What Does A $16,000+ PC Look Like, Anyway?

[ayach]

serial design water cooling!!!!! very bed slution for this machine

 

[Guest]

As for serial cooling design, I'm no expert, but I would expect the downstream CPU's to be quite a bit warmer than the first processor, just due to how much the water temperature increases as it flows from CPU to CPU.

Also, as for the customer getting ripped off/no SSD's, crappy graphics, etc. I would imagine the customer went to Puget already knowing exactly what he wanted. I don't think anyone would contact a company and tell them they want a "super quiet $16,000 computer" without some idea of what they wanted inside of it.

 

[Shadow703793]

[citation][nom]Luscious[/nom]I've been building water-cooling rigs for many years. I see 3 problems with this setup:Running 4 cooling blocks in series is going to create a ton of back pressure, and that particular pump on the Koolance, while quiet, is not a very powerful one.90 degree barbs are a big no-no for a watercooling setup, they create even more back pressure making the pump work harder.You never place a reservior at the bottom. It should be at the top of the case where it is the highest component in the water loop so as to minimize the formation of air bubbles in the other components.I don't know how well their setup runs, but I would be very surprised if it goes for a year without something breaking somewhere.[/citation]
QFT. Well said! The CPU blocks aren't the best either (GTZ FTW!).

 

[ilikesoup]

Who in their right mind would buy a machine like this with a 1 year warranty. Where I work we never buy any computer over 1000$ with less than a 4 year warranty. As for applications, one that I think that it would be pretty suitable for is someone who wants to do testing or programming for virtuilization. They could run this as their desktop machine with dozens of virtual machines running simultaneously.

 

[Aerobernardo]

One comment to rule em all:
Still can't play Crysis on very high with 60fps

 

[Aerobernardo]

One comment to rule em all:
Still can't play Crysis at very high with 60fps

 

[Guest]

With all that processing power & RAM, he's clearly hoping to run Vista on VMWare.

 

[Guest]

I can built a $8K air-cooled system that would do the same job, if not better. Pick the benchmarks, pick the real word applications. I am willing to bet my $8K system for this challenge. But if I win, I want $16K in cash because, that system is totally useless.

 

[stoner133]

You would think for $16,000 they could have used all compression fittings in the water loop.

 

[donkeypunch]

It's good to see people cutting back during this "recession". 😛

 

[y2kserver]

maybe if it can,
1. push air from fan to radiator(in out heading front cast) can take up to 5"C lower.
2. reserator must on upper slot
3. using splitter for each flow to cpu for better cooling performance(decrease impact)
this is a hyper system, cause i have only 2 CPU for eight core. great work. but most of people will use THERMALRIGHT EXTREME for it low noise and good cooling performance.

 

[sunwoo]

Hope the stimulus package isn't paying for this!

 

[sunwoo]

Hope the stimulus package isn't paying for this.

 

[sunwoo]

Hope

 

[zodiacfml]

i'll sacrifice the case window and place the radiator there.

 

[yobigd20]

LOLOL. This dude got RIIPPPED off!! HAHAHA. The company is laughing all the way to the bank.

Lets try to sum up all the errors and mistakes!

1) sub-par reservoir and pump, there are much better reservoirs and stronger pumps (needed here!!) that could have been used
2) the blocks being in 'series', this means each cpu in the series will not be cooled as well in sequence, as well as loss of pressure flow. hence the need for stronger pumps. There should have been at least 2 loops here or separate reservoirs and placed in parallel to optimize cooling.
3) the use of AMD cpus. For this amount of money, he could have waiting a few more weeks. The Xeon-based nethalems are due out this month!! march 29th i think is the release date.
4) the dude is looking for performance and not a single SSD was used!! TERRIBLE!!
5) $16k and P.O.S. video card was used! hahaha. That card is how many releases behind now, like 4 or 5? lol.
6) 90 degree barbs used. BIG NO-NO!!! the loss of pressure flow here is going to be huge!
7) reservoir tubes is at the bottom of the loop, Luscious is correct about problems with air bubbles and flow.

