Workstation Interrupted..... and Then Detoured!!!

This has been what my personal computing world has been like for the last 2 years! In September of 2017, I wrote a blog post on my workstation rebuild project. At that point, I had acquired the motherboard, processor and memory. Everything was pretty much in place to move on to the build itself! Then a number of things happened:

• For my birthday (October) of that year, I got a gun. Subsequently, I've been very involved in all things firearms!
• I started coaching the swim team at my school. We'll just say that it's time consuming, and exhausting and leave it at that....
• Since that time, my children have turned 12&15, then 13&16, which is in and of itself exhausting, but has included things such as teaching my son how to drive, as well as dealing with a teenage daughter...... enough said......
• I found out that the X99 motherboard steadfastly remained dead, despite my best efforts, so it went to Gigabyte warranty depot. Which is why you buy from a quality manufacturer.
• Gigabyte had a glitch and forgot about my board for about 6 months.....
• Gigabyte now has no more of the X99 boards to replace it and we are now going back and forth as to what to do about this situation.....
• MS Windows 7 support is ending, and I've been dealing with ours' as well as clients' machines.

You can see, what that above picture is about now.

After I sent the X99 to Gigabyte, I decided to pull out one of my old computers as a stop-gap measure, expecting that it would do email and some light web surfing for a month or two at worse. 8 months later .....I finally took it off of my desk and put the old warhorse out to pasture. For those who don't recognize it off-hand; it's my old "Tomcat" build. It's an IBM (which should be your first clue), Z61m running a Core2Duo processor with a chipset so old that it has a 3Gb limitation! Which goes to show that for what most people do (email and web-surfing), they don't need the latest and greatest. In any case, although it was slow and occasionally a little annoying to use, I was grateful to have it. On to the next thing.....

....And this is the next thing. An ASUS Rampage III Extreme with an Intel i7-950 processor and 6 sticks of 2Gb Dominator memory that I picked up for $50 about 3 years ago off of Craigslist. It has the X58 chipset and was from the 1st generation of Core CPUs! I'm using it because I'm tired of not being able to use my monitor rig, including the 28" 4K panel. I spent a few hours this last Saturday getting it up and running. I've got to say that for a 2011 motherboard, it runs (Windows10) pretty well, especially compared to the old ThinkPad! 

As of yesterday, Gigabyte and I are in the process of negotiating a mutually agreeable replacement for the X99 board. They asked me for a chipset and I prudently asked for a Z370 board vs. the X299 which would be a direct replacement in the product line. However, after some research, it turned out to have some hardware limitations that would have boxed me into some very specific (read expensive) hardware that I didn't want to get involved with. Much like my new philosophy about my cameras, I've decided to give up on some dreams for a more practical a outcome. Despite the "Z" chipsets being more "consumer" oriented, it will do everything I need it to do. There was just no sense in spending more money on spec that would have been meaningless. I'll explain more when I detail the build in a future post. 

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!

New Project: Part 1 My Solution for Life's Craziness

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.