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.