Lane C

I'm looking at this beast: https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/xeon/c600/x10dax.cfm The C612 chipset, support for 2TB of RAM, 10 SATA drives, Dual SLI, and it's from a vendor I've built server hardware with in the past. Thoughts?

My use case is running Linux virtual machines for web and mobile development almost all Python based. Nothing I do is insanely high performance, the largest databases are in the size of about 5GB. Still, I often find myself spinning up environments for multiple projects simultaneously. Mac OS in a VM is a horrible experience. I've tried it in the past. I can't see myself dumping the GUI on the Linux system, it's going to be doing too much for me to want to admin it all from the CLI.

The budget up front I'd like to keep at $4k or under, though I'm flexible if it makes sense. The largest portion of the spend I imagine will be the CPU/RAM/MOBO for this kind of rig. It wasn't cheap building the Mac Pro but I put it together in phases. All in I think I put $15k into it over time. I'll probably do the same with this rig though I'll save some bucks by recyling the screens and potentially the SSD's (they were $600/each when I added them into the rig). I'm partial to Intel. Not to knock what AMD is claiming with Ryzen but I want this thing to be rock solid and overall my Intel systems have been more reliable for me than their AMD counterparts (though to be fair maybe I'm just adding some cognitive bias since the last AMD I owned was an HP DL385 G3 system). What do you mean by testing KVm and VT-d on my PC? I don't have new hardware to test today and I already feel the pain of my rig with virtualizing too many environments. I think it's partially I/O but also partially the fact that this system is an old architecture. I agree with the lightweight Linux. I'm thinking Lubuntu since I hate how Unity worked for me in the past, though I guess I'd give it another shot and see if I can tolerate it.

Hello LTT Forums! I'm looking for some advice to build a workstation class gaming rig that I can use for work and play. Unless folks think that it's more economical to just build a gaming PC and build a server for my work. To set the stage I wanted to outline that I have been using a Mac Pro mid 2010 rig for work (self employed) since it's release, it's running: Dual 2.4Ghz Xeons 96GB of ECC Memory Dual ATI Radeon 5770 GPU's powering QTY 4x24" HP ZR2440w LCD's Apple RAID5 with 4x480GB SSD's I've never used the Mac Pro rig for modern gaming (although I do run Age of Empires 2 with PlayOnMac) and Apple has for all intensive purposes abandoned pro users entirely. As such I'm looking at the PC world to see what I can buy/build for work. I virtualize a lot of different environments so having a fast disk array and a bunch of ram is imperative to me. I also hate using Windows for work if I can avoid it. My use case is that of a software developer / devops where I currently use a mix of Vagrant with Virtual Box and VMWare Fusion on the Mac. Despite my familiarity with VMWare ESXi my goal is to setup a ZFS pool and boot Ubuntu into a GUI on the new rig. Then I would likely license VMWare Workstation and use Vagrant with VirtualBox for Linux with this new build. I'd like to dual boot into Windows 10 on a single SSD for Gaming. I have a Macbook Pro I work/travel with but use the workstation as a primary workhorse. So, I'm toying with either I want to have something powerful enough that I can use it for that purpose but since I'm going to PC hardware I'd also like to be able to game on it. I'm at day one of reading about PC hardware and been watching a bunch of Linus Tech Tips videos on Youtube to get me up to speed on what hardware is great (I stopped building my own PC hardware at least 10 years ago). At this time I'm thinking of running a C612 based motherboard with dual Xeon CPU's. I'll probably do 128GB of RAM and keep my 512GB SSD drives for the new build to use for the ZFS pool. I can pickup a new SSD for the Windows drive. As for the GPU, I'd like to do an Nvidia 1080 GTX but I'm not sure what the total build out costs will be for everything else. I still want to be able to power my 4 LCD screens with the new build. I looked at what SuperMicro has been offering and at the HP Z840 series workstations. I can't tell if there are any big downsides to using these kinds of systems for my build. Has anyone else built anything as complex as this?