Question "Workstation" or "Gaming" motherboards for a small business

[IT_Person]

I'm an IT person for a small business, and in preparation to transition to Windows 10 (ack) I'm going to build several dozen new desktop computers for the office, as our current desktop computers are a mishmash, with a variety of older motherboards. The business's primary work is crunching big datasets and geocoding address data, so the more powerful and faster the computers, the better. In shopping for motherboards -- and for simplicity's sake, I'd like to use the same motherboard model for all the new computers -- I've come across a dilemma, which is, should I buy a workstation motherboard or a gaming motherboard? For instance, MSI's B450M Pro-VDH (which they describe as a workstation motherboard) or MSI's B450M Bazooka V2 (which is designed for gaming)? Long story short, a salesperson at MSI said I should buy the Bazooka, on the grounds that it's designed for gamers, and that gaming systems are designed for demanding tasks (i.e. gaming). My impression though is that gaming motherboards are all about optimizing graphics capability, whereas again, the computers I'm building will be used primarily for crunching numbers....not for World of Warcraft. While the computers I'm building need a lot of processing power, it's not for video or entertainment purposes.

Thanks very much for reading. Very curious to hear your thoughts!

 

[drea.drechsler]

I'm an IT person for a small business, and in preparation to transition to Windows 10 (ack) I'm going to build several dozen new desktop computers for the office, as our current desktop computers are a mishmash, with a variety of older motherboards. The business's primary work is crunching big datasets and geocoding address data, so the more powerful and faster the computers, the better. In shopping for motherboards -- and for simplicity's sake, I'd like to use the same motherboard model for all the new computers -- I've come across a dilemma, which is, should I buy a workstation motherboard or a gaming motherboard? For instance, MSI's B450M Pro-VDH (which they describe as a workstation motherboard) or MSI's B450M Bazooka V2 (which is designed for gaming)? Long story short, a salesperson at MSI said I should buy the Bazooka, on the grounds that it's designed for gamers, and that gaming systems are designed for demanding tasks (i.e. gaming). My impression though is that gaming motherboards are all about optimizing graphics capability, whereas again, the computers I'm building will be used primarily for crunching numbers....not for World of Warcraft. While the computers I'm building need a lot of processing power, it's not for video or entertainment purposes.

Thanks very much for reading. Very curious to hear your thoughts!

What will be the primary applications?

If anything, HPEDT Work stations are about memory capacity and bandwidth as well as extreme processor performance in addition to connectivity to multiple drives/RAID arrays and I/O to high-bandwidth LAN's, etc. They frequently feature special sockets for different processor types to allow for 4-8 memory channels in very high capacities and many more PCIe lanes to achieve that. If your use case includes the demanding apps they are built for then you probably need to spec one. These are not budget friendly, in general, because firstly the complex designs and secondly the users have a business model and cost/benefit analysis that fully justifies their need. In other words: they can bill their client(s) for the cost, and clients always want the job done 'yesterday' so they pay.

But 'gaming' motherboards are all about gaming aesthetics, i.e., flashy color schemes and bold designs with RGB bling. The graphics capabilities come almost exclusively with the GPU selected. And oh yeah, they're generaly budget friendly. That's not to say they can't be capable performers, but they don't have the I/O connectivity and 4-8 channel memory bandwidth that may be required by an HPEDT application.

 

[TerryLaze]

Gaming mobos will overclock everything CPU ram anything that can be overclocked will be,which is nice for performance but it's gonna be a nightmare for you anytime anything doesn't work right or spits out wrong data you will have to reset everything to default settings to figure out if it's the cause.
There's a reason why xeons only run at low clocks and have O/C disabled.

 

[IT_Person]

In response to your question about applications, the main ones are ESRI's ArcMap geocoding software, and SAS statistical software. In both cases the datasets we'll be analyzing with them are quite large.