting/decrypting through BitLocke
Re:Where have I seen this before? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Where have I seen this before? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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For $16.000 I expect a case with good enough ventilation to make sure my $16.000 investment doesn't turn into an insanely expensive paperweight after a single session of Crysis. And with that many fans, it's kinda hard to get something to look Ferrari-ish, whereas the whole "little mainframe" look fits that perfectly.
Re:Where have I seen this before? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Where have I seen this before? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [physorg.com] supercomputers supercomputer [wired.com].
Yes but... (Score:3, Funny)
Not advised, linux would run so fast (Score:4, Funny)
Not advised, while this rig might finally get you that elusive score 5.0 on vista, linux would run so fast it would be faster then the speed of light, catch up with itself so that if you ever decided to shut it down it would actually be shut down before you had it booted up, destroying the entire universe in the process and just try claiming that on your home insurance.
Re:Where have I seen this before? (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe... but only if you disable Windows Aero.
But will it blend? (Score:5, Funny)
But will it blend?
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I remember when.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I remember when.... (Score:4, Funny)
No kidding. Plus, compared with putting money in Citigroup stock, this is a better investment. At least it will have at least half its value next year!
And it runs Windows (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And it runs Windows (Score:5, Informative)
No.
$14,746
# Two 2.93GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
# 32GB (8x4GB)
# Mac Pro RAID Card
# 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
# 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
# 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
# 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
# ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB
# One 18x SuperDrive
# None
# None
# Apple Mighty Mouse
# Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad (English) and User's Guide
# None
# None
# None
# None
# None
# None
# None
# Mac OS X Server (10-Client)
# None
# None
# Mini DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI Adapter
# None
# None
# AppleCare Protection Plan for Mac Pro (w/or w/o Display) - Auto-enroll
Re:And it runs Windows (Score:5, Funny)
And: I also have this image of a great big store like Amazon littered with millions of electronic shopping carts, crowding the aisles.
Must go take my meds now.
... So $7000 in 2 years? (Score:2)
(Re: another poster, maybe they forgot to mention the video card, because it would be be ordinary.)
I get a kick out of the Time Value of computers. $16,000 feels like a high flown retail price that will tank.
Re:... So $7000 in 2 years? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why the 300GBx2 drives (Score:2)
What is the point of the two WD 300GB drives? They provide 300GB usable disk space, while the system has another 4TB of usable space. They are RAID1 -- just like the pair of Samsung drives. Are they just for show? Or to fill more of the available drive bays? Perhaps the builder could have covered the case with diamonds to make it more expensive?
Re:Why the 300GBx2 drives (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why the 300GBx2 drives (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd think that for $16,000 they could have put a couple SSDs in there.
Re:Why the 300GBx2 drives (Score:5, Funny)
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I've ordered my own new comp, it has a 150GB Velociraptor as bootdisk and 4x1.5TB Seagate as storage.
Faster bootdisk FTW :)
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Just RMA em, seagate will send you shiny new non-fucked ones :)
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Speed, plain and simple. They use the faster drives for whatever regular disk access they need, and stuff that does not get used as much or just does not need that much speed get shuffled off to the slower but larger drives.
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I'm guessing the answer's "speed". The VelociRaptor's are 10,000rpm, whereas the SpinPoints are 7200rpm.
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I suspect this is the system drive, where the OS will be installed. They are way faster than the Samsung, and can be configured for smaller block sizes.
Since it is Windows, you want to keep the OS on separate space since you know it is going to need reloading fairly often as viruses strike and new versions filter out.
The other RAID1 is probably working disk space, and will probably have some rather large blocking factors.
The RAID5 is probably planned for longer term bulk storage since it can be a tad slowe
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Nah, it's the reverse. No one would pay the premium for those velo's if they were just going to put the OS on them...The OS would go just as fast if it was in the other RAID 1 volume.
Well, unless the moron just wants windows to boot AS FAST AS POSSIBLE...Still FTFA it's going to be running 2008 Server, and Windows Server doesn't boot all that fast.
BAARF (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [miracleas.com]. 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.
Re:BAARF (Score:5, Informative)
Except he would need another drive to achieve the same storage.
Raid10 = 1/2 N * Size.
Raid5 = N-1 * Size.
Two drives failing before you can replace the first failure is fairly unlikely. The fact that they more than likely bought all the drives at the same time increases the odds that they will fail reasonably close to each other in time.
But having Two drives failing before you have time to replace the first failure is fairly unlikely.
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> Other drives made on the same line on the same day are likely to have the same manufacturing defect.
So what? They still won't fail at the same time.
I have had dozens of consecutively serial numbered drives in production in various raid farms over the years and never has two drives fail at the exact same time.
