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The lack of ECC in consumer grade CPUs is irritating, because when AMD was viable, they had ECC support in most of their CPUs (but you had to make sure the moth
by drewg123 11y ago
The lack of ECC in consumer grade CPUs is irritating, because when AMD was viable, they had ECC support in most of their CPUs (but you had to make sure the motherboard supported it). You could use a random AMD CPU + a motherboard supporting ECC & be sure of your data integrity.
These days I pay the "server" tax on the machines I build, buying Xeons just to get ECC. If they supported ECC, a normal i5 / i7 would probably be plenty, and the build would be less of a PITA as there would be more and cheaper motherboard choices with workstation basics like audio on board.
And yes, I use ZFS, and am otherwise pretty paranoid..
- dman 11y agoThe suitability of i5/i7 for most workloads hasnt gone unnoticed at Intel. I expect future i5/i7 to be gimped with respect to IO connectivity to ensure that people doing real computation continue to pay the Xeon tax. For reference see the bits about pcie lanes at http://semiaccurate.com/2015/08/05/intel-plays-press-skylake-stupidity/ http://semiaccurate.com/2015/08/05/intel-plays-press-skylake... . Another place where this shows up is the AVX 512 fiasco where AVX 512 is missing from consumer chips. Intel has some of the best engineers in the world and make exceptional products. I wish the beancounters at Intel were a bit less into market segmentation.
- Retr0spectrum 11y agoIf you don't mind buying slightly old and power hungry stuff, server grade hardware is actually much cheaper. 24GB DDR2 ECC RAM - £16 (I was VERY lucky to get this one) 2x Xeon X5450 - £22 Intel S5000PALR Motherboard - £30 These specs are roughly equivalent to a 2008 mac pro, which costs around £500.
- jotm 11y agoYeah, used HP Z600/Z800 workstations (dual hexacore Xeons and everything) go really cheap these days...
- Osmium 11y agoWhere do you get them from? I use a HP workstation at work, and I'm going to be sad to leave it when I leave my current job.
- jotm 11y agoeBay is a good place to go: http://www.ebay.de/itm/HP-Z800-Workstation-2-x-Xeon-6-Core-X5670-Ram-24GB-SSD-128GB-Quadro-2000-USB-3-0-/252004163277?hash=item3aac9e5ecd http://www.ebay.de/itm/HP-Z800-Workstation-2-x-Xeon-6-Core-X... The Lenovo Thinkstation C20 is also a good dual Xeon choice if you can live with a 24GB RAM limit (it's also very compact). There's also specialized resellers like ITSCO.de and ESM-Computer in Germany (they ship EU-wide). For ~$1000, a dual X5670 workstation with 12 ECC RAM slots, I think it's an excellent deal. If you want something newer, the Z820/Z620 are a good choice, they should start rapidly dropping in price soon enough. These computers are designed extremely well (the 800+ Watt PSUs alone are eons ahead of anything on the consumer market), but even in the rare cases they break the parts are cheap (a replacement system board for ~$100, older but still powerful Xeons also drop in price insanely fast). I don't know why people buy new midrange PCs for the same price anymore, unless they need the latest processors :-)
- Osmium 11y agoThanks very much for this. It's the Z620 I'm using at the moment, and I think it's excellent. Such a productive machine. Very nice internals too, logically laid out and seems like it'd be easy to upgrade in future.
- jotm 11y agoThe performance difference between Westmere (X5000 series in the Z600/Z800) and Sandy Bridge (E5 used in the Z620) looks negligible. The high end X5670 or X5690 should outperform all but the top first gen Xeon E5. It uses more power at idle, but the upfront cost is almost halved at the moment... I'd say you should get a unit with the highest end processors you can find (it will end up way cheaper than upgrading them) and preferably with the 1100 Watt PSU, the rest can be upgraded later and you should have plenty of power for anything (dual GTX 9xx for gaming and stuff :-))
- Perdition 11y agoWhat's the power cost per year compared to modern stuff?
- cft 11y agoAre there benchmarks comparing those X56nn with modern E5-nnnns ?
- delroth 11y agoThere are a few non-Xeon Intel CPUs supporting ECC: http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?s=t&RetailSkuAvailable=true&ECCMemory=true http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?s=t&RetailSkuAvailable=...
- louwrentius 11y agoBuilding some box with ECC memory using Intel is doable for a reasonable price. You don't need Xeon's for that. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16x6xeENVLNySuVxpjfLx4yOUDYP4qxUyFbTDbELHkrg/edit#gid=1721926988 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16x6xeENVLNySuVxpjfLx... Notice the two tabs for CPUs and Motherboards.
- wolfgke 11y agoBut as I see it, for Intel CPUs you can only use the rather slow ones (i3, Pentium, Celeron), not i5 or i7.