Work PC Sanity Check

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1

Hi All.

My employer normally just hands me a new generic PC every three years, but this time they are allowing me to pick and mix, providing that the resulting PC costs less than $3,000 NZD (about $2,000 USD using today’s exchange rate).

I currently run Debian Jessie as my host, and Windows 7 in a bog standard VM so I can use SolidWorks (an MDA tool) and Altium (an EDA tool), amongst other things. This time however I would like to try using VFIO and pass through a Quadro GPU to the Windows VM to speed up SolidWorks.

Here is my parts list so far:

  1. CPU - Ryzen 2700
  2. Motherboard - ASRock X470 Taichi
  3. Memory - Crucial 2 x 16GB 2666MHz Unbuffered ECC
  4. SSD - Samsung 970 EVO 500GB
  5. HDD - Western Digital 3 x 1TB Red
  6. GPU (Host) - EVGA GeForce GTX1050Ti 4GB
  7. GPU (Guest) - Leadtek Quadro P1000 4GB
  8. Case - Fractal Design Meshify C Mid Tower Case
  9. PSU - Corsair RM750X

If I were to drop the case and use an old 4U rack mount one I have laying around, I could potentially move to a Ryzen 2700X or Quadro P2000, but personally I don’t think it is worth it. Thoughts, feedback?

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You lucky son of a b$!ch… My work PC is literally a second hand PC from a local university, it does the job n’ all, but it’s a bit painfully slow here and there! :joy:

Edit

As for feedback, sorry I got a bit excited just seeing the budget.

I would personally go for the ITX form factor, but I’m an ITX fanatic personally. All in all, looks good, does that budget include peripherals? … Depending on the desk I may either go for a 4K monitor/dual monitor setup or 1 ultra wide. :slight_smile:

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No peripherals, just the boxen. I will keep the two Philips Brilliance 271P 1920 x 1080 monitors and generic keyboard / mouse I currently have, as they are perfectly fine. I can add a third identical monitor if I so choose, but two has worked out well these past few years. The only other thing I might pick up is a wireless Connexion 3D space mouse to make model manipulation a bit easier.

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looks fine. maybe get a seasonic/superflower/fsp psu and hitachi/toshiba HDDs if you want lower failure rate year over year.

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@RBE not bad at all, as for the whole monitor setup, personally I dislike a 3 screen setup, sure it’s great and all, but personally I find that with 3 monitors the third may rarely get used, I mean it’s great, if you’re allowed to have it and there’s no compromise with regards to the setup, sure, go ahead!

For me personally, I think that a dual monitor config is nice, although I’m yet to try an ultra-wide monitor, I am tempted, there’s many people saying for and against.

As @tkoham said, maybe look at an alternative brand for the HDD’s, there’s nothing wrong with WD, I personally swear by WD. But there is 0 debate that Toshiba make some pretty damn reliable hard drives, I mean I remember the last Toshiba hard drive I had, it was new in 2000, and believe it or not, it still works, and it works well considering the age and neglect it’s had over the years. It’s from my brother’s laptop, and he’s the kinda guy who’d happily block the main intake/exhaust cooler by sitting his laptop on the bed, he just wants to watch the world burn…

But seriously, Toshiba, for reliability, I’ve never known anything better.

P.S.

I may actually have to eat my own words about WD, I’ve recently purchased a single 4TB black drive, and the first one I had was faulty, kept saying I/O errors when I tried to use it and I tried it in multiple systems, different ages, different sizes you name it. The drive was just dead, so, I sent that drive back, got the replacement in yesterday, exact same problem(s). Only this time I tried even more tests, I tried some diagnostic tools, and I just couldn’t get it to work.

Now, not to give WD a bad rep, it could be the guys I purchased the drive from, they didn’t even include the box that WD ship the drives with, it just came in an anti static wrapping, around that was some bubble wrap. So it’s a bit of an odd one, hard to say who’s at fault there? :man_shrugging:

All I know now is that I won’t be asking for a replacement, this time I’ll be asking for a refund, I mean c’mon, what are the odds of receiving two dead/faulty drives in a row? I mean I know it’s not a power problem because my PSU has plenty of juice (I use a max of 75% under full system load), I know it’s not a SATA issue because I’m currently running my ol’ 3.5" HDD on the same SATA connections, and the fact that I’ve tried and tested the same drive(s) in other machine(s) kinda rules that one out too.

The only conclusion I can come up with is that the drive is damaged or dead.

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I was wondering if it would be more sensible to opt for three individual drives, regardless of who the manufacturer is, over one drive with three times the capacity?

Are there any benefits for or against either of these options?

