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[citation][nom]Fear3d[/nom]Funny you'd say that...because the place that I was refering to was a pizza hut, and not a "mom and pop place." And unfortunately, the entire point that I was trying to make went entirely over your head...{etc}[/citation]
It sure seems like it did....ENTIRELY too, as you say.
Incidentally, Fear3d, just wanted to thank you for the "cavalry." It's nice to have some well-placed common sense here.
Some people seem to think prices (high, low, or otherwise) are ruled by some "corporate conscience," while conjuring up some images of fat, cigar-waving martini-bar-goers with a rubber stamp in their pockets or some equally ridiculous fat-cat caricature. Maybe it's a valid assumption for, say, Julia Roberts' Hollywood jeweler (maybe). But they don't count.
There will always be lots of people who tend to assume the worst of businesses in general, seemingly as if because they are not UNICEF they are unscrupulous con-artists. That's fine - it takes all types...even if they are just providing my Saturday matinee.
But for the topic of PC hardware, it annoys me how little appreciation some of them have for the travails (operating costs, etc) of the smaller enthusiast-level PC builders, as if a garage and two hobbyists is all it takes for everyone to run a shop, and THEY could do it so much better if they wanted to, and that it's mostly a gravy job. As I mentioned before it's because of the boutiques that we have as many build options as we do now. 15 years ago, there were no (or very few) off-the-shelf uv-reactive parts, water-cooling units, or pre-cut grills and windows, and a handful of enthusiasts alone do not make a solid (and price-competitive) market for it.
And I still don't understand the surprise from some that Jon Bach came in to comment - pretending that not many others in his position would have the guts to do so. What the hell do they mean? Why not? These guys like Jon or, say, Kelt (from Falcon, costly as they may be) are the same ones who read Anandtech and Tom's and such, and probably long before most of us did. They have the same love of PC's, but also the guts to open PC shops, and have been at it for a lot longer than five years - the survival cutoff for most, more or less. Lots of guys fail. Since this is Tom's, let's use a featured product - anyone remember what happened to Kyle Felstein from AAC? It's not because of lack of repeat business, or integrity, or use of money-grubbing tactics backfiring, but because they can't handle the running costs. Though in Kyle's case he handled it badly and some customers got burned at the end.
These guys aren't Dell or HP who outsources their support to India and builds with the cheapest possible components to make $0.25 more per box on 10,000 to stay ahead. They TAILOR your system in person or on the phone or whatever you prefer. Chances are, under the same circumstances, should they try, few of these naysayers in this forum would survive either.
Again, I don't think this thing is ugly, but Puget could have done a somewhat better job with the aesthetics, to be sure, but my opinion is immaterial if the customer is satisfied.
On a related topic,
I spent $500 the other day at Performance PC's and was lamenting about how pricey they are, and while that certainly is true, then I thought about the same thing - someone custom-cut, sleeved, heatshrinked, and tested those molex/sata cables. Someone stocked those other exotic parts for who knows how long, someone powder-coated those thumbscrews to order (at one point, anyway), and wired the led's into the semi-custom side panels for me. Never mind ALL the details - this is the tip of the iceberg on my order, but you get the point. I could have done it all myself for 60%-70% the price, and it's not exactly difficult - but that menial work isn't worth my time. It is worth my money...
And so it goes...
It sure seems like it did....ENTIRELY too, as you say.
Incidentally, Fear3d, just wanted to thank you for the "cavalry." It's nice to have some well-placed common sense here.
Some people seem to think prices (high, low, or otherwise) are ruled by some "corporate conscience," while conjuring up some images of fat, cigar-waving martini-bar-goers with a rubber stamp in their pockets or some equally ridiculous fat-cat caricature. Maybe it's a valid assumption for, say, Julia Roberts' Hollywood jeweler (maybe). But they don't count.
There will always be lots of people who tend to assume the worst of businesses in general, seemingly as if because they are not UNICEF they are unscrupulous con-artists. That's fine - it takes all types...even if they are just providing my Saturday matinee.
But for the topic of PC hardware, it annoys me how little appreciation some of them have for the travails (operating costs, etc) of the smaller enthusiast-level PC builders, as if a garage and two hobbyists is all it takes for everyone to run a shop, and THEY could do it so much better if they wanted to, and that it's mostly a gravy job. As I mentioned before it's because of the boutiques that we have as many build options as we do now. 15 years ago, there were no (or very few) off-the-shelf uv-reactive parts, water-cooling units, or pre-cut grills and windows, and a handful of enthusiasts alone do not make a solid (and price-competitive) market for it.
