6 ms·

That Magical Word: Workstation

63 points by smackeyacky 5y ago

DanTheManPR 5y ago
His point about enterprise gear being a good value on the secondhand market is well taken. I've refreshed old optiplex workstations with some new components, and given them to kids and organizations who need a new computer, and they work great. Besides being cheap, they're also designed for easy maintenance.
- pnutjam 5y ago
  Business class is where it's at. Especially for laptops. A latitude is going to outlast and inspiron any day, and you can get parts for about a decade.
nunb 5y ago
Ran IRIX back in the day and the thing I most remember is display postscript with zoomable everything. Today a resto-modded [1] ThinkPad is probably a better choice, featuring repairability, 64GB max RAM, three storage drives, docks, usb-C, a choice of modern hi-res display screens, openboot etc. (1) https://www.xyte.ch/shop/x2100-pricing/ https://www.xyte.ch/shop/x2100-pricing/
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  Irix! When I got my MFA in '88 we had Mac IIs, Amigas, and a SGI workstation. There was a huge difference: the macs/amigas sat quietly on the work desks in their sleek beige boxes, the workstation was about 3'x2'x3' box with roaring fans that whirred menacingly from beneath the desk, and took up all legroom.
fwipsy 5y ago
These laptops can actually be upgraded with newer GPUs as well. They use a modular graphics card standard called MXM 3.0B, although not all GPUs are compatible. Seems like the 980m and 970m are popular choices: https://www.userbenchmark.com/System/HP-EliteBook-8760w/3989 https://www.userbenchmark.com/System/HP-EliteBook-8760w/3989
kerneloftruth 5y ago
I was working at IBM in the 1980s when they came out with the term "workstation" -- many of us winced at such a terrible term and concept. They did that to market PCs to corporate customers. The term takes the machine from a place where you can invent and create to one where you simply toil. IBM chose the lucrative corporate customers in doing so, letting Apple fully own the "creatives" (artists, musicians, advertisers, ...).
- mxuribe 5y ago
  That's fascinating! Is there anything you can share about any less-enterprise, more "creative" alternative names that might hjave been considered? My initial guess was someone probably suggested "CreateStations...but that doesn't roll off the tongue as smoothly as "workstations"...BTW, I always interpreted the "work" portion in workstations as a machine *working for me*...though i totally get they "toil" perspective you noted.
jncraton 5y ago
The following generation machine (8770w) is my daily driver at home. If anyone else is thinking about getting a laptop like this, I maintain a little site that sifts through, cleans up, and sorts the current eBay listings: https://createdtolast.com/laptops https://createdtolast.com/laptops Select "workstation" from the size drop down to see only 17 inch machines.
- csdvrx 5y ago
  Only i5 and i7 as CPU choices? That's not a workstation. For me, having a Xeon (for ECC) defines a workstation.
gruez 5y ago
>On the second desk at SmartShepherd I normally have the first laptop I bought when the company started: an Acer that sported 16gb of memory, ATI graphics and an AMD A10-9600p processor. When I bought it, the research indicated that bang-for-buck this machine was pretty good. It turns out that it was garbage, the main culprit being that A10-9600p. The processor had specifications that suggested it should be about as fast as a mid-range Intel i5 (2017 is when I purchased it). Did the author only look at the core/frequency and concluded "it should be about as fast as a mid-range Intel i5"? Surely someone who's technically savvy like him would know to look for benchmarks? If we look up benchmarks for the AMD A10-9600P[1] and compared it to a "mid range i5"[2], we see that the intel is about 50% faster despite having approximately the same frequency and half the cores. [1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-A10-9600P-Bristol-Ridge-Notebook-APU.173188.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-A10-9600P-Bristol-Ridge-No... [2] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Core-i5-6300U-Notebook-Processor.149433.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Core-i5-6300U-Notebook-P...
- geocrasher 5y ago
  I have to admit that one of the conclusions I came to already in this article is that the author is bad at choosing a good laptop. Acer isn't exactly known for their high quality and reliability. And after his bad experience with the first one he went and bought another one. Great taste in the old stuff, though!
  - grp000 5y ago
    Yeah, everyone in the enthusiast space knew all bulldozers were dogs compared to basically any Intel offering, but the market iterates so quickly it's easy to get out of date.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  OP here. Sure I suck at buying laptops (the Acer Nitro isn't bad though). In the bad old days, you used to simply look at the frequency and it would pretty much tell you the performance, and at the time I bought the A10-9600p laptop I did exactly that. I have learned since then that the simple approach to buying anything with a multi-core CPU doesn't work like it did a decade ago. Some of us are slow learners!
phendrenad2 5y ago
Off-lease business-class hardware is a goldmine. I've converted several old Dell Dimensions and Optiplex machines into decent gaming machines by adding a GPU and a higher-end CPU.
- bserge 5y ago
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  OP here. My office is populated pretty much exclusively with older HP gear. Some resellers offer 2 year warranties making them extremely attractive compared to buying something new. Mostly I reformat the drives and install Debian on them, which is always an instant 30% speed increase for development work. Can't say I have done a lot of gaming on them. The laptop from the article does have Wolfenstein "The New Order" from 2014 on it that I did for an experiment, and it's surprisingly snappy. As development machines though, just unbeatable.
