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This has been my life the last month. As of this weekend, you can add my son's broken arm to the auto accidents. He literally fell out of a tree (tree house) and broken his humorus just below the ball. Clean break, but it was completely offset and needed two pins to hold it all back in place! He'll be "sidelined" for 2 months. So, to stem the tide of craziness in my life, on to my the progress of my slow-moving workstation build.
There is in fact progress: I bought a Gigabyte (you were expecting something else?), GA-X99 Gaming 5p motherboard. It's a pretty high-end board in a high-end category, so yeah, it's nice. They currently sell on Newegg for just south of $400. I bought it for $90 shipped because it has some dinged up socket pins that need fixing. It's a calculated risk, but I've got my fingers crossed and have some time to be patient with it. In case you were wondering, I have in fact successfully straightened socket pins and the machine that was built out of it is still in operation a year later. I'm not going to get into a full on review here since there are some excellent ones already out there on this specific board, but I'll highlight some things that I specifically targeted that took me to this particular model.
I'm a bit of an audiophile, so the special audio section on this board was "a thing" for me. It's not only isolated on the board, but the components are very much in line with clean sound reproduction, down to the replaceable OpAmp and Burr-Brown DAC. This was the single reason why I went with the "Gaming 5p" vs the various other X99 board by Gigabyte.
The other big deal is the M.2 sockets that will allow me to use the latest and fastest interface out there for the primary boot drive. But that's only half the equation.....
In the M.2 world (roughly speaking), there are 3 types of drives. One is represented by the Sandisk X400 in the top image. You can in fact, get it in either a regular 2.5" SATA3, or the M.2 2280 form-factor, but they both run at the SATA3 speed which is maxed at 600MB/s. The only advantage of using this drive vs. a regular 2.5" drive is that it can be mounted on the board-mounted socket vs. a drive-bay requiring both a power and data cable. Then there's the next level of M.2 drives as represented by the Intel 600p. It does actually use the PCIe interface vs. SATA3 and has a read speed over 1000MB/s faster than the X400. That's a lot, but it's a cheap drive and it's write speed at 560MB/s isn't any better than SATA3 and in fact is actually slower than the X400!!! Yes, on your boot drive, you read way more than you write, but still.... that's really a half-measure, so why do it. Then there's this......
It's the Plextor M6e in the M.2 2280 package with, and without the PCIe card adapter. It's a full on PCIe interface with a throughput far in excess of SATA3. Those of you that have been looking into these things might have already seen that it's a 2 year old drive and that it's nowhere near as fast as the current crop of NVMe drives which represent the third group, such as the Samsung 850/860 drives and Plextor's own M8, but neither does it cost as much either. Yes, right now, the 512Gb capacity is $700 on Newegg, but I got mine for less than $120 shipped. These, like anything else are subject to "early adopters" who buy high, and keep on doing so, then sell off for pennies-on-the-dollar when something new comes along.
So, at this stage, I've got two of the four "new" pieces I need to buy to move on to the new workstation. It's going to get quite a bit harder and more expensive after this with the DDR4 ram and an i7 Haswell-E or Broadwell-E processor. The memory is going to cost me another $100 to $125, the CPU...... ah...... something along the lines of $300 for the "low-end", 5820K which is a mere Hex-Core clocked at 3.3Ghz. There's some growth potential here though; which is like a baseball scout saying that a skinny, lanky 6'6" 17 year-old lefty who throws in the high 80's has some projectability! The LGA-2011 v3, right now has processors that start with the 5820K at 6 cores and end with the ten-core 6950X. The chipset gives you 8 sockets for a max of 64Gb of RAM. The higher end processors have 40 data lanes, so you can put 4 graphics cards in it running at full tilt. I should be able to get some years out of they system.
Which brings me to this. Remember when I gambled on the "next-gen" monitor...... a 28" 4K ThinkVision Pro2840m for $126 being run by the GTX 770? Yeah, the original problem with it going into power-save came back. It detects but mostly refuses to fire up. So, I had to go to my backup plan (always have a backup plan), which was to call on the 2 more years of warranty left on this monitor and send it back to Lenovo for repair.
It's this thing's fault, and I'm sticking by my story! You might remember a month or so ago, I came across an nVidia GeForce GTX 770 on the local Craigslist listed for $100 or so dollars. I offered $75, thinking that I'd be happy to pay $85/90 for it, but the guy took the offer. Who am I to look a gift-horse in the mouth (although I do teach about the Battle of Troy)! I installed it. It runs great and is way more video card than my the old Radeon HD 7850. And as I've said any number of times in the past, (being a non-gamer), I don't need much in the way of GPU power. However, it was a good opportunity and I took it.
