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

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bfaber

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I can't imagine what somebody would do with 16-cores in a case like that.. You'd like such configurations would be more suitable for server duty, and hence require a good rack mount...
 

cangelini

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[citation][nom]bfaber[/nom]I can't imagine what somebody would do with 16-cores in a case like that.. You'd like such configurations would be more suitable for server duty, and hence require a good rack mount...[/citation]

Video workstation maybe? The problem with most rackmount systems is that they're bloody noisy. This thing was designed to be the exact opposite, suggesting it'd be used in an office or something.

Who knows, maybe the new owner of that rig will stop by and tell us exactly what he's doing with it now!
 
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Opteron processors? What will the intel fanboys say? Xeons/Corei7s not up to the task?
 

cangelini

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[citation][nom]boknoy[/nom]Opteron processors? What will the intel fanboys say? Xeons/Corei7s not up to the task?[/citation]

There are no Nehalem-based Xeons yet ;) For an application like this, AMD has the upper hand.
 

wildwestgoh

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There's 1 card above the PSU being bended, wonder if that's ok =)

And, the Chasis going to be massively heavy on one side, with the already heavy mainboard + the radiator, wonder if the chasis can withstand such setup for long term.
 

cangelini

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[citation][nom]BloodRage[/nom]What about the display cards??[/citation]

It's in one of the captions, too, but he ordered an 8800 GTS.
 
This isn't a workstation, its a freaking mainframe put in a large tower case modded for silent running. 16 cores and that much memory, with such a small GFX option, someone's doing some heavy virtualization. Hope he's running a flavor of LINUX on that thing.
 

deej1977

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No no no it's for a member of the x264 release groups, he wants to encode his Blu-rays super fast and be the first at everything ;).
 
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How long until this is made obsolete by a single socket solution? 2 years? 3 years?
 

Luscious

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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.
 

zedx

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That's a little too much... It seems the person might be doing some highly parallel work with those 16 cores... I'm not sure but with OpenCL drivers coming and Larrabee, one might be able to have a similar performance with a next gen RV870 system for around $900 or at least in Cross Fire for around $1200. And the system would be quiet too. The storage and memory is a different thing though. I wonder why the person didn't pop some SSD's. And for a single socket CPU to overtake this, it would take about 6 years (assuming we have 10 core by then and the single threaded performance improves).
 
Gee, for 16,000 one would think that anyone will go for more updated graphics solution...even a 4830.

But other than that annoyance, this rig is just awesome! Run Crysis + encode video + run a scan + zip a huge file + burn DVD all at once!
 

clist

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You can't help but wonder if he couldn't make this more quiet for less money and get better cooling by simply putting it in a specially built closet - or the basement - and having some long cables and an external DVD drive. I swear people work so hard to be able to keep their PCs near their desks as if they were trophies, when, IMHO, they're simply noisy eye-sores that would be better left in the basement (along with all of their AV equipment). You could easily put your PC 30' from your desk with high quality DVI cable and active USB extension cables, and even further with a DVI repeater box...

Cheers,
CList
 
I would think a better method would be to use a MUCH better pump (possibly two) and run two parallel loops that dump into the save resevoir. You won't get the cool "all in one" gadget, but honestly... thats for a regular home PC and this ain't no home pc.
 
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I always wanted to ask this question about the "serial" design of the water cooling! and here it is:
is the water cooling will be hoter when it leaves the first CPU and so forth..?
 

clownbaby

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that rad they used is a piece of crap. For 16k I'd expect some better cooling components and some nice custom fabrication. A 16k machine shouldn't have a radiator hanging off the side of it. That could have all been built in. Who ever this customer was got ripped off.
 
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