- LogicWolfe 5y ago
  This is true with ultra books as well. 3 or 4 year old Thinkpad X1 Carbons or XPS 13s are an easy cost savings and quality improvement compared to low or even midrange contemporary competitors.
  - grumpyprole 5y ago
    Batteries last 3-4 years and can already be very hard to get hold off after that time. I had a tough time sourcing a genuine replacement battery for my 4 year old X1 Carbon. It's a shame as otherwise the user replaceable battery would be a huge advantage over e.g. a MacBook.
  - t0mas88 5y ago
    The older XPS "developer edition" models with a lot of ram and an SSD also make very good home servers. Power usage at idle is a fraction of what you would otherwise use and the performance is great.
- 5y ago
kitsunesoba 5y ago
For a while around 2012 or 2013 I was using a circa-2008 Dell M4400 workstation laptop. It cost me $350 used on Craigslist, complete with docking station and HDD caddie, and it absolutely beat the pants off of anything you could buy new at that point for twice and probably even three times as much money. It came with a 15.4” 1920x1200 display, 2.80Ghz T9600 Core 2 Duo CPU, Nvidia Quadro FX 770M (GTX 9600M equivalent) GPU, 8GB DDR2 RAM, a hotswap bay, wifi/Bluetooth card, and WWAN slot and a ridiculous number of ports, including 4x USB, full size DisplayPort, and gigabit Ethernet (and that’s before docking it!). Its only real downfall is an odd design decision to bridge a large gap between the heatsink and GPU with a thick thermal pad, which was fixed by replacing the pad with thermal paste and a copper shim. I don’t have a lot of use for it now, but I’ve upgraded it to a 2.53Ghz QX9300 Core 2 Quad (socketed CPU!!), Samsung SSD, and an Intel Wifi 6+Bluetooth 5 card just for fun. With all that, it’s quite serviceable nearly 14 years after manufacture when running a lighter modern OS and good adblocker. The value on that machine is probably among the best of any tech purchase I’ve ever made.
- laurensr 5y ago
  You made me realize again how much I miss the 1920x1200 screen of my HP 8740w. I'm on a ZBook now, and even though full HD, or a multiplier thereof, is more standardized, I still miss 16:10 enormously.
  - kitsunesoba 5y ago
    The good news is that 16:10 is finding its way back into laptops. The Thinkpad X1 Nano I bought last year is 16:10, as are several other Thinkpad models refreshed recently. Same is true for the XPS 13/15/17 models. Also, Apple has stuck to 16:10 with MacBook Pro’s this entire time, with exception of the latest 14” and 16” models, which are 16:10 but with extra vertical pixels for the menubar to “live” in.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  How are the batteries doing? Keep an eye on those, old laptop batteries can sometimes behave in weird / dangerous ways. See reddit 'spicypillows' for some examples.
spydum 5y ago
The HP mobile workstation lines were incredible, often coming with great displays (WUXGA; 1920x1200 17").. but they weighed a ton, and struggled to fit in most bags. Acer made some similar gaming rigs. I used to build product demos that didn't need internet access (you could easily load them up with 16gb memory and SSD's, and run multiple VMs with excellent performance).
everyone 5y ago
I have one of those. An 8770w. It was a beast of a laptop at the time I got it. I inherited it, I would never have bought one, they were ludicrously overpriced imo. I used the crap out of it for years. It started suffering from what seemed to be extremely bad overheating, where it would auto-shutdown, eventually only being able to run for less than a minute before shutting down. I tried replacing thermal pads + thermal paste but to no avail. Maybe the heat pipes were broken. If anyone wants it hmu. Ships from Ireland tho.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  Good to know. This 8760w runs at reasonable temps but I will keep an eye on it.
madengr 5y ago
jjevanoorschot 5y ago
This brings back memories. My university offered this laptop to students at a reduced price. I carried it everywhere with me even though it was thick and heavy as a brick. I was jealous of students with a fancy MacBook, but it ran Matlab like a champ.
jdworrells 5y ago
About two years ago, I was researching this very topic and ended up with an HP z400 workstation. I maxed out the RAM at 48GB, put in the best Xeon available, put in a mid-range video card, and installed a SATA 2 HBA and SSD. It idles just under 100 watts which isn't ideal but it's been a fun project and a great workstation. I see it like buying an older car and fixing it up. It takes some knowledge and research, it's not as fast or sleek as a modern car, but it's YOURS and you know it inside and out.
- nunb 5y ago
  Similar to what car enthusiasts do, restomods are probably the sweet spot for performance and ownership.
Shikadi 5y ago
Was the A10 really that bad back then, or did Acer nerf it with poor cooling or slow ram? I remember a time when the A series chips were a good buy, but that may have been substantially earlier than 2016
- geocrasher 5y ago
  Probably both. I've never been impressed with any A series CPU. They've always seemed far slower than they should be for their specifications. Back in the early 2010s everybody was excited the AMD was going to be coming out with multicore bulldozers and pile drivers. But they bombed out pretty hard. And he made some choices that made sense at the time but didn't pan out. They fixed it with the Ryzen.
- toast0 5y ago
  The AMD Bulldozer architecture was really not great. And the updates weren't much better. Zen was a huge improvement. The integrated GPUs were always significantly better than Intel, and sometimes the pricing was great, but if you wanted good CPU performance, in that time frame, you needed an Intel and the latest "core" architecture was usually the right choice. And then Intel stalled around Skylake/Kaby Lake.