And I still don't understand the surprise from some that Jon Bach came in to comment - pretending that not many others in his position would have the guts to do so. What the hell do they mean? Why not? These guys like Jon or, say, Kelt (from Falcon, costly as they may be) are the same ones who read Anandtech and Tom's and such, and probably long before most of us did. They have the same love of PC's, but also the guts to open PC shops, and have been at it for a lot longer than five years - the survival cutoff for most, more or less. Lots of guys fail. Since this is Tom's, let's use a featured product - anyone remember what happened to Kyle Felstein from AAC? It's not because of lack of repeat business, or integrity, or use of money-grubbing tactics backfiring, but because they can't handle the running costs. Though in Kyle's case he handled it badly and some customers got burned at the end.
These guys aren't Dell or HP who outsources their support to India and builds with the cheapest possible components to make $0.25 more per box on 10,000 to stay ahead. They TAILOR your system in person or on the phone or whatever you prefer. Chances are, under the same circumstances, should they try, few of these naysayers in this forum would survive either.
Again, I don't think this thing is ugly, but Puget could have done a somewhat better job with the aesthetics, to be sure, but my opinion is immaterial if the customer is satisfied.
On a related topic,
I spent $500 the other day at Performance PC's and was lamenting about how pricey they are, and while that certainly is true, then I thought about the same thing - someone custom-cut, sleeved, heatshrinked, and tested those molex/sata cables. Someone stocked those other exotic parts for who knows how long, someone powder-coated those thumbscrews to order (at one point, anyway), and wired the led's into the semi-custom side panels for me. Never mind ALL the details - this is the tip of the iceberg on my order, but you get the point. I could have done it all myself for 60%-70% the price, and it's not exactly difficult - but that menial work isn't worth my time. It is worth my money...
And so it goes...
A similar Marquis tower from ASL runs about $10K. You can get the ASL with 128GB RAM for a little less than this.
Considering the 2GHz 8-series cpus, I think I'd prefer the new MacPro 2.9GHz/3.33GHzTurbo nehalem Xeon. Buy the 32GB from Crucial, pickup the 30" Cinema display and pocket the $3K you didn't blow on this thing. MacPros are pretty damn quiet and you don't have to worry about them leaking. Oh, and they run Windows (or Linux) too because they're x86 boxes.
Some things require a lot of parallelism but there's something to be said for retiring fewer threads faster (and then moving on to more)
Considering the 2GHz 8-series cpus, I think I'd prefer the new MacPro 2.9GHz/3.33GHzTurbo nehalem Xeon. Buy the 32GB from Crucial, pickup the 30" Cinema display and pocket the $3K you didn't blow on this thing. MacPros are pretty damn quiet and you don't have to worry about them leaking. Oh, and they run Windows (or Linux) too because they're x86 boxes.
Some things require a lot of parallelism but there's something to be said for retiring fewer threads faster (and then moving on to more)
Oops.. my above comments were based on a price of around $13,000. I got the cost of this mixed up in my head.
A 4 socket ASL tower runs about 13K with 128GB of RAM.
A high end 2 socket quad-core Nehalem Xeon machine with 32GB RAM from Crucial and a 30" Cinema Display runs about 10K.
A 4 socket ASL tower runs about 13K with 128GB of RAM.
A high end 2 socket quad-core Nehalem Xeon machine with 32GB RAM from Crucial and a 30" Cinema Display runs about 10K.
[citation][nom]ffakr[/nom]Oops.. my above comments were based on a price of around $13,000. I got the cost of this mixed up in my head.A 4 socket ASL tower runs about 13K with 128GB of RAM.A high end 2 socket quad-core Nehalem Xeon machine with 32GB RAM from Crucial and a 30" Cinema Display runs about 10K.[/citation]
By the way it was mentioned several times - this system is old news - it was constructed back in September. Nehalem wasn't available then.
By the way it was mentioned several times - this system is old news - it was constructed back in September. Nehalem wasn't available then.
Granted it's now March 2009, a half year after this system was built, but out of curiosity I spec'd out this new Mac Pro:
2x 2.93Ghz Nehalems (speed might be close to 4x AMDs 6 mo. ago?)
32GB 1066MHz DDR3 ECC RAM (vs. DDR2)
RAID card
4x 1TB 7200rpm SATA drives
ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB
2x SuperDrives
3yr AppleCare Protection
$14,248
2x 2.93Ghz Nehalems (speed might be close to 4x AMDs 6 mo. ago?)
