5 ms·

The God Box (2004)

37 points by ecliptik 7y ago

sharkjacobs 7y ago
> A floppy drive is still a basic tool for system construction In 2004! I grew up using Macs, so this is wild to me. In my candy coloured little world the floppy drive was finished in 1998 when Steve Jobs told me it was.
- Maakuth 7y ago
  IIRC the recommended way to provide possibly missing storage drivers to Windows XP installer was via floppy disk. XP was the go to Windows version in practice until Windows 7 release in 2009!
  - imglorp 7y ago
    After they got tolerances figured out, 1.44 mb floppies were dependable and just about 100 pct guaranteed on all PC hardware, from whiteboxes to servers, oscilloscopes, routers, even clunky laptops. They made sense for little stuff like sneakernet and drivers for a long time.
    - himinlomax 7y ago
      Just curious, why do you write "pct" instead of using "%"?
      - HocusLocus 7y ago
        Why did you write out the entire word why instead of 'y'?
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        himinlomax 7y ago
        You do realize that the entire word would be "percent," don't you?
- hoistbypetard 7y ago
  I remember being horrified in 1998 when they killed the floppy. As a mac repair tech, we used them constantly, and the cost increase from shifting to boot cds was maddening. By 2004, I'd made my peace with it and had stopped including them on my PC builds.
- Rerarom 7y ago
  I got my first computer in 2000 and used floppies all the time in 2000-2002 to share files with my best friend. My next PC in 2004 also had a floppy drive, though I used them less and less often (I used CD-Rs in 2005, and then USB sticks starting in 2006). Only in 2008 I had a PC (laptop) with no floppy drive.
Sam_Harris 7y ago
Site is useless on mobile devices
dmayle 7y ago
The total price is just a hair of $9.7k ($13,290 is 2020 dollars) It's interesting looking at the breakdown, because in some cases prices are similar, and I think in some other cases, the smart money has changed. For instance, a really high end motherboard (X570 or threadripper) will still be in the $500 range, but there are now available options going up to $800. The closest CPU option is 32 cores 3970X TR, but it runs $2000, not the $2400 they spend (again, 2020 dollars) 256GB of DDR4 ECC RAM (instead of 4GB) will cost about $1200, not the $1350 spent. GPU options, however, will run into $1200 for an RTX 2080 Ti rather than the $800 they spent. SCSI cards are no longer necessary, as NVME is the smart play, and PCIE 4.0 is the high-end play. They only spend $600 on the system drive ($827 if you include the controllers), but for a God Box, I'd put in an Optane PCIE card for $1300. For $1440 in storage drives, you're either looking at dual 4TB SSDs if you want SSD speed, or an external 4-bay NAS with 3 8TB drives. Optical drives are out, which just leaves backup and case. I know nothing about tape storage, so I won't comment on that, but in the case world, you now have interesting options like the TureMetal UP10 which allow you to run this system entirely fanless, but for somewhere in the $700-$1000 range.
- greggyb 7y ago
  > The closest CPU option is 32 cores 3970X TR, but it runs $2000, not the $2400 they spend (again, 2020 dollars). Sticking to HEDT, rather than server components, the 3990X is available, appropriately enough, at $3,990 retail. This is 64 cores. > 256GB of DDR4 ECC RAM (instead of 4GB) will cost about $1200, not the $1350 spent. This is not possible as a combination right now. Threadrippers (as is the case for all mainstream and HEDT processors from AMD) can only use unbuffered DIMMs. The largest unbuffered ECC DIMM I have been able to find is 16GB, which maxes out at 128GB with 8 DIMM slots (I haven't seen larger for any TR motherboards). > For $1440 in storage drives, you're either looking at dual 4TB SSDs if you want SSD speed, or an external 4-bay NAS with 3 8TB drives. If it's a capacity play, you can easily get more than 3x8TB if you install into the tower directly, rather than a separate NAS. Especially with Threadripper, the motherboards tend to be large and 3rd gen need massive cooling solutions. There should be room for at least 4-8 3.5" drives in the tower. Still, the modern god box is a good sight better than the old one.
gok 7y ago
Would get a single threaded Geekbench score of around 250, similar to that of a 2013 iPhone.
- RachelF 7y ago
  are the Geekbench benchmarks equivalent across versions of Geekbench?
  - gok 7y ago
    They are normalized but also they've run this chip on Geekbench 5: https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/708 https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/708 [Technically, that's an Opteron 275 instead of a 250, but they're quite similar. 250 was clocked a bit higher but had slower memory and no SSE3]
ytjohn 7y ago
I was trying to figure out why, if money was no object, they chose 4GB of RAM vs the 16GB they said the board supported. Then I remembered about the 32-bit OS 4GB limit. While XP 64-bit came out in 2001, it was only for Itanium 64-bit processors. It wasn't until 2005 that XP and Server 2003 would have supported 64-bit, and therefore anything over 4GB. Kind of a difficult time to plan your system build, here 64-bit processors are out, motherboards capable of supporting vast quantities of ram, but unable to utilize that outside of Linux. However, this "God Box" would have been excellent for 2004. Then in 2005, you could upgrade to XP Pro 64-bit, and go ahead and spend your unlimited funds to quadruple your RAM.
- 2J0 7y ago
  My 2005 Dell dual Xeon 3.9Ghz box with 8GB RAM is floating around, we used VMware and more memory than that though and the nvidia card has half a gig and my box had four 15k 146GB Fujitsu drives on a LSI R10 with iirc 1GB BBU RAM cache , this was fiscal 04 iirc
- hnuser123456 7y ago
  Physical Address Extension would've been an option, no?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
time0ut 7y ago
Oh wow ars old site design is making me nostalgic.
- RachelF 7y ago
  Yeah, back in the days before their 2007 Conde Nast pivot and they moved towards softer stories.
hnuser123456 7y ago
firefox document.getElementsByTagName("td")[15].width = "85%";
firecall 7y ago
Old Ars Nostalgia! New Ars isn't a patch on what it was. But then the world has changes I guessed. Ars seems to be more about TV show reviews these days :-/
greggyb 7y ago
Pretty timely, LTT has published one of their appropriately-named "Compensator" builds, where they make the most obscene off-the-shelf PC possible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkfbg-sHwDo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkfbg-sHwDo