Often within several weeks of each other, but never in the same day or same week.
You think there is a built in Clock in these things with fail date pre-scheduled?
The myth of synchronized failure j
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The velociraptors are 10k rpm vs the more usual 7200rpm for the spinpoints; so they should be noticeably faster. (just as a 7200rpm desktop drive is noticeably faster than a 5400rpm or 4200rpm laptop hard drive.
Still, why not just drop in an SSD.
That aside I can't imagine there really being a point to the 3 sets of RAID drives here or than 'because I can'.
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What is the point of the two WD 300GB drives? They provide 300GB usable disk space, while the system has another 4TB of usable space. They are RAID1 -- just like the pair of Samsung drives. Are they just for show? Or to fill more of the available drive bays? Perhaps the builder could have covered the case with diamonds to make it more expensive?
I have not personally had any Microsoft software on my own computers for close to ten years, so I am not sure how much of what I am about to say would apply to Windows Server 2008. Having said that, the 300GB RAID-1 sounds like a good boot/system volume (on Linux, I would probably mount it at /, as the root partition) while the four 1TB drives in RAID-5 would be a good user data volume (i.e. /home in Linux) and maybe the 1TB RAID-1 volume would be good for supplementary storage (perhaps /usr or possibly fo
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Perhaps the builder could have covered the case with diamonds to make it more expensive?
I prefer rubies you insensitive clod!
I start with this motherboard ... (Score:2)
Just to get it out of the way (Score:2)
Beowulf cluster... Vista... Crysis...
Seriously? What would be the point of a system like that? Rather, what is the purpose of a system like that that can't be served by a cheaper alternative?
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Rather, what is the purpose of a system like that that can't be served by a cheaper alternative?
Bragging rights over throwing away 16k on a computer?
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I'm just trying to figure out what sort of moron expects 16 cores and 8 hdds to be quiet?
You could save yourself thousands just by ditching the "near-silent" requirement, and investing in some good earphones.
I'm going to agree with Ninnle; it's all about ostentation.
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It could be for a music studio. That doesn't quite explain the soundcard... but hell, throw it in for backup if we're already up to $15,800.
I could easily see a song with 50 tracks with filters needing the horsepower... to run comfortably.
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That's nothing, I've got a 150k PC one room over (Score:2)
Sadly you can't use it to run much of anything except PACS software. I'd love to give flight sim a whirl if quadro
Re:That's nothing, I've got a 150k PC one room ove (Score:5, Funny)
Mammography
It figures someone on slashdot would spend 150K for a computer that allows you to look at breasts.
giving up mod rights to comment here (Score:5, Informative)
1) Single Cooling Loop - with 4 quad-core processors, this machine could net much better bang-for-the-decibel out of a dual loop system - one loop handling one pair of processors, second loop handling the other pair. Optimally speaking, a quad-loop system (individual loops per processor) would net even better results.
2) Video cards have fans, too! - Find yourself a video card that uses cooling pipes or similar technology, rather than fans. Those little fans spinning really fast make _LOTS_ of noise.
3) Speaking of noise - WD300 Raptors? Congrats, you just put the noisiest modern hard drives in a machine "built to be quiet" - if no expense was to be spared, why is this thing not outfitted with Solid State Disks???
4) Problems with the liquid - in addition to number one above, the reservoir is mounted at the bottom of the case? That's an amateur mistake right there. Reservoir at top of case = any air infiltration gets trapped at the reservoir. Additionally, the "angled barbs" are 90-degree bends - not exactly what you want in a low-flow system, backpressure is going to kill that pump, or at least cause it to whine incessantly, even at lower flow settings.
5) PSU - Corsair HX 1000W PSU - why not a PC Power and Cooling ultra-quiet unit, or a SilenX-modded solid cap PSU? Instead, they opt for a PSU rated at 57dBm?
Amateur job, Puget, very amateur. If anyone feels the need to build a super-quiet box, they really should shop around and look into these type of issue, or suffer sever disappointment.
E
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They answered with the following: "Our client came to us with a need we hear often: he wanted a high performance machine, but wanted it quiet.
That's easy - stick the compute stuff in a rack in some other room and remote into it. rdesktop, X11, whatever.
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3) Speaking of noise - WD300 Raptors? Congrats, you just put the noisiest modern hard drives in a machine "built to be quiet" - if no expense was to be spared, why is this thing not outfitted with Solid State Disks???