32GB 1066MHz DDR3 ECC RAM (vs. DDR2)
RAID card
4x 1TB 7200rpm SATA drives
ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB
2x SuperDrives
3yr AppleCare Protection
$14,248
neiroatopelcc
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- Oct 3, 2006
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He should have gone for DDR2-800 instead of the slower 677. Also, Velociraptor drives are overrated. When spending this much cash, they should have made a RAID of either SSD's or 15k RPM SAS drives for system disks, and put the 1TB's in RAID10. RAID5 is sloooooow, even with the fancy controller.
Looking forward to the day there are standard liquid cooling connections for rack mount servers. Could install a radiator as part of the rack itself maybe on the back like a fridge.
One not so minor problem i see here is the position of the coolant resovoir this should always always always be the highest part of the system so that any air or other gasses have a safe place to go instead of getting trapped in the system been there had the problems moved the tank end of problem , ave you not noticed how on a car the main resovoir is always above the engine same applies here .
We had 3 similar spec machines built for running Geophysics simulations. Only difference seems to be the ram (we went for 64 gig per node)
Of course, ours are in 2RU cases, live in an airconditioned server room and run linux.
$16k kind of indicates that the water cooling wasn't that expensive, our machines were probably of a similar cost (exchanges rates and all that)
Of course, ours are in 2RU cases, live in an airconditioned server room and run linux.
$16k kind of indicates that the water cooling wasn't that expensive, our machines were probably of a similar cost (exchanges rates and all that)
I suppose AMD processors run cooler.. I wouldn't dream of putting four overclocked Core i7 processors in the same loop.
Where are the 4870 graphics cards and solid-state drives for that much cash?
Is that tubing 1/2" or smaller (looks smaller)? Why place the rez so close to the bottom? That looks hard to fill and drain..
The 90 degree joint is probably a bad idea for such a big loop.
And while I do like Koolance blocks, I have tried that particular pump and rez and mine started leaking after a few months and it was not as strong as the MCP650.
Where are the 4870 graphics cards and solid-state drives for that much cash?
Is that tubing 1/2" or smaller (looks smaller)? Why place the rez so close to the bottom? That looks hard to fill and drain..
The 90 degree joint is probably a bad idea for such a big loop.
And while I do like Koolance blocks, I have tried that particular pump and rez and mine started leaking after a few months and it was not as strong as the MCP650.
This is such a wast of money, I'm a student majoring in computer science and my department just bought a new super computer for $11,000 the bought 32 systems with dual quad core processors, giving total of 256 cores. These guys only got 16 cores for $5,00 more what a rip off.
This is such a wast of money, I'm a student majoring in computer science and my department just bought a new super computer for $11,000 the bought 32 systems with dual quad core processors, giving total of 256 cores. These guys only got 16 cores for $5,00 more what a rip off.
[citation][nom]pete_n[/nom]One not so minor problem i see here is the position of the coolant resovoir this should always always always be the highest part of the system so that any air or other gasses have a safe place to go instead of getting trapped in the system been there had the problems moved the tank end of problem , ave you not noticed how on a car the main resovoir is always above the engine same applies here .[/citation]
True, but...
Was discussed extensively in the comments already - customer specified they wanted it this way (pump on bottom), and flow-rate is very low in this system (30% of pump capacity) so this problem was tested and not a significant issue. They went ahead and built it to order.
True, but...
Was discussed extensively in the comments already - customer specified they wanted it this way (pump on bottom), and flow-rate is very low in this system (30% of pump capacity) so this problem was tested and not a significant issue. They went ahead and built it to order.
[citation][nom]Catid[/nom]I suppose AMD processors run cooler.. I wouldn't dream of putting four overclocked Core i7 processors in the same loop.Where are the 4870 graphics cards and solid-state drives for that much cash?Is that tubing 1/2" or smaller (looks smaller)? Why place the rez so close to the bottom? That looks hard to fill and drain..The 90 degree joint is probably a bad idea for such a big loop.And while I do like Koolance blocks, I have tried that particular pump and rez and mine started leaking after a few months and it was not as strong as the MCP650.[/citation]
Was also talked about several times - Nehalem wasn't around last September. Very low flow rate just adequate to provide cooling made the sharp angle irrelevant. A different (higher-end Swiftech) pump was used
This is not a gaming rig. Graphics was chosen by default because it was readily available. SSD drives in September were less available and fault tolerance + capacity was a bigger concern than flat-out i/o performance.
Builder handles the labor, the customer does not - the difficulty of maintenance is their problem.
Was also talked about several times - Nehalem wasn't around last September. Very low flow rate just adequate to provide cooling made the sharp angle irrelevant. A different (higher-end Swiftech) pump was used
This is not a gaming rig. Graphics was chosen by default because it was readily available. SSD drives in September were less available and fault tolerance + capacity was a bigger concern than flat-out i/o performance.
