Top-shelf
Posted by Michael.
So, it looks as though my current work computer has bitten the proverbial dust. I was having overheating problems all last week, and even before then the fans would spin up excessively – and this is a G5 tower, mind you, so 5 cooling fans at 3000 rpm made my office sound like an aircraft hangar.
So now the question comes to the replacement machine. Assuming I can get the “corp” to pay for it, what features are necessary and what can I do without? I’m tempted go for a bare-bones 8-core tower and then add RAM and hard drives separately, especially since being able to run calculations on 7 processors in parallel would be only/almost half as efficient as running on some of the “slow” 16-processors-per-node NAVO machines. Anyway, here’s hoping, and I welcome any insight/suggestions.
June 15th, 2009 at 3:27 pm Using
More processors is good and lots of ram is good. I really don’t think the upgraded processors are worth it though… 10% more performance for 50% more money? Get at least a gig of memory per processor, two is even better and it looks like 16 GB total doesn’t even cost that much from Apple.
I have a snazzy plan for drives that isn’t too expensive either. Get a WD Velociraptor for your boot drive. They’re not huge, but 300 GB should be enough for most stuff and they’re screamingly fast. Then, populate the other three drive bays with WD Caviar Green 1 TB drives. Their lack of heat will somewhat compensate for the Velociraptor and they’re plenty fast enough for pretty much anything. That’ll give you ~3.3 TB of disk space to arrange however you want with plenty of speed.
Ahh, the 24″ LED display too. I think that a single 24″ monitor is good enough, you don’t need multiples. Although, if you want to add a second one, you could get a smaller pivoting display from HP or somewhere and keep it in portrait orientation for writing code and such while you use the Apple display for all your visualization stuff.
Yup, that’s just what I’d do.