Frontier; a workstation that's absolutely overkill for me

[Ahwx]

As I've been wanting one of the new MacBooks, I needed to sell my workstation as I do not have a source of income (am underage). My parents were looking for one, and thus we made an agreement. I already needed more RAM, since I was using a Windows 10 VM on my server for 3D modelling (which is rendered on the CPU's only, and thus gives absolutely horrible performance)

 

The thing is, Apple makes their laptops with lots of RAM completely ridiculous as far as pricing goes. I need a lot of RAM for VMs, and thus I needed to build another workstation. Because I am tight on money, and I came across one of those Jingsha motherboards, I decided to go X99 this time.

 

Some of you might notice that the name is the same as a little supercomputer made by HPE. This is because I am not going to utilize all of the power that this thing will have, but it's nice to have anyways

 

Parts

Planned

Bought

Arrived

 

CPU: Xeon E5-2650 V4 (20 euros used)

CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO with 2 fans

RAM: 4*32GB 2400MHz ECC Registered from Samsung (140 euros)

Motherboard: Jingsha X99M-G, a m-ATX board that's honestly pretty okay for its price (about 40 euros used)

Motherboard replacement: ASRock Fatal1ty X99 Professional Gaming

GPU: ASUS GeForce GTX 750 Ti-OC-2GD5 (doesn't do 3440x1440 at 100hz, only at 30hz, so it will be replaced)

GPU: Inno3D GeForce GTX 1050 X1 Compact 4G (in other PC right now, will get access to that within this month.

GPU Riser: some random model on local used marketplace

PSU: EVGA 600B, might not be enough, but I had it lying around (free long time ago)

Case: custom built from wood I had, still building it, waiting for the motherboard, GPU, GPU riser and cooling to show up till I finish it

SSD: 240GB NVMe boot drive and some random SATA SSDs. Spinning array is going to be connected over LAN anyways. 

Networking: QLogic QLE7340 Single Port 40Gbps

 

What do I already plan on upgrading:

The motherboard, I want to be able to add another GPU for HW acceleration in a VM for 3D moddeling

The CPU, will probably upgrade to a E5-2699 V4 at some point, although they're still kinda pricey at the moment

The PSU, for obvious reasons, although if (EVGA 600B) it's enough, I will keep using it

 

Planning on updating once I have more updates for y'all 

 

Attached an image of the case idea I have. I used old socket 775 era parts for demonstrating purposes. Already built the holder for the GPU riser.

[SorryBella]

15 hours ago, Ahwx said:

although they're still kinda pricey at the moment

It takes damn near eternity for Xeon flagships to go down in price because as long as the board for them still exist there's still demand for it

[Ahwx]

Sadly very true, both of my DL380p G8s still run on dual first gen 2650's and dual first gen 2630's, absolutely kills anything performance wise but it's whatever, will probably build something based on X99 once I upgrade to a less sketchy motherboard (or one of the DL380p's takes their life)...

[Ahwx]

Guess what the mailman brought a few days back!

 

I mounted the board etc already on the case with some 3d-printed standoffs, but they're not really stable and I dont like em, currently printing a larger backplate, but that'll take about 12 hours :p.

 

I did take the oportunity to take some pictures

 

128GB ECC Registered 2400MHz DDR4

Jingsha X99M-G with LiteOn NVMe SSD on it and no CPU cooler yet

Showing its horrible IO and the standoffs

 

Installed Gentoo, everything runs now. I will update once I get the new motherboard (ASRock Fatal1ty X99 Professional Gaming) or other stuff shows up.

[Ahwx]

I got the motherboard, but the socket was broken. I got it for only 20 euros, and if I would get my money back if the motherboard didn't work so that's why I tried it anyways. I then repaired the socket, bent a few pins back and it works now!

 

I also 3D-printed another motherboard baseplate for on the wood part, since the standoffs were really annoying to get right with the locations and stuff. My solution was to just print another base and that worked fine. I will probably post more pictures once I build the rest of the case.

[Ahwx]

Okay, so the plans have changed! I got the Macbook Pro (2023, M2 Pro, 14", 16GB, 512GB) and I realised that I do not need a new workstation at all. I am going to utilise Frontier as a server/NAS now, and I'm still tinkering with NixOS. Since I am also in the middle of moving, I will post pictures of the final rack once it's done.

[ki8aras]

@Ahwx hey, i know this is off topic and i apologize for that, but how was your experience with the jigsha x99m-g?

 

im asking cuz im thinking about getting one myself for a mini server im planning

[Ahwx]

On 8/25/2023 at 5:23 PM, ki8aras said:

@Ahwx hey, i know this is off topic and i apologize for that, but how was your experience with the jigsha x99m-g?

 

im asking cuz im thinking about getting one myself for a mini server im planning

Fine... Not much tweaking etc, but it's fine and never broke on me for the 3 weeks I used it.

[ki8aras]

On 9/8/2023 at 7:23 PM, Ahwx said:

Fine... Not much tweaking etc, but it's fine and never broke on me for the 3 weeks I used it.

aight cool

thanks