Builder handles the labor, the customer does not - the difficulty of maintenance is their problem.
Dang, I guess the guy never heard of terminal services...... Just make it a rack mount and forget about the noise. connect with mstsc and you're good to go.
[citation][nom]sparcler[/nom]This is such a wast of money, I'm a student majoring in computer science and my department just bought a new super computer for $11,000 the bought 32 systems with dual quad core processors, giving total of 256 cores. These guys only got 16 cores for $5,00 more what a rip off.[/citation]
And an inexperienced student quick to type without thinking but also much to learn regarding practical hardware use. A little reading of the article and posts would fill you in on the "why's."
A well-to-do fractal artist has no desire for 32 mid-tower boxes in his office or even basement that he cannot cool quietly, cannot power cheaply, and to which he cannot distribute his ample computing loads without a specialist in Myrinet applications and clustering/distributed computing interfaces (of which there are perhaps half a dozen mainstream choices with which you doubtless MUST be familiar in your studies, so I don't have to call them by name).
Oh - so maybe that was an example of the department and not what you meant - he should just buy FOUR units like this but with two quad-core opterons each for 32 total cores (again, back in September before Nehalem) at a fraction of the cost of his system. And once again, clustering software and myrinet specialists still come to mind since it is still a little cluster, as does his particular needs regarding his work which is not really suitable for that particular kind of parallelizing.
A diesel mechanic could, for argument's sake, litter his shop with four cheaper hydraulic lifts for less than one high-end, powerful, expensive one and have more than twice the lifting power when added together. Why wouldn't he do that instead? The answer is pretty clear if he specializes in fewer heavy trucks and tractors individually and not several lighter-duty ones at a time.
And an inexperienced student quick to type without thinking but also much to learn regarding practical hardware use. A little reading of the article and posts would fill you in on the "why's."
A well-to-do fractal artist has no desire for 32 mid-tower boxes in his office or even basement that he cannot cool quietly, cannot power cheaply, and to which he cannot distribute his ample computing loads without a specialist in Myrinet applications and clustering/distributed computing interfaces (of which there are perhaps half a dozen mainstream choices with which you doubtless MUST be familiar in your studies, so I don't have to call them by name).
Oh - so maybe that was an example of the department and not what you meant - he should just buy FOUR units like this but with two quad-core opterons each for 32 total cores (again, back in September before Nehalem) at a fraction of the cost of his system. And once again, clustering software and myrinet specialists still come to mind since it is still a little cluster, as does his particular needs regarding his work which is not really suitable for that particular kind of parallelizing.
A diesel mechanic could, for argument's sake, litter his shop with four cheaper hydraulic lifts for less than one high-end, powerful, expensive one and have more than twice the lifting power when added together. Why wouldn't he do that instead? The answer is pretty clear if he specializes in fewer heavy trucks and tractors individually and not several lighter-duty ones at a time.
jonnyblobby
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ummmm. two words spring to mind... mac pro
http://www.apple.com/macpro/specs.html
why have some ugly, bulky shitbox when you can have... well... well built power-station.
http://www.apple.com/macpro/specs.html
why have some ugly, bulky shitbox when you can have... well... well built power-station.
drkim
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First, Mr. Bach, huge street cred to you for building and defending your product here. Of course many people say things here they would never say in person.
That said, I was curious, doing work in fractals, if you had considered the NVIDIA Tesla Personal Supercomputer (which are around 10k); and then focusing engineering efforts on the noise reduction.
That said, I was curious, doing work in fractals, if you had considered the NVIDIA Tesla Personal Supercomputer (which are around 10k); and then focusing engineering efforts on the noise reduction.
jonbach
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Thanks drkim!
In this case, we did not consider that, because the fractal programs were programmed to run off the CPU. We looked closely at CUDA though, and once the fractal programs adopt it or OpenCL, it will be pretty amazing. I have to admit I haven't checked again after we built this workstation last year, so its entirely possible that CUDA and Tesla would do the job now.
In this case, we did not consider that, because the fractal programs were programmed to run off the CPU. We looked closely at CUDA though, and once the fractal programs adopt it or OpenCL, it will be pretty amazing. I have to admit I haven't checked again after we built this workstation last year, so its entirely possible that CUDA and Tesla would do the job now.
Surely, there is a design flaw in this setup, I'm no expert but even I can see that if you have 4 CPUs in series that the 4th CPU will be supplied with nice warm water! By the time the water has travelled through the first 3 CPUs the temperature of the water must rise substantially.
For $16,000 dollars, surely two seperate cooling systems could of been used!
For $16,000 dollars, surely two seperate cooling systems could of been used!
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