63 points by smackeyacky 5y ago

His point about enterprise gear being a good value on the secondhand market is well taken. I've refreshed old optiplex workstations with some new components, and given them to kids and organizations who need a new computer, and they work great. Besides being cheap, they're also designed for easy maintenance.

pnutjam 5y ago
Business class is where it's at. Especially for laptops. A latitude is going to outlast and inspiron any day, and you can get parts for about a decade.

nunb 5y ago

Ran IRIX back in the day and the thing I most remember is display postscript with zoomable everything. Today a resto-modded [1] ThinkPad is probably a better choice, featuring repairability, 64GB max RAM, three storage drives, docks, usb-C, a choice of modern hi-res display screens, openboot etc. (1) https://www.xyte.ch/shop/x2100-pricing/ https://www.xyte.ch/shop/x2100-pricing/

SavantIdiot 5y ago
Irix! When I got my MFA in '88 we had Mac IIs, Amigas, and a SGI workstation. There was a huge difference: the macs/amigas sat quietly on the work desks in their sleek beige boxes, the workstation was about 3'x2'x3' box with roaring fans that whirred menacingly from beneath the desk, and took up all legroom.

fwipsy 5y ago

These laptops can actually be upgraded with newer GPUs as well. They use a modular graphics card standard called MXM 3.0B, although not all GPUs are compatible. Seems like the 980m and 970m are popular choices: https://www.userbenchmark.com/System/HP-EliteBook-8760w/3989 https://www.userbenchmark.com/System/HP-EliteBook-8760w/3989

kerneloftruth 5y ago

I was working at IBM in the 1980s when they came out with the term "workstation" -- many of us winced at such a terrible term and concept. They did that to market PCs to corporate customers. The term takes the machine from a place where you can invent and create to one where you simply toil. IBM chose the lucrative corporate customers in doing so, letting Apple fully own the "creatives" (artists, musicians, advertisers, ...).

mxuribe 5y ago
That's fascinating! Is there anything you can share about any less-enterprise, more "creative" alternative names that might hjave been considered? My initial guess was someone probably suggested "CreateStations...but that doesn't roll off the tongue as smoothly as "workstations"...BTW, I always interpreted the "work" portion in workstations as a machine *working for me*...though i totally get they "toil" perspective you noted.

