Jump to content

High-end project 3-in-1 (Workstation, Testenvironment, Gaming)

A few words before I get into the details: I am intending to build a new computer later this year, after more than 5.5 years of using my current system. I target a budget of around $6000 (US, I am located in Asia though), which after mostly pinning down my requirements, seems to be an amount I need to spend. It is the primary system I earn my money with, so justifying that amount is not as hard as justifying a balls-to-the-walls gaming machine of the same price range.

I am aware that right now you can't give me a definite answer, as particularly the CPUs are not yet released, but I would really like to know if I missed anything out or have any major flaws in the concept of the build. Also: obviously LTT was an inspiration to actually doing this in a fully virtualised environment.

 

What are my requirements?

I am a developer (professionally) and an enthusiast photographer/videographer (Lightroom and Final Cut) and hobbyist designer (2D and 3D, Photoshop and Blender). As I work on large-scale web applications, I have the need for a lot of RAM. To give you some perspective, my current system is now going on 6 years of age, it is the trashcan Mac Pro (6 Core Xeon, 64 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD and a lot of external storage via USB SSDs and NAS).

My main operating system (Mac) should have 64 GB RAM again (more is, well, more - but I realistically don't need more than 64 GB) and a decently sized GPU so I can drive my two 4K screens as well as use GPU acceleration for video editing.

 

What am I planning exactly?

In short: I want to have a no-compromises workstation (primarily MacOS), a Linux system for multiple Kubernetes environments and a Windows machine for some mid-range gaming. I do intend to spend quite a bit of money on this, as I want the system to last for 5 years without major changes, but as I did not win the lottery, my budget clearly has limits.

The whole system is going to be virtualised. That means the Linux system will be the host, there is going to be a MacOS VM and a Windows VM, each with their own dedicated GPU that will be passed through directly to the VM. I have an Aten CS1944DP 4 Port Dual 4K KVM switch, which will allow me to easily switch between all 3 systems and a MacBook I also use for work (one particular client that requires me to use their hardware).

 

GPUs

GPU-wise I am pretty certain I will go into the direction of an RX 580 for OSX (or a 5700, if by then Catalina support is fully confirmed). That is so I have GPU acceleration in Lightroom, Blender and Final Cut.

 

For the gaming side of things I plan to buy an RTX 2060 Super. I will only ever game on one screen and if I have to lower the resolution to 2.5k or even 1080p for some high-end games, that would be acceptable. I fear if I go for anything higher spec, my CPU choice (see below) is probably going to limit the GPU anyways.

 

Lastly for the linux host system a cheap dual 4K capable GPU, maybe a Quadro P400, as it is cheap, well supported and has multiple DisplayPort outputs (the KVM uses DisplayPort connectors). To be honest, I will probably not spend much time using the linux system directly, for convenience I will mostly use automated jobs or SSH anyways. This is primarily used if I need to create new VMs or maintain the existing ones, create snapshots etc.

 

RAM

I am quite sure I will put 128 GB inside, but would like to keep my options open to extend this to 256 GB later without the need to replace the existing RAM already, so probably 4x 32GB modules (as it will be an HEDT system, 8 RAM slots are a given). RAM needs to be ECC, I am willing to sacrifice a bit of speed for more stability. That then limits the choice of CPUs.

I will probably divide it like so: 64 GB for Mac, 48 GB for Linux (so other VMs have plenty of headroom) and 16 GB for Windows (I suppose that is still plenty for pretty much all current games?)

 

CPU / Mainboard

Here I am completely uncertain, due to the fact that the next generation I intend to use is not yet released. So you probably won't be able to make any suggestions here at all (yet). I do want a lot of cores / threads, as a lot of my typical workload scales quite well (Kubernetes pods, photo / video exporting, 3D rendering etc.), while not completely sacrificing single thread performance (so I can still game with a decent performance). Looking at the currently released CPUs (which I am not going for, but the next generation released later this year), this would probably either mean a Xeon W-2195 (too expensive, but the W-2295 will be within the budget) or a 2950WX/2970WX. 32 Cores would be amazing to have, but as far as I saw in benchmarks, the 2990WX is doing quite poorly in terms of single thread performance. If we look at the Ryzens, where AMD has seemingly solved a lot of their NUMA node issues and managed to bring clock speeds and boost up quite a bit, maybe the Zen 2 Threadripper with 32 Cores might be good enough in terms of single thread performance. It is obviously just speculation at this point and I will definitely need to wait for benchmarks first. Safe to say that the 48 and 64 Core variants will have too low clock speeds and thus probably not a sufficiently high single thread performance, even in turbo boost, which would very much limit my gaming experience.

 

Storage

I have a NAS for archiving and backups, so while I need a fair bit of storage in the system, it won't be excessive. I will probably go for 3x 2 TB M.2 NVMe SSDs. One really high speed (like the Patriot Viper VP4100 2TB) and two fast but more affordable ones (like the ADATA XPG Gammix S11 Pro 2 TB).

The idea is to have the fast SSD as primary drive for Linux, having two virtual disks (of probably 500 GB each) as system drives (remember, both Mac OS and Windows will run virtualised). That allows me to do snapshots on them before major updates, so if it screws up the system, I can go back to the previous state with ease.

Then I will use one of the SSDs as home drive on Mac OS (PCIe Passthrough), so that my data is completely independent, even if I restore a previous snapshot of the OS.

The last SSD will then be connected to Windows again via PCIe Passthrough as a ? drive, to put all the games. Yes, I know it is overkill, but a significantly slower SATA SSD at 2 TB is barely cheaper than the much faster M.2 variant, so why not?

