Workstation build

[niculw]

Hello.

 

Im planning a build for my girlfriend and I. We are both engineering students, and both of us need some decent compute power, in our daily tasks.

I am therefore planning a build - for when we can afford it. 

I am considering this build https://pcpartpicker.com/list/9hV9MZ

On top of this I would probably add a Quadro (P2000 or P4000?) for Matlab acceleration or maybe my old GTX970 is fine?

 

My goal is to do something ala 2 gamers one CPU, where we can dynamically allocate however many cores we need, using a hypervisor.

The Radeon wx7100 is for SOLIDWORKS acceleration for my girlfriend. I pretty much only need CPU power for Xilinx Vivado, as well as some CUDA acceleration for Matlab.

On top of this I added a 2x10Gb NIC cause my thought is to run the clients on a Mac mini or similar NUC with 10gig ethernet, so we can do super fast transfers and save on some power, only running the workstation when needed.

I plan to run the workstation as headless as possible.

 

Do you have any improvement suggestions or ways to make it cheaper (a lot of the components are chosen due to them being cheaper in Denmark) and faster? I guess my budget is floating, and also needs to be converted from US to Monopoly money, So that leaves me at a preferred US$3500, but I might be able to stretch to US$4500, if it is worth it.

[brob]

I know there were initially problems with gpu passthrough on Threadripper. You may want to check to see if the issues have been resolved.

 

Two gamers one cpu is not a sound architecture and doesn't offer any savings. Among the negatives is the fact that a single hardware failure means two users are unable to work.

 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 7 2700X 3.7 GHz 8-Core Processor  ($294.89 @ OutletPC) 
Motherboard: Gigabyte - X470 AORUS ULTRA GAMING ATX AM4 Motherboard  ($136.96 @ Amazon) 
Memory: G.Skill - Ripjaws V 64 GB (4 x 16 GB) DDR4-3000 Memory  ($330.98 @ Newegg) 
Storage: ADATA - XPG SX8200 Pro 512 GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive  ($87.99 @ Amazon) 
Storage: Hitachi - Ultrastar 7K4000 4 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($89.89 @ Amazon) 
Video Card: AMD - Radeon Pro WX 7100 8 GB Video Card  ($494.99 @ Newegg) 
Case: Phanteks - ECLIPSE P400S TEMPERED GLASS ATX Mid Tower Case  ($89.99 @ Amazon) 
Power Supply: SeaSonic - PRIME Gold 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply  ($89.99 @ SuperBiiz) 
Wired Network Adapter: Gigabyte - GC-AQC107 PCI-Express x4 10 Gbit/s Network Adapter  ($99.99 @ Amazon) 
Total: $1715.67
Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-04-14 19:25 EDT-0400

 

[Jurrunio]

3 hours ago, niculw said:

The Radeon wx7100 is for SOLIDWORKS acceleration for my girlfriend.

Odd, because Solidworks do better with Nvidia cards than with AMD. In fact if you use Radeon Pro it's only as good as Geforce cards in Solidworks. 

 

There are boards with 10Gb LAN built in, atm not certain if they have 2x10gb but at least you can spend less on buying an expansion card for that

 

1 hour ago, brob said:

I know there were initially problems with gpu passthrough on Threadripper. You may want to check to see if the issues have been resolved.

seems to be fixed quite some time ago, but then AMD tends to break things with new updates in an attempt to fix/bring something else in...

[Jurrunio]

made this

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

Type	Item	Price
CPU	AMD - Threadripper 1950X 3.4 GHz 16-Core Processor	$583.90 @ OutletPC
CPU Cooler	Noctua - NH-U14S TR4-SP3 82.52 CFM CPU Cooler	$79.90 @ Amazon
Motherboard	ASRock - Fatal1ty X399 Professional Gaming ATX TR4 Motherboard	$368.88 @ OutletPC
Memory	G.Skill - Ripjaws V 64 GB (4 x 16 GB) DDR4-3000 Memory	$330.98 @ Newegg
Storage	Intel - 660p Series 1 TB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive	$109.99 @ Newegg
Storage	Intel - 660p Series 1 TB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive	$109.99 @ Newegg
Storage	Western Digital - Blue 4 TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive	$94.89 @ OutletPC
Storage	Western Digital - Blue 4 TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive	$94.89 @ OutletPC
Video Card	PNY - Quadro RTX 4000 8 GB Video Card	$892.99 @ Newegg
Case	Corsair - Carbide 400C ATX Mid Tower Case	$74.99 @ Newegg
Power Supply	Cooler Master - MWE Gold 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply	$64.99 @ B&H
Case Fan	Phanteks - PH-F120MP_BBK_PWM 53.3 CFM 120mm Fan	$14.99 @ Amazon
Case Fan	Phanteks - PH-F120MP_BBK_PWM 53.3 CFM 120mm Fan	$14.99 @ Amazon
Case Fan	Phanteks - PH-F120MP_BBK_PWM 53.3 CFM 120mm Fan	$14.99 @ Amazon
Case Fan	Corsair - ML120 Pro 75 CFM 120mm Fan	$24.89 @ OutletPC
Case Fan	Corsair - ML140 Pro LED 97 CFM 140mm Fan	$19.99 @ Amazon
Case Fan	Corsair - ML140 Pro LED 97 CFM 140mm Fan	$19.99 @ Amazon
	Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
	Total (before mail-in rebates)	$2956.23
	Mail-in rebates	-$40.00
	Total	$2916.23
	Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-04-15 01:45 EDT-0400

 

[niculw]

10 hours ago, Jurrunio said:

Odd, because Solidworks do better with Nvidia cards than with AMD. In fact if you use Radeon Pro it's only as good as Geforce cards in Solidworks. 

I googled it a bit, here is GNs tests, american price to performance of p2000 and wx7100 is about the same, it is not as bad as a geforce card. Looking at local prices however p2000 is almost $300 cheaper than wx7100, and p4000 is $150 more expensive than wx7100, so I will go with both a p2000 and p4000 since both of us may need it at the same time.

Also reason why I didn't include fans is that I have some LL120 laying around  

 

Floorplanning and things involved with FPGA design can require a fuckton of ram, thus I won't downgrade the 128GB. The optimal synthesis is also dependent on number of cores, which is also why I don't want to downgrade from 16 cores. Plan so far is to give the girlfriend the P4000, 4 cores and 32GB of ram, when we are splitting resources, and then keep the rest for myself , hopefully I can dynamically allocate resources, so if one client is running that they get all the resources. I have never tried unRAID or ESXi, or any hypervisor really.