jncraton 5y ago

The following generation machine (8770w) is my daily driver at home. If anyone else is thinking about getting a laptop like this, I maintain a little site that sifts through, cleans up, and sorts the current eBay listings: https://createdtolast.com/laptops https://createdtolast.com/laptops Select "workstation" from the size drop down to see only 17 inch machines.

csdvrx 5y ago
Only i5 and i7 as CPU choices? That's not a workstation. For me, having a Xeon (for ECC) defines a workstation.

gruez 5y ago

>On the second desk at SmartShepherd I normally have the first laptop I bought when the company started: an Acer that sported 16gb of memory, ATI graphics and an AMD A10-9600p processor. When I bought it, the research indicated that bang-for-buck this machine was pretty good. It turns out that it was garbage, the main culprit being that A10-9600p. The processor had specifications that suggested it should be about as fast as a mid-range Intel i5 (2017 is when I purchased it). Did the author only look at the core/frequency and concluded "it should be about as fast as a mid-range Intel i5"? Surely someone who's technically savvy like him would know to look for benchmarks? If we look up benchmarks for the AMD A10-9600P[1] and compared it to a "mid range i5"[2], we see that the intel is about 50% faster despite having approximately the same frequency and half the cores. [1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-A10-9600P-Bristol-Ridge-Notebook-APU.173188.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-A10-9600P-Bristol-Ridge-No... [2] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Core-i5-6300U-Notebook-Processor.149433.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Core-i5-6300U-Notebook-P...

geocrasher 5y ago
I have to admit that one of the conclusions I came to already in this article is that the author is bad at choosing a good laptop. Acer isn't exactly known for their high quality and reliability. And after his bad experience with the first one he went and bought another one. Great taste in the old stuff, though!
- grp000 5y ago
  Yeah, everyone in the enthusiast space knew all bulldozers were dogs compared to basically any Intel offering, but the market iterates so quickly it's easy to get out of date.
smackeyacky 5y ago
OP here. Sure I suck at buying laptops (the Acer Nitro isn't bad though). In the bad old days, you used to simply look at the frequency and it would pretty much tell you the performance, and at the time I bought the A10-9600p laptop I did exactly that. I have learned since then that the simple approach to buying anything with a multi-core CPU doesn't work like it did a decade ago. Some of us are slow learners!

phendrenad2 5y ago

Off-lease business-class hardware is a goldmine. I've converted several old Dell Dimensions and Optiplex machines into decent gaming machines by adding a GPU and a higher-end CPU.

bserge 5y ago
smackeyacky 5y ago
OP here. My office is populated pretty much exclusively with older HP gear. Some resellers offer 2 year warranties making them extremely attractive compared to buying something new. Mostly I reformat the drives and install Debian on them, which is always an instant 30% speed increase for development work. Can't say I have done a lot of gaming on them. The laptop from the article does have Wolfenstein "The New Order" from 2014 on it that I did for an experiment, and it's surprisingly snappy. As development machines though, just unbeatable.
LogicWolfe 5y ago
This is true with ultra books as well. 3 or 4 year old Thinkpad X1 Carbons or XPS 13s are an easy cost savings and quality improvement compared to low or even midrange contemporary competitors.
- grumpyprole 5y ago
  Batteries last 3-4 years and can already be very hard to get hold off after that time. I had a tough time sourcing a genuine replacement battery for my 4 year old X1 Carbon. It's a shame as otherwise the user replaceable battery would be a huge advantage over e.g. a MacBook.
- t0mas88 5y ago
  The older XPS "developer edition" models with a lot of ram and an SSD also make very good home servers. Power usage at idle is a fraction of what you would otherwise use and the performance is great.
5y ago

