The prices continue to drop! I’m contacting my Enterprise rep at HPE to setup an evaluation of a DL385 Gen10+ with the small EPYC Rome processor in it, to see how it might work as a GIS workstation for an Emergency Management Office I support.
I plan to put a Quadro P2000 in it, and maybe a USB 3.1 host bus adapter. OS will be Windows 10 Enterprise, I don’t think Windows for Workstations will offer any additional benefits, looking at 16 cores and 64gb ram.
The existing workstation is an HP z800 with some sort of Xeon in a 4U rack mount configuration, and not exactly quiet. The other G10 I’ve worked with have been very quiet, and I believe have a low noise setting mode for the fans.
Update on this, wheels of government turning slowly and all…
None of my vendors want to send me an eval unit to try using as a workstation, claiming HPE prohibits this application. So, not to be deterred, and by prices continuing to drop, I’m just going to order a “server” and go for it. If I have to call HPE for anything, I’ll take the GPU out first.
HPE advertises the G10+ as having a max noise level of 37db in a 72 degree room, minus any noisy drives chattering away. Even if the thing is in the 50s, that’s not bad and will be on par with the z800 it’s replacing. I’m going with raid 1 on two “mixed use” SATA ssd’s, most of my storage is network based, there won’t be any drives chattering away.