8) the price! hah. those components added up don't even come close to 16k. What a moron for not knowing this. I understand Puget needs to make a profit, but cmon! I probably could have done the same for half the price (guesstimate). so like 8k profit for maybe two or three days worth of work building the pc. I'm in the wrong business! I should get into the business of ripping off people, it's so much more profitable!!

I could rip on some of the other choices of components, like the fans. Scythe is the best I believe, but since he was going for 'quiet', i won't pick on them for this because I didnt check the db level and cfm of those fans.

Also, it does look like $**t. no custom case or paint job for that amount of money = 🙁

I won't be surprised if some of the cores start burning out in a few weeks due to the very poor design.

 

[Guest]

meh server geek...digitalstorm pc's >

 

[MonsterCookie]

[citation][nom]anoni[/nom]I can built a $8K air-cooled system that would do the same job, if not better. Pick the benchmarks, pick the real word applications. I am willing to bet my $8K system for this challenge. But if I win, I want $16K in cash because, that system is totally useless.[/citation]

I would not be soooo much self confident if i would be you. In supermassively parallel applications under Linux like CPMD (or even in PWscf) your $8k system would bleed out in a few minutes. In fact, if you do not have enough memory or large enough number of CPU cores, your system might just crash right after WF initialization.
What is your system anyway? From $8k you cannot put so many things in it nowadays when all components cost an arm and a leg. And forget about Xeons in this category, because in these builds AMD is still far superior. Hopefully the new Xeon will be better, and finally AMD have to cut back a bit on the prices.

 

[rubix_1011]

Not really sure why these builders always use Koolance when there are far better solutions on the market. More than likely it's due to the 'dummy panel' pump/res and pretty lights. You would really need a Liang/655-based pump to push that many blocks and that massive radiator.

Agreeing with Luscious on 'why would you place the reservior at the bottom'?

 

[heltoupee]

[citation][nom]christop[/nom]What is this for... I would love to know? Too much money and no brains?[/citation]
I'm thinking CAD or video rendering. Or you may be right, too.

 

[Guest]

waste of money, its got to be for vid editing or virtualization. I'd guess the former

 

[justaguy]

That price really is nutty for what he gets. It appears that the customer paid at least $10,000 for a water cooling setup that is less than ideal. Had it been air cooled, even with the $800-900 retail price of the mobo, it wouldn't run nearly half the $16k sticker here.

 

[garydale]

OK, he's got a good mainboard and CPUs with sufficient memory. And he's got RAID for storage. However, without redundant power supplies, the whole thing can be shut down by a minor component failure. Moreover, the cooling system also represents a single point of catastrophic failure. If the cooling fails the system shuts down. If the coolant leaks, the system could fry.

There's a reason why server boxes are noisy. They rely on massive amounts of air flow through redundant fans to keep things cool. Any fan or power supply could fail and the system keeps running. When you want to pack a lot of powerful components into a box, you need to expect failure and this design doesn't.

For the money, I'd look at getting a good server box and putting it in a soundproof container instead.

 

[scook9]

call me crazy, but core i7 with overclock to 4GHz gives you the same power as this system, 8 virtual cores runing with twice the speed => 16 cores at 2 GHz. You can get 24GB onto most x58 boards (albeit, at a hefty price for 4gb DDR3 sticks - and currently not ECC). Then you are looking at 1 cpu block to cool. With the ASUS and DFI x58 matx boards, you could even do this in sff haha. And oh yeah, air cooling is only loud if you are cheap, 120mm tower coolers with GOOD fans, quieter than a hard drive.

Anyways, for that price, have a custom program made for use on CUDA, throw 4 gtx 295 into one system, and enjpy a huge amount more paralell processing ability. Something to think about.

 

[hellwig]

[citation][nom]scook9[/nom]call me crazy, but core i7 with overclock to 4GHz gives you the same power as this system..[/citation]

You're crazy. The hyper-threading "cores" on the i7 only run during wait cycles for things like I/O. With the faster memory controller and a bunch of cache, you could easily flood the processor with computations, choking out the virtual cores. Whoever needs 16-cores is going to be running some highly-optimized code. I doubt the i7's auto-tasker would find any open holes to sneak in extra instructions.

The speed is the difference though, and 8 true nehalem cores at 4GHz probably would be close, depending on the application.