The Refitted "Blackbird" Workstation Flys!!!

It's been a long haul, but my rebuilt workstation is finally up. I will have to say that it's a little strange to open up the Resource Monitor and see 16 cores running! So let's start there.

The heart of any high performance vehicle is the engine. And looking at the SR71 "Blackbird's" huge engine, you can see why it's a legendary plane. It was said that they pretty much only needed one answer when a SAM was launched at it......, that was to go faster!

 

At the heart of my rebuilt workstation is the Xeon E5-2630L processor. It's a bit of a weird part in the computer world. It's clocked at a low 1.8ghz, so only consumes 55 watts, which isn't very much given that it's got 8 physical cores and being hyper-threaded functions as 16 cores to the operating system. Which basically means that it doesn't do anything super fast compared to say, an i7 or i9, but it can do a LOT of different things pretty fast all at once. 

Right now, it's being fed by 2 8Gb modules of Corsair Dominator RAM, but with a total of 8 sockets available, I can max out at 64Gb total some day in the future.

It's all plugged into a Gigabyte X99-Gaming G1 board. The X99 chipset and the boards that they live on, is what make this thing workstation level. 8 RAM sockets, M.2 compatible, 40 lanes of access to the processor! Actually, I had started out with one of these which had dud processor pins that I never did get fixed. Then last week, I bought an Asus X99-3.1U board that had some issues with POSTing, which has to go back to Canada. So now this. There are two other parts to this build that make it my main machine for the next several years. 

A couple of weeks ago I traded for an nVidia GTX 970 which takes over the graphics duties for my old GTX 770 which looks just like this, except that it's less powerful and consumes twice as much power.

The last major component is the Plextor M.2 NVMe drive that will take over the boot drive duties. Theses things are quite a bit faster than my old Intel SSD connected through SATA3. The mass storage and optical drive stays the same, as do the old complement of monitors.

 

I supposed I'm about as happy as I can be with another rebuild put to bed.

The "Next Level" Workstation

And so it begins...... the project to upgrade my "Blackbird" workstation. It's current configuration of Intel Z77 chipset powered by an i7-3770 of the "Ivy Bridge" generaton has just about run it's course as a front-line workstation.

My decision is to move away from the "enthusiast" route toward the true workstation hardware.  Which means choosing a processor from the Xeon line instead of the consumer oriented "Core" line. These CPUs pretty much can't be overclocked, which is something I don't engage in anyway. Of course, there are other features as well, after weighing the pluses and minus, I decided a high core count and low cost was the way to go leading me to a Xeon E5-2630L which is a low powered (55w) chip with 8 cores on board! I decided that even at a slow 1.8Ghz clock speed would be fine for 16 hyper-threaded cores. For what I do, and it's $85 cost, this would be a great LGA-2011-3 starting point.

 Of course, there's always a "fly in the ointment" in one way or another. Right now, it's the cost of DDR4 memory. So, I'm going to start with 16Gb. I know...... woe is me!!! Well, it is a downgrade for me since I'm running with 32Gb right now. I'll get 16Gb more at some point in the next year which will get me halfway to the 64Gb capacity. I can live with that. Other bugs?

 

Well..... there is this little thing..... I bought a board that was inexpensive because it has some bent pins. So, yeah.... I have got a tedious little task in front of me to get them all straightened. It isn't a trivial task, but I've done it before.

A fun weekend to look forward to, but after that....... Blackbird Mk II flies again!