While looking into what this card would do and my options for connecting my 4 monitors, I began to examine my current video interface set up. It's been awhile, so I'll walk through it for you to set a baseline. I have 4 monitors running as a standard. I've had at least 3 for some years going back to when we lived in Lubbock and worked in IT. It allowed my to keep an eye on how the servers were running while doing other things as well.
At the time, I was using an 17.3" SGI 1600SW LCD which was pretty exotic at the time. Yes: in fact it is the one, more accurately, the ones depicted being used by the Hugh Jackman "hacker" character in the 2001 movie Swordfish. It was my main monitor that worked with a couple of 19"/20" Apple Displays running Trinitron tubes on either side. For 2001-3, that was a pretty high-end setup. I sold and gave away that rig when we moved to the DFW area, but would rebuild it after picking up an unusual (normal for me) an Acer version of their Ferrari line F20 display.
Imagine this monitor, but with all the red parts being silver and no Ferrari badge (of course). I don't even think it was sold in the US. It was 20" and I used a number of other unremarkable panels on the side(s) for some time. As things progress, I started getting more picky with LCD panels and wanted to get into an IPS type screen.
That's when I picked this up, the IBM ThinkVision L200p. In it's day, it was "the big dog" of LCD monitors and was very expensive. When I bought it, it was out-of-date and just being pushed out the door. I actually picked it up locally for $13! The guy advertised it on CL as a 17" and I thought it would go on the side of the 20" Acer quite well. But, once I got a taste of using this IPS panel, the Acer found itself being sold!
Then I found one of these, an ThinkVision L220x for about $100 shipped. It uses an S-PVA panel and is fantastic. Just as sharp as the L200p, but brighter. Not very long later, I found another one on Craigslist for $50 and jumped all over it.
That's when I progress from the above setup with, 1 L220x, 1 L200p, and a 19" Westinghouse TV to 2 L220x, replacing the tv with 2 19" L1940pwd panels. Oh yeah, that little display you see on the lower left was my ThinkPad Tablet connected via USB and used as a touch display. I rarely used it this way, but just wanted to see if it would work. So that's been the state of affairs with the display end of my computing rig for quite some time. I ran 2 Radeon graphics cards to drive these 4 displays and was quite happy. Right up until that trouble-maker GTX 770 came along and started me thinking!
Well..... that's actually, not quite right. I was playing around with the GTX 750 Ti that I had upgraded my son's gaming PC to when I decided to see if it would drive the 55" Sony TV at it's native 4K resolution. Whattayaknow! It did it! I wouldn't play games that way, but it worked. This started me thinking..... if that thing will do 4K, what about that new GTX 770?
You know; that thinking business can get you into some trouble.... I started looking into 4K computer monitors and even looking at 4K TVs as computer monitors. What I found was that the small (24") ones made everything so tiny at 3840 x 2160 that you couldn't see a darned thing. Although, the new inexpensive 27"/28" panels had come out, they were still $700 or so! Looking at used ones, I found that the big boys (Dell, HP, Lenovo) had, had some out for a few years and they could be found used, but still in the $400+ range, until I stumbled onto this:
A ThinkVision Pro2840m, 28" TN panel. Yes, it's NOT IPS, but those guys are still well over $1000, so no $1K for 4K for me. There was one on eBay that was listed at about $200 with a "best offer", so I offered $150. Oh, by the way, the guy said that it displayed the image as a tiny little thing at the top and it would go into "power save" mode and not come out. I suspected that issue to be user error with a GPU that wouldn't support the resolution or a cable that wasn't DP1.2 compliant. He came back to me at $165, but I never could get him to tell me how they tested it; so I let it pass. The following week, I saw it listed again, but this time at $150. I was busy getting ready and then going off to Washing DC on our family Spring Break trip, so I didn't do anything about it then either. When I came back, that monitor was again relisted, but this time at $126 (including shipping). I figured, "what the heck", I could risk it!
The box arrived yesterday. In between running errands and going to look for an new car (I'll discuss this later), I connected it. It detected and ran all on it's very own. I set it up with the 20" L200p on the right, and the 2 22" L220x on the left and ran it for several hours during which, it was amazing to have that amount of real estate (3840 x 2160, 1920 x 1200, 1920 x 1200, 1600 x 1200)! It is showing some issues with going into power save and not coming out, but I think that can be resolved, on top of which, I believe it's still under warranty.