The God Box (2004)

37 points by ecliptik 7y ago

> A floppy drive is still a basic tool for system construction In 2004! I grew up using Macs, so this is wild to me. In my candy coloured little world the floppy drive was finished in 1998 when Steve Jobs told me it was.

Maakuth 7y ago
IIRC the recommended way to provide possibly missing storage drivers to Windows XP installer was via floppy disk. XP was the go to Windows version in practice until Windows 7 release in 2009!
- imglorp 7y ago
  After they got tolerances figured out, 1.44 mb floppies were dependable and just about 100 pct guaranteed on all PC hardware, from whiteboxes to servers, oscilloscopes, routers, even clunky laptops. They made sense for little stuff like sneakernet and drivers for a long time.
  - himinlomax 7y ago
    Just curious, why do you write "pct" instead of using "%"?
    - HocusLocus 7y ago
      Why did you write out the entire word why instead of 'y'?
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - himinlomax 7y ago
        You do realize that the entire word would be "percent," don't you?
hoistbypetard 7y ago
I remember being horrified in 1998 when they killed the floppy. As a mac repair tech, we used them constantly, and the cost increase from shifting to boot cds was maddening. By 2004, I'd made my peace with it and had stopped including them on my PC builds.
Rerarom 7y ago
I got my first computer in 2000 and used floppies all the time in 2000-2002 to share files with my best friend. My next PC in 2004 also had a floppy drive, though I used them less and less often (I used CD-Rs in 2005, and then USB sticks starting in 2006). Only in 2008 I had a PC (laptop) with no floppy drive.

