Question $1,200 Work Prebuilt

[polloave]

Approximate Purchase Date: This month

Budget Range: Less than $1,250 + taxes

System Usage from Most to Least Important: Parallel processing CPU and CUDA, programing

Are you buying a monitor: No

Parts to Upgrade: Need a full new computer

Do you need to buy OS: No

Preferred Website(s) for Parts: None

Location: Chile, I'm taking into account that taxes+shipping will be around $300

Parts Preferences: Nvidia GPU

Overclocking: No

SLI or Crossfire: Not sure

Additional Comments: The computer must be a prebuilt, as my grant will only pay for a single "thing"

And Most Importantly, Why Are You Upgrading: I recieved a grant and they gave me funds for a PC, I need it to do diferent kinds physics simulations using MPI (parallel computing) and I'll soon start using CUDA.

Thank you for your time.

 

[Eximo]

Couple of Dell Vostros that are worth looking at. Not going to get much in the way of CUDA cores for $1200. Maybe a GTX1050Ti or GTX1060 and a decent i7-8700 or something.

You might want to look at refurbished workstation systems with larger Quadros in them. Amazon and Newegg will carry quite a few.

But if you are talking local, no idea where to find that equipment in Chile.

 

[Eximo]

Tons of these things out there. Kepler, Maxwell, even a few low end Pascal Quadros with high core count Intel chips.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA68F7NB4534

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA68F7K08604

 

[justin.m.beauvais]

It isn't really easy to link a specific load out here, but you could check out Dell or HP. They have sections in their stores which are specifically for professional developers.

For Dell you want to look at their Precision Workstations. You can get a quad core Xeon with hyperthreading and a Quadro P1000 for a fairly reasonable price.

For HP they have their EliteDesk and Z systems. You can get similar loadouts.

You'll have to play around with configurations quite a bit to get the most for the money... but honestly the budget is the limiting factor here.

 

[polloave]

Thank you for your answers! I forgot to say I already have access to a cluster, so this computer's objective would be testing programs, or running small scale test.
Though I want them to run fast.
I looked into some of the systems, like https://www.newegg.com/global/cl-en/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA68F7K08604 and they seem quite good, but the cpu and the gpu don't seem really good.

Why would it be better than a pc like https://www.newegg.com/global/cl-en/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883230437 ? It seems to have a much better cpu and gpu.

In simple I don't understand the advantage of these "workstation" pc over the "gamer" pc.

And if you say the issue is money, I could ask for more money, I just need to show a good justification. (like showing how much faster it would be to solve a problem)

 

[Eximo]

Those were just examples in the $1000 range. They have many configurations on offer. I believe they are actually assembling the components at time of purchase. All of their listings say additional GPUs, disk controllers, etc on offer. It depends entirely on the type of work you are doing if high core count CPUs, ECC memory, ECC GPUs, etc are all worth it to you. If you can get away with a gaming card and standard memory, there are plenty of lesser workstations to look at.

Most workstations are designed for high output or long duration, vs off the shelf consumer grade hardware which isn't. Down to the quality of power supplies, motherboards, etc. ECC just makes them practically crash proof. Usually louder and faster than your typical desktop.

We have some of those Dell precision towers at work, but they vary in usage and capacities. Many of them have a single high frequency 8-core CPU, others have dual 12 cores at a lower, but still decent speed. 64-128GB of memory, and at time of purchase I think we ended up with P4000, and a few guys running Teslas. They stopped making them a while back, not sure what is on offer now in terms of GPUs and core count configs.

HP and Lenovo offer similar.

You could always hit up a boutique builder and order a custom PC with whatever parts you want. That does add to the final cost a bit.

The key here is we don't really know what you are doing. So if you have some sliding scale with architecture/CUDA/Time or know how the CPU performance effects your testing.

 

[ElectrO_90]

Dell also has a great second hand market as well. Should easily pick up some bargains there.

 

[justin.m.beauvais]

It would be easy to just say that workstation hardware is "professional grade"... but it isn't appreciably different than normal desktop hardware in most cases. The CPUs are largely the same as their consumer counterparts, with the exceptions being normally lower clock speeds for stability and power savings, and support for ECC memory. Motherboards are sometimes just lower featured but better built and more stability focused, other times they are purpose built with special features useful to different tasks. RAM is usually in higher quantities and comes in ECC (error correcting) or normal flavors. Power supplies are usually higher quality. Cases lack RGB. Hard drives are specific to the tasks with options from Intel's excellent Optane NVME options to high capacity, long life enterprise grade mechanical drives, and everything in between.

The real difference is in graphics cards. Through slight design tweaks and driver changes AMD and NVidia can make normal consumer chips perform a LOT better in productivity software. AMD's workstation cards are usually pretty close to their desktop gaming cards. There isn't a lot of difference between a Radeon WX workstation card and a Radeon RX gaming card. As such you can use them fairly interchangeably. NVidia, in classic NVidia fashion makes it a s#$% show. You have the consumer cards, the GTX and RTX options that have very poor relative performance in productivity tasks compared to NVidia's own Quadro cards, which use the same GPUs. Then you have Creative drivers for those that enable some of the lost performance at the loss of some gaming performance. Then you have the Quadro cards, which CRUSH productivity... and are relatively good for gaming as well. It makes no sense. Why not just have one line of cards for gamers and one line for professionals that use the same hardware, like they already do, and the same drivers, like they kinda can do, and call it good for everyone with the board partners making component choices and what not to make the professional line more reliable. Instead they sell Quadros for thousands of dollars when a gaming card with the same GPU chip, but some features turned off, goes for hundreds.

Ok, that was a little bit of a rant... but the takeaway is that there are different graphics cards for workstation class hardware.

When it comes down to it, a gamer PC and a workstation PC are pretty much the same thing until you start getting into high end configurations. You could easily get a computer with an i5 9400F and an RTX 2060 and be fine for productivity. Since your system will be more focused for programming than rendering, database, scientific computation, or engineering, you could pretty easily get away with a consumer grade machine.