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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Rick83 - Monday, December 10, 2012 - link
With 3 Teslas, you definitely want a C606 based chipset, otherwise you'll run out of PCIe fast. Haven't looked intensely at that market yet, because it's outside my needs/budget.Next9 - Tuesday, December 11, 2012 - link
What about Supermicro? They have plenty of single socket and dual socket LGA2011 motherboards? Even with onboard audio and USB 3.0. Or there are also C32/G34 alternatives if you prefer Opterons.Ananke - Monday, December 10, 2012 - link
I absolutely agree. Workstation path is Supermicro/Tyan/Intel motherboard with Xeon, ECC RAM, etc. and NVidia GPGPU. If you use mostly Maya, than you can cheap with some consumer Radeon. Eventually, redundant PSU. Such system can go as high as $50k though.Next9 - Tuesday, December 11, 2012 - link
Cheap Radeons are also great in Virtualized environment (Vt-d/IOMMU). Consumer grade GeForce cards have often problems with direct HW passthrough.Penti - Monday, December 10, 2012 - link
Workstation features and text-mode firmware is what you want, not to be reminded about the GUI BIOS's of 486 computers of the past. It wasn't a good idea then and isn't now. Working implementations is all that matters.I guess high-end should be something like a LGA2011 Xeon machine. Of course something like a Supermicro board will have it's own (third party) IPMI and KVM over IP embedded BMC/stack. Or a 4P Opteron Piledriver machine. For high-end enterprise type stuff. (Boxx sells systems with dual processor Opteron or Xeon, I guess dual processor Opteron will give a boost for some, at least with G34 quad-channel and 2/4P on top of that). At least those systems where you have the choice to go 2P or 4P is what you would call actual workstations. Which performs better or fit other uses then a say clocked 3770k any how. Between a six core SB-E and Ivy Bridge quad-core there just won't be a lot of difference to justify the shift. If you want VT-d you could find Z77 boards with support for it if your looking. Just not Asus boards. Provided you choose a CPU that as support for it too, like 3770 (non-k). Probably Q77 vPro/AMT supported boards too if you look for them. If you do any creative multimedia type stuff you probably want a much more powerful graphics card then GF210 btw. In the terms of supporting stuff like Adobe's Mercury Playback Engine, CUDA acceleration or professional CAD or modeling software.
All depends on need. If you need it a good machine will probably be worth it.
Olaf van der Spek - Monday, December 10, 2012 - link
What's up with the Radeon 5450 suggestion? With only 64 bit DDR3 it's seriously low on memory bandwidth, which might even cause trouble on the desktop.DanNeely - Monday, December 10, 2012 - link
I've ran a 2560x1600 and 1200x1600 monitor simultaneously on significantly slower cards without trouble before. You're not going to be able to do anything GPU heavy on them but the desktop's requirements are so low virtually anything can handle them.slatanek - Monday, December 10, 2012 - link
just wanted to add, for all adobe cs6 users (premiere pro especially) go with nvidia for the graphics. amd's gpu's get limited support and it's osx only (mercury engine mostly).for the lack of ecc, v-td etc. I understand that Zack stated/advised that if your work is critical (thats where you'd use ecc after all) you'd be better off with pre-build systems that come with full service. thats why, I assume, no mention of the pro features.
ggathagan - Tuesday, December 11, 2012 - link
Are you sure about that?In CS5, the Mercury engine only supported CUDA.
As I understand it, however, Mercury has been modified in CS6, dropping CUDA support in favor of OpenCL and OpenGL
http://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/photoshop-cs6-...
"MGE is new to Photoshop CS6 and uses both the OpenGL and OpenCL frameworks. It does not use the proprietary "CUDA framework from nVidia."
TeXWiller - Monday, December 10, 2012 - link
That is an inappropriate selection for a workstation. Try the W-series instead. And since we are talking about entry-level workstations, the E3 Xeons and AMD based ECC-supporting consumer boards should have been included, like the other commenters have pointed out. The A300s don't support ECC but would have been an interesting point of comparison.