 

Backups

I will not backup the Windows drives at all. If the SSD for the games die, whatever. It is mostly Steam and GOG, so the save states are mostly in the Cloud anyways and I have a Gigabit connection, so downloading the games is really not a problem.

The Mac system is going to backup via TimeMachine to my NAS (running in RAID 6, so very little risk of data-loss here), as does the current Mac. The NAS itself then takes the most important data (photos and encrypted work-related data) and backs that up to an online storage provider every night. It already does that and that works fine for my purposes.

 

Case and Cooling

I do not care too much for the look of the case, it should be somewhat minimalist, but it is going to disappear under my desk and will be seen as little as possible. No RGB, no nonsense. It will probably be on the larger side due to the fact that the mainboard will be at least an E-ATX or SSI-CEB.

For the CPU I plan to use an AIO Watercooler with a larger radiator, as whatever I take will have 200+ Watt TDP. It should be a moderately quiet system when there is no load on it, but it doesn't need to be ultra silent as I live in a tropical country and a ceiling fan runs all day long anyways. This provides for some base-level noise in the room anyways, so even a super silent system would be wasted.

 

PSU

I know I should not save at the wrong end, so I will try to get a high quality PSU. No idea exactly how much power I will need, but I presume with a 2060 Super, an RX 580 (or 5700) and a Quadro P400, plus one of the highest-spec HEDT CPUs will probably put me in the 800+ Watt range. Would it be sensible to go for a 1000 Watt PSU?

 

So: Does this make sense? Is there anything in here that seems like nonsense or even straight up is not going to work? Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!

I will provide have to revisit this thread in December or January, once all the benchmarks are available for the new CPU generation. Then I can also look at matching mainboards with the newer chipsets and create a detailed shopping list.

Link to post
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, xtj7 said:

A few words before I get into the details: I am intending to build a new computer later this year, after more than 5.5 years of using my current system. I target a budget of around $6000 (US, I am located in Asia though), which after mostly pinning down my requirements, seems to be

You should probably practice making a hackintosh now if you haven't done so already


But you pretty much have to decide on X399 now, or Threadripper 3000 in a short while, or X299X whenever it comes out.

You are likely better off on the level 1 techs forums though.

But you may also just want a separate dedicated blender render machine with like 2 1080tis or Vega FEs/Radeon VIIs for the large ammounts of VRAM for a relatively low price. If you do a lot of blender rendering.
 


Also have no idea what parts are available for you at what prices, unless you are ordering from the US or something.
 

 

I edit my posts a lot, Twitter is @LordStreetguru just don't ask PC questions there mostly...
 

Spoiler

 

What is your budget/country for your new PC?

 

what monitor resolution/refresh rate?

 

What games or other software do you need to run?

 

 

Link to post
Share on other sites

Thanks a lot for your reply!

I have run a Hackintosh alongside my MacBook Pro before I bought the Mac Pro in 2014. I suppose quite a few things changed in between, but from what I read it mostly got easier (as long as you select the correct hardware) compared to back then, where it involved an incredible amount of manual steps to get the right kexts installed etc.


I am planning to go along with this tutorial for the basic setup, so that I can get macOS running in a virtualised environment with pass-through of certain components:
https://passthroughpo.st/new-and-improved-mac-os-tutorial-part-1-the-basics/

 

The X299X won't support ECC, as far as I know, right? From what I researched, I think if I want ECC with the Xeon-W, I need to go for C422 as a chipset.
And for AMD there are supposedly two new chipsets coming out for the 3rd Gen Threadripper, so I guess for that I can't even speculate much yet. 

 

Thanks for the Level1 link, I will have a look at that. To be honest I never really looked at their channel, but that may be just the right place.

 

I am currently in Malaysia, so parts are slightly limited compared to the selection you can find in the US and Europe, but that's more down to the range of selection. Most components are available, albeit not from all manufacturers, so I may have to dig quite a bit to find some of the more uncommon hardware (such as the mainboard, I presume).

Link to post
Share on other sites

36 minutes ago, xtj7 said:

Thanks a lot for your reply!

X399 and presumably TRX40 support ECC depending on the motherboard, but do you really need ECC memory? It's just more of a server or mission critical thing. The chances of a bit flip affecting anything are pretty minimal outside of those environments.

Think Intel requires xeons for ECC

I edit my posts a lot, Twitter is @LordStreetguru just don't ask PC questions there mostly...
 

Spoiler

 

What is your budget/country for your new PC?

 

what monitor resolution/refresh rate?

 

What games or other software do you need to run?

 

 

Link to post
Share on other sites

Yes, indeed, X399 does (depending on the mainboard, a lot of boards only support ECC in non-ECC mode), TRX40, TRX80 and WRX80 also supposedly all do, but if X399 is any indication, it may again depend on the mainboard. Probably with the exception of WRX80, as that is a dedicated workstation chipset I would assume that all those boards support ECC.

 

While I could probably live without ECC (I don't do any scientific workload or financial data or whatever), for stability reasons I would really like to have it. My system runs 24/7 and while I have hourly backups, auto-save on most applications etc. - a crash is still quite a nuisance where I lose time (and thus money). If ECC can reduce that risk (and it does), it's something I'd really like to have. For the same reason I will completely abstain from overclocking and choose a high quality PSU. Stability is the primary goal, closely followed by speed (where again multi thread performance is a little more important than single thread performance).

 

If I go for Intel, it would be a W-series Xeon, most likely the W-2295, which supports enough memory and ECC (like the Threadripper does), as long as I use a mainboard with a C422 chipset. I have the feeling that, given my requirements and budgetary constraints, if I were to choose Intel, the W-2295 on a C422 board is pretty much the only sensible option.

Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now

×