That's not really accurate, the newest Velociraptors are 2.5" hard drives encased in a large 3.5" heatsink that also is very effective at quieting the drive. Anandtech measured extremely reasonable sound levels [anandtech.com] in its review, so I'd be careful before casting aspersions on that f
24 Samsung SSD's (Score:2)
Re:24 Samsung SSD's (Score:5, Interesting)
I inherited a $10,000 PC in 1999... (Score:5, Interesting)
It was purchased in the late nineties for a 3D artist at a dotcom; the company folded a year or so later. The few employees that stuck around received hardware in lieu of their final paychecks.
Dual 333 MHZ P3s. Nvidia Riva 2. Half a gig of ram. Dual 10k RPM 14GB U160 SCSI drives attached to a Adaptec 19160 (The 19160 *still* sells for at $100, 10 years later. Who knows how much it cost at the time...). High speed (for the time) Plextor SCSI CDRom reader and writer.
With a few minor upgrades here and there (video card, a little more ram, a few replaced power supplies), it remained my main system til about 2005. Even played WoW on it. The only real reason I don't use it anymore? Lack of 48-bit LBA support -- couldn't stick a drive larger than 137 gig on it, which in this day and age, just doesn't quite cut it for a desktop.
Replaced it about a year ago -- picked up $300 worth of parts at Fry's, and built a machine that out-spec'd the original in every way, except drive speed.
Those SCSI drives would still be sweet, if they weren't so damn small.
Re:I inherited a $10,000 PC in 1999... (Score:4, Informative)
When I hit that barrier on my old machines, I install Linux, which really just doesn't give a shit about BIOS limitations.
Sounds about right (Score:2)
'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.'
The specs needed to
I just bought an 8core Xeon w/64GB RAM (Score:5, Interesting)
No, not for personal use or gaming. It will run Linux with a Xen kernel and is intended to replace nearly all of our old individual servers. Everything from the piddly servers like DNS, LDAP, Kerberos, and our minimal web services to the AFS db servers. No file services on that beast though, I'm not crazy - no disk I/O-RAM access contention please. My plan is to copy an entire OS image of /usr into a RAMFS filesystem in the top level Dom 0 domain and then cross mount that as RO in each Xen instance. We'll also stick small SQL server and other dbs copies in local tempfs RAMdisks too. Everything in RAM will be snapshotted and saved to physical disk periodically. Those deltas will then be copied to a remote fail-over server periodically as well.
It should be both reasonably stable and blindingly fast.
Another machine will handle AFS and some NFS file services, which has up to sixteen SATA disks attached to two 8 port 3-Ware RAID cards, thus spreading I/O load across two PCI buses. No, we don't need all that disk space - we need the I/O performance. It too should be reasonably fast. We're gearing up to connect that either by several channel bonded 1Gb to a CISCO 6509, or - if we're lucky - we'll just go 10Gb optical. We'll see how the finances work out there.
This is how departmental IT is done. Or, at least, it's how it *should* be done. I spent less than $25K on these two computers and they will replace well a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of accumulated hardware purchased over the last ten years and now fully depreciated.
Re:I just bought an 8core Xeon w/64GB RAM (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Insightful? How about: Illiterate.
To wit:
This is how departmental IT is done. Or, at least, it's how it *should* be done. I spent less than $25K on these TWO computers [Emphasis mine]
He says, right there, that there are two of them. Oh, sure, the rest of the time he's referring to the purchase in the singular sense, but if he's doing it right, he's treating both the live system and its spare as a singular entity anyway.
Please learn to read before flaming. Thanks!
Apple Store (Score:5, Insightful)
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. :)
GeForce 8800 GTS (Score:4, Funny)
*Hey buddy, look what I ordered.. the coolest machine ever build to date.. Spend 16k on this little beasty.. bet you are jealous now huh?*
Cool, I bet this can run Crysis pretty damn fast!
*erm, no.....*
Pretty insane if you ask me.. Even if you don't have a use for a graphicscard.. you'd still have some pride right? :)
When someone builds one of these, I always think (Score:3, Insightful)
Build it yourself at HALF the price (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Compare that... (Score:3, Insightful)
Compare that to building the thing yourself, with the exact same components: probably under 1/3rd the cost.
At that price, he could almost justify a Mac Pro! (But seriously: a similar Mac Pro could likely be configured for less!)
Oh, and seriously: at $16k, I'd expect the system to be small, fanless, and near-hermetic. And, I'd like to see how "quiet" that system is in 12 months once the fans start to take a little wear.
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If I recall correctly from the comments on Tom's website, the buyer is using the machine to generate fractal art.
