Holiday 2012 Workstation Buyer's Guide
by Zach Throckmorton on December 10, 2012 3:20 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
- AMD
- Intel
- Ivy Bridge
- Piledriver
- Holiday 2012
Conclusions
As stated plainly on the first page of this guide, it's critically important to consider whether to build a workstation yourself, or to buy a pre-built from a company that can provide support. If you're capable (and willing) to support the workstation yourself, or if your system isn't mission critical (like a prosumer-grade photo or video editing system that can be offline for a few days without impacting your wallet), then a DIY workstation can be a good value and enjoyable experience.
Before putting together a workstation, be sure to be especially cognizant of your storage and graphics cards needs, as these will be wildly variable between different workloads. Regardless of whether you need low or high powered components, pay attention to prices over the holidays. Component costs are especially dynamic this time of year, and you can save a lot of money by doing your research and watching for sales.
As always, AnandTech's General Hardware forum is a great place to share information with fellow PC enthusiasts, and the Hot Deals forum is full of useful tips for scoring cheap parts. Those interested in GPGPU computing can check out our Video Cards & Graphics forum for information on how various models perform in different scenarios. We also welcome you to share your workstation specifications and what you use your workstation(s) for in the comments section.
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Next9 - Tuesday, December 11, 2012 - link
there is another important argument - NBD on site warranty.If there is any problem with your real workstation, you call the vendor and next day, you have functional machine.
If there is a problem with you do-it-ourself consumer grade so-called workstation, you are left on your own.
PCMerlin - Monday, December 10, 2012 - link
I have to agree with you Next9. The stability of ECC and raw power of Xeon, along with the Quadro or Fire series video cards should be the only combination for a serious CAD or other graphics workstation.I would NOT want to be the tech that has to answer the call when a designer wants answers to why the drawing he/she just spent the better part of the day working on just got "zapped" when his/her system blue-screened.
In the regular workplace, the helpdesk guy can be the "hero" by restoring a crashed system back to life. CAD designers and engineers, on the other hand, would be perfectly happy if they never saw anyone from the IT world during their day-to-day work.
zebrax2 - Monday, December 10, 2012 - link
What happened to the workstation GPU review?A5 - Monday, December 10, 2012 - link
Is that what the kids are calling it these days? ;)GrizzledYoungMan - Monday, December 10, 2012 - link
While I agree with you on some points (see below), I'm still deeply skeptical of the usefulness of quick sync for professional video encoding. The image quality of those Intel commodity hardware encoders is really poor relative to any halfway decent software encoder. And pros tend to value quality over a few minutes (or even hours) of encoding time, as it so heavily affects the perceived overall quality of their product.But maybe that's changed? Perhaps a comparison article is in order?
JarredWalton - Monday, December 10, 2012 - link
I believe the point is that if you're uploading something to YouTube (which will futz with the quality, so there's no point in ultra-high rendering quality in the first place), Quick Sync is awesome. E.g. "Here's a preview clip -- it encoded in one minute on my little Ultrabook with Quick Sync, and since it's on YouTube the loss in quality doesn't matter."GrizzledYoungMan - Monday, December 10, 2012 - link
I don't want to nitpick, but the fact that youtube generally recompresses any video delivered to the site isn't a justification for skimping on the quality of video delivered to youtube, it's a rationale for being even MORE careful about what you deliver to youtube.Speaking from experience, it's definitely possible to get video up on youtube that looks great, you just have to deliver at the highest quality possible. If memory serves, youtube accepts files of up to 20GB in size with no practical limit on bitrate, so I usually max out bitrate (via high quality settings, larger frame size, frame rate, etc etc) as much as possible relative to the length of the clip and the file size limit.
In general, the rule when encoding is that good video put through bad compression gives you mediocre video. Mediocre video put through bad compression gives you bad video.
To put it another way, the more information (by way of better quality compression) delivered to the youtube encoding pipeline, the better the overall result.
Next9 - Monday, December 10, 2012 - link
What is the point of using garbage consumer grade boards like ASUS or ASrock?ASUS boards usually lacks proper VT-d, ECC, AMT and other professional features support. BIOS/UEFI interface is complete piece of shit with GUI targeted at 10 year old kids full of stupid tawdry "features" with no real value to usability.
Rick83 - Monday, December 10, 2012 - link
I was about to say the same - This review lacks consideration of S1155 Xeons, C216 chipsets, ECC...basically all that makes the distinction between a desktop and a workstation.And even the C216 ASUS Board does not support AMT.
With th current price of these components, you would only add around 200 dollars to the mid-end machine, to bring it up to workstation spec.
ECC-UDIMMs are only mildly more expensive than non-ECC-UDIMMs, S1155 Xeons are only marginally more expensive than the i7, and come with all features unlocked, and the Supermicro X9SAE(-V) (the only boards for the S1155 workstation market, that can be found in retail) go below 200 dollars, if you shop around - twice the price of the bargain bin B75 board, but you get so much more for your money....
There's little use in going higher end, as anything that requires more performance should probably not be at your workplace, but rather in a server room.
The AMD route is an interesting way of getting ECC at a slightly cheaper price. But only if you can stomach losing remote management.
Ktracho - Monday, December 10, 2012 - link
What motherboard(s) would you recommend for for ECC and full VT-d support? I built a system with 3 Tesla cards with the idea that one or two of them could be dedicated to a virtual machine, but I didn't realize the motherboard also needed to support VT-d. I have no idea how to find out what motherboards have this feature.