Scientific computing workstation

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Hello, all! I need to put together a desktop for C and Fortran development on Linux and for day-to-day browsing, media, documents. I haven't been following hardware developments for a few years now, but I do have a sense of the general principles and I've done builds before.

For reasons I'll spare you, I won't be using any CUDA, OpenCL, or Phi co-processors, at least not in the foreseeable future. This is what I value most, in rough order of importance:

  • fast CPU/computation, and the nature of the code means that I can take advantage of many cores (Do I want a Xeon? Maybe 2 Xeons on one motherboard?)
  • quiet and relatively cool
  • no noteworthy storage needs, regular-sized SSD should be plenty
  • discrete GPU from Nvidia for just-in-case, but no plans for gaming
  • small(er) desk footprint

The code I'll be writing will eventually run on a SLURM cluster but I do want to be able to debug it and maybe do some smaller trial runs on my own machine, so CPU performance is the key.

Budget-wise... somewhat flexible, but $1,000-2,000 excluding monitor and other peripherals is doable. Am I even in the right ballpark with these figures?

Does anyone have any experience with such machines? Any recommendations? Thank you!

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Here is my build
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/CKgHYJ

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I think you're perfectly in the ballpark. I'd recommend an R720 if your noise concerns are minimal, but if they aren't, you're well within a 5930k 32G system. If you want more than that you could Frankenstein build a desktop out of 2 year old server components for way cheap. You're going to need to scour eBay for good hardware and verify the mobos will fit in a desktop case.

I'm actually about to grab an R720 for my personal lab for the same reason. Running gcc with -j 20 makes me happy.

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There's actually a passively cooled 250 GPU if you want some silence from it and still maintain some performance, otherwise just get a 5450 or something that's like 20 bucks

http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/113176/Sapphire-Radeon-R7-250-Graphic-Card/?cm_mmc=PLA-_-Google-_-Computer_Parts_Upgrades-_-113176-VQ6-47886838556-VQ16-c-VQ17-pla-VQ18-online-VQ19-113176-VQ20-83579202790-VQ21--VQ22-176194316-VQ27-9134804636&gclid=CObG35nc08sCFZFcfgodpCgO9A

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Thank you very much! Looks great!

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Thank you!

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One last question... Would it make sense to hire a company to assemble this for me? I'm inexperienced with handling coolers and thermal paste and cable management. Thank you!

Can you recommend anyone who can custom build something like this and ship/sell it assembled?

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building PCs is incredibly easy. Just have the tek sydicate video on thermal paste standing by before you do it. The only reason to pay for someone else to assemble it is if you really want the warranty that comes with it.

The video:

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