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Virtual instruments mostly. A lot of current audio plugins (VST/DX, no experience with macs) are real (and i mean REAL) CPU/RAM hogs. Today, even a simple fm synth with a bit of magical dsp thingamabobs is going to eat into your CPU big time. For instance, Image-Line's Sytrus, a brilliant software FM/Additive synth can eat anything up to 30% of processing time. As for RAM, there are gigantic sample banks out there, easily bigger than a blu-ray disc (Vienna Instruments for example) that don't come with a cus
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Oddly, Raid-5 (2D+1P) + an online hot spare == 4.
But, you know, that's just new math.
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If you want performance, avoid RAID-5 and go straight to RAID-10. RAID-5 has horrible write performance.
Re:And no SSD? (Score:5, Informative)
and yet when they go all out on a system like this, they don't even choose one as the system drive?
How very inconsistent.
Except Tom's Hardware neither designed this system nor was it the purchaser of the system. So I don't see what the inconsistency could possibly be.
Re:And no SSD? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, who has time to read the summaries anyway?
Re:What a waste (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What a waste (Score:5, Informative)
Making blanket statements like "Windows doesn't scale" is FUD. It's correct to say that Samba scales much better on linux than Windows 2003 File Server does on the same hardware. However, Oracle Database server scales equally well on both platforms.
As always... use the right tool for the job and make an informed decision. Which it sounds like you did for your environment. However, having supported Java App Servers, Seibel, Oracle, MS-SQL, etc. in HP/HA environments I can tell your blanket statement is not correct.
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That's a SPECIFIC application, which was not performance optimized, even by Microsoft's own admission.
The next version of that APPLICATION, released as part of .NET 4.0 has "10x" the performance. That SCREAMS unoptimized to me.
I've seen benchmarks of properly multi-threaded applications like video and image rendering software scale 1.9x or better on Windows.
Realistically, the NT kernel has something like a 1% overhead, if that, especially for CPUs other than the primary. User-mode applications can cheerfull
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Try not to speak authoritatively about things you clearly know nothing about:
http://www.rungeek.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/taskmanager2.jpg [rungeek.com]
And if you want detail:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc768048.aspx [microsoft.com]
The "poor utilization" in the article is a relative term. For most apps running under Windows, scalability to multiple CPUs is not hampered by the kernel. There have been improvements to I/O and networking on many-CPU servers, but it's just a fine tuning, not a massive leap forward.
60
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And once you get out, you wonder why you haven't heard anything except ringing in your ears...
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Well, if you read TFA you'd know that they put all those fans in there so they could run them on their lowest settings, and thus be quiet.
You'd also know that the PSU they bought is loud as hell, and that they didn't mod the graphics card to do water cooling, so it's going to be howling like a little buzzsaw.
For my money, air cool the mofo with the fans running full out, and then blow 500 bucks on the best pair of noise cancellation headphones money can buy. Or just put it in a server cabinet.
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Who the hell are "USians"? And what is their relation to UKians?
UKians? No such thing.
They're GBese, you insensitive clod!
Re:For my fellow USians.... (Score:5, Informative)
It's United States of America, people! That makes us Americans.
Unfortunately (or fortunately), the USA does not constitute all states of America, so people living in those states are also technically Americans (just like all people living in European countries are Europeans, people living in Asian countries are Asians, and people living in African countries are Africans). Unfortunately, the citizens of the USA have appropriated the term to refer exclusively to themselves, and many people in other countries consider such narrowing of the scope of the term inappropriate.
Me, I think the idea of rewriting the dictionary definitions when they're already well established, for good or bad, is silly. But they do have a point regardless.
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Seriously, for the individuals that want to Nitpick about the name, there is no place called "America".
Right, and wrong. Under the US' educational system, South America and North America are distinct, separate continents, but for other countries the continent is America and the division of north, south and sometimes, central is solely to simplify reffering to areas of such a large continent. Like East Asia or Northern Africa, neither of which is a separate continent.
I'm pretty sure that "North American" is universal understood to be someone from any country in North America.
Not really. Since most people in latin-speaking countries understand "American" as "someone born in the continent of America", on most dubbings
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I think that 50 [cheap netbooks] would be pretty quick in a Beowolf cluster. (Well... an XP gaggle... but I digress)
Depends on your problem, but for most of them the network latency is a killer if you're trying to do it over wifi. My guess is the sweet spot for most use cases is more like 10 mid-end desktops with gigabit ethernet connected via a reasonably high end switch.
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Depends on whether space is expensive for you or not.
First assuming space is not at a premium
Netbooks/nettops have atom processors with only one core, low clocks and not brilliant performance per clock. For double the price you can probablly get a desktop with a quad core processor with each core being faster than the atom in the netbook/nettop
Server hardware is way more expensive than desktop hardware per unit of CPU power. OTOH for some workloads the larger ram and caches may be a superlinear benifit.
So d