Sam_Harris 7y ago

Site is useless on mobile devices

dmayle 7y ago

The total price is just a hair of $9.7k ($13,290 is 2020 dollars) It's interesting looking at the breakdown, because in some cases prices are similar, and I think in some other cases, the smart money has changed. For instance, a really high end motherboard (X570 or threadripper) will still be in the $500 range, but there are now available options going up to $800. The closest CPU option is 32 cores 3970X TR, but it runs $2000, not the $2400 they spend (again, 2020 dollars) 256GB of DDR4 ECC RAM (instead of 4GB) will cost about $1200, not the $1350 spent. GPU options, however, will run into $1200 for an RTX 2080 Ti rather than the $800 they spent. SCSI cards are no longer necessary, as NVME is the smart play, and PCIE 4.0 is the high-end play. They only spend $600 on the system drive ($827 if you include the controllers), but for a God Box, I'd put in an Optane PCIE card for $1300. For $1440 in storage drives, you're either looking at dual 4TB SSDs if you want SSD speed, or an external 4-bay NAS with 3 8TB drives. Optical drives are out, which just leaves backup and case. I know nothing about tape storage, so I won't comment on that, but in the case world, you now have interesting options like the TureMetal UP10 which allow you to run this system entirely fanless, but for somewhere in the $700-$1000 range.

greggyb 7y ago
> The closest CPU option is 32 cores 3970X TR, but it runs $2000, not the $2400 they spend (again, 2020 dollars). Sticking to HEDT, rather than server components, the 3990X is available, appropriately enough, at $3,990 retail. This is 64 cores. > 256GB of DDR4 ECC RAM (instead of 4GB) will cost about $1200, not the $1350 spent. This is not possible as a combination right now. Threadrippers (as is the case for all mainstream and HEDT processors from AMD) can only use unbuffered DIMMs. The largest unbuffered ECC DIMM I have been able to find is 16GB, which maxes out at 128GB with 8 DIMM slots (I haven't seen larger for any TR motherboards). > For $1440 in storage drives, you're either looking at dual 4TB SSDs if you want SSD speed, or an external 4-bay NAS with 3 8TB drives. If it's a capacity play, you can easily get more than 3x8TB if you install into the tower directly, rather than a separate NAS. Especially with Threadripper, the motherboards tend to be large and 3rd gen need massive cooling solutions. There should be room for at least 4-8 3.5" drives in the tower. Still, the modern god box is a good sight better than the old one.

gok 7y ago

Would get a single threaded Geekbench score of around 250, similar to that of a 2013 iPhone.

RachelF 7y ago
are the Geekbench benchmarks equivalent across versions of Geekbench?
- gok 7y ago
  They are normalized but also they've run this chip on Geekbench 5: https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/708 https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/708 [Technically, that's an Opteron 275 instead of a 250, but they're quite similar. 250 was clocked a bit higher but had slower memory and no SSE3]

ytjohn 7y ago

I was trying to figure out why, if money was no object, they chose 4GB of RAM vs the 16GB they said the board supported. Then I remembered about the 32-bit OS 4GB limit. While XP 64-bit came out in 2001, it was only for Itanium 64-bit processors. It wasn't until 2005 that XP and Server 2003 would have supported 64-bit, and therefore anything over 4GB. Kind of a difficult time to plan your system build, here 64-bit processors are out, motherboards capable of supporting vast quantities of ram, but unable to utilize that outside of Linux. However, this "God Box" would have been excellent for 2004. Then in 2005, you could upgrade to XP Pro 64-bit, and go ahead and spend your unlimited funds to quadruple your RAM.

2J0 7y ago
My 2005 Dell dual Xeon 3.9Ghz box with 8GB RAM is floating around, we used VMware and more memory than that though and the nvidia card has half a gig and my box had four 15k 146GB Fujitsu drives on a LSI R10 with iirc 1GB BBU RAM cache , this was fiscal 04 iirc
hnuser123456 7y ago
Physical Address Extension would've been an option, no?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

time0ut 7y ago

Oh wow ars old site design is making me nostalgic.

RachelF 7y ago
Yeah, back in the days before their 2007 Conde Nast pivot and they moved towards softer stories.

hnuser123456 7y ago

firefox document.getElementsByTagName("td")[15].width = "85%";

firecall 7y ago

Old Ars Nostalgia! New Ars isn't a patch on what it was. But then the world has changes I guessed. Ars seems to be more about TV show reviews these days :-/

greggyb 7y ago

Pretty timely, LTT has published one of their appropriately-named "Compensator" builds, where they make the most obscene off-the-shelf PC possible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkfbg-sHwDo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkfbg-sHwDo