kitsunesoba 5y ago

For a while around 2012 or 2013 I was using a circa-2008 Dell M4400 workstation laptop. It cost me $350 used on Craigslist, complete with docking station and HDD caddie, and it absolutely beat the pants off of anything you could buy new at that point for twice and probably even three times as much money. It came with a 15.4” 1920x1200 display, 2.80Ghz T9600 Core 2 Duo CPU, Nvidia Quadro FX 770M (GTX 9600M equivalent) GPU, 8GB DDR2 RAM, a hotswap bay, wifi/Bluetooth card, and WWAN slot and a ridiculous number of ports, including 4x USB, full size DisplayPort, and gigabit Ethernet (and that’s before docking it!). Its only real downfall is an odd design decision to bridge a large gap between the heatsink and GPU with a thick thermal pad, which was fixed by replacing the pad with thermal paste and a copper shim. I don’t have a lot of use for it now, but I’ve upgraded it to a 2.53Ghz QX9300 Core 2 Quad (socketed CPU!!), Samsung SSD, and an Intel Wifi 6+Bluetooth 5 card just for fun. With all that, it’s quite serviceable nearly 14 years after manufacture when running a lighter modern OS and good adblocker. The value on that machine is probably among the best of any tech purchase I’ve ever made.

laurensr 5y ago
You made me realize again how much I miss the 1920x1200 screen of my HP 8740w. I'm on a ZBook now, and even though full HD, or a multiplier thereof, is more standardized, I still miss 16:10 enormously.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  The good news is that 16:10 is finding its way back into laptops. The Thinkpad X1 Nano I bought last year is 16:10, as are several other Thinkpad models refreshed recently. Same is true for the XPS 13/15/17 models. Also, Apple has stuck to 16:10 with MacBook Pro’s this entire time, with exception of the latest 14” and 16” models, which are 16:10 but with extra vertical pixels for the menubar to “live” in.
jacquesm 5y ago
How are the batteries doing? Keep an eye on those, old laptop batteries can sometimes behave in weird / dangerous ways. See reddit 'spicypillows' for some examples.

spydum 5y ago

The HP mobile workstation lines were incredible, often coming with great displays (WUXGA; 1920x1200 17").. but they weighed a ton, and struggled to fit in most bags. Acer made some similar gaming rigs. I used to build product demos that didn't need internet access (you could easily load them up with 16gb memory and SSD's, and run multiple VMs with excellent performance).

everyone 5y ago

I have one of those. An 8770w. It was a beast of a laptop at the time I got it. I inherited it, I would never have bought one, they were ludicrously overpriced imo. I used the crap out of it for years. It started suffering from what seemed to be extremely bad overheating, where it would auto-shutdown, eventually only being able to run for less than a minute before shutting down. I tried replacing thermal pads + thermal paste but to no avail. Maybe the heat pipes were broken. If anyone wants it hmu. Ships from Ireland tho.

smackeyacky 5y ago
Good to know. This 8760w runs at reasonable temps but I will keep an eye on it.

madengr 5y ago

jjevanoorschot 5y ago

This brings back memories. My university offered this laptop to students at a reduced price. I carried it everywhere with me even though it was thick and heavy as a brick. I was jealous of students with a fancy MacBook, but it ran Matlab like a champ.

jdworrells 5y ago

About two years ago, I was researching this very topic and ended up with an HP z400 workstation. I maxed out the RAM at 48GB, put in the best Xeon available, put in a mid-range video card, and installed a SATA 2 HBA and SSD. It idles just under 100 watts which isn't ideal but it's been a fun project and a great workstation. I see it like buying an older car and fixing it up. It takes some knowledge and research, it's not as fast or sleek as a modern car, but it's YOURS and you know it inside and out.

nunb 5y ago
Similar to what car enthusiasts do, restomods are probably the sweet spot for performance and ownership.

Shikadi 5y ago

Was the A10 really that bad back then, or did Acer nerf it with poor cooling or slow ram? I remember a time when the A series chips were a good buy, but that may have been substantially earlier than 2016

geocrasher 5y ago
Probably both. I've never been impressed with any A series CPU. They've always seemed far slower than they should be for their specifications. Back in the early 2010s everybody was excited the AMD was going to be coming out with multicore bulldozers and pile drivers. But they bombed out pretty hard. And he made some choices that made sense at the time but didn't pan out. They fixed it with the Ryzen.
toast0 5y ago
The AMD Bulldozer architecture was really not great. And the updates weren't much better. Zen was a huge improvement. The integrated GPUs were always significantly better than Intel, and sometimes the pricing was great, but if you wanted good CPU performance, in that time frame, you needed an Intel and the latest "core" architecture was usually the right choice. And then Intel stalled around Skylake/Kaby Lake.