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@nfellaby Considering it’s a works machine, I would imagine his stated option is a better option:

This way he could have a raid configuration if he wanted to, simply for the extra reliability. Even if he didn’t bother with RAID, there’s still an odd chance drive 1 could fail, but 2 and 3 would still be fine. If he did go the single HDD route, then surely there may be more risk in the sense of losing data? :slight_smile:

Personally, I don’t really see any benefit for going with the single drive option, I mean fair enough for asking, but I’m just throwing my input in there… :slight_smile:

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Thanks what I was thinking, I actually mis-read the original post and though that RBE had opted for one 3Tb drive. But I also thought the flip side was that with three drives you have three times the point of failure… however, with no option for RAID backup which I guess is the biggest issue.

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I thought that was the case in the way you wrote the question, although I didn’t want to seem like a condescending a$! hole, lol! :joy:

Haha, I like that point, it’s just kinda funny tbf… I mean very, very unlikely to be the case, but not impossible at all! :slight_smile: … I mean if you read my comment about how I’ve recently purchased 1 4TB WD Black HDD, 2/2 of the drives have been faulty. If anything I’m having to resort back to my good ol’ and trusty 2TB WD green drive for the time being… I don’t think they even make green drives anymore?! :joy: … I think their Blue drive have basically replaced the Green drives… If I’m not mistaken.

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Or I guess there is always the option of mounting 10’s of second hand small HDD to a server rack. The soothing hum will lul you to sleep no doubt :thinking:

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If data preservation is a concern you might wish to consider running RAID 10 on the mechanical drives for speed and reliability. I’m assuming you wish to install the o/s on the SSD. With a three K budget I’m curious why you didn’t choose NVME. If you plan on using a 4K monitor I wouldn’t recommend going lower than the GTX 1070. Of course I recommend these things because I currently use them and have used them in the past. I suppose it really depends on what sort of work you will be doing with this unit. Again, if you happen to be planning on engaging in any video rendering I’d bump it up a notch (or two) on the EVGA GeForce. You chose good products at any rate.

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WD actually has the second highest failure rates year over year.

Seagate makes them look good by comparison, but they got their lunch eaten by Hitachi and Toshiba until they bought HGST from Hitachi

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That’s exactly what I was getting at earlier, if he cares about ensuring that the data is secure, then RAID 10 is probably the best bet.

As for the 4K monitor thing, would you really need a 1070 for just doing dev type stuff? I mean typically most developers (not including games) don’t use that much of the GPU, unless it’s a graphically oriented application or it just requires so much processing power that it eats up everything?

In which case, yes, I TOTALLY agree with the 1070 being the minimal option! :slight_smile: … But I assumed this was a developer machine, don’t ask why, probably because I’m a software/web developer and I just jumped to that conclusion.

As they say, right tool for the job! :wink:

Yeah, for failure… Seagate … They’re just a joke (at least in personal experience)… I think I’m gonna go back to the good ol’ Toshiba path, I’ve had an incredible experience with Toshiba drives personally, and it’s just a HDD at the end of the day, the performance doesn’t matter for me personally as I just use that as my main storage unit, download, docs, etc. I have over 1TB of SSD’s, so I use that for the OS and anything that does require faster loading times, and in my case… Games… I typically tend to install stuff like IDE’s (other than VS) on my SSD’s because the loading time is just unbearable! :stuck_out_tongue:

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TKOHAM, I was going to stick my neck out and say something about that too. I hear you. IN FACT, I’ve burned through so many WD mechanical drives in a single year that I’ve pretty much sworn off the things. Seagate isn’t much better but they do seem to last slightly longer. I think the days of mechanical drives are pretty much drawing to a close. My Seagates are strictly used for storage only and they do have a slightly lower mortality rate but really aren’t much better. Crystal Disk tells the story. Their hybrid drives are a nightmare too. My advice to anyone is to avoid hybrid drives altogether. On the other hand, WD puts out some rather reliable SSDs. There it is.

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there’s data to back it up, look up the backblaze surveys
seeagate isn’t better but WD is still pretty bad

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Pretty much, they’re only still going because a 4TB SSD is much more expensive than a 4TB HDD, as an example. Well at least that rule sure as hell applies to the UK, just to get a 1TB SSD, you’re talking about £200.

I actually just had a look to see how big the price difference is for a 4TB HDD vs SSD, it’s actually hilarious. :joy:

  • 4TB HDD £100
  • 4TB SSD £1,000
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nah. You put 8 drives in a raidz2 and you’re never gonna notice it’s not solid state

plus you can abuse them write-wise in this format far, far more

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I’m in no rush. I’ve learned in my PC building days to be in no rush. The SSDs I use now are up to 3x cheaper to buy than when I first purchased them. With the advent of NVME the cost of standard SSDs has dropped considerably. A 1 TB SSD used to run closer to a K Canadian. I expect to eventually phase out of all mechanical drives by raiding my older SSDs for back up drives and passing them off to my children as I gradually buy larger, faster, and more efficient ones. Why use klunky old mechanical back up drives if you don’t need to? I like the idea of faster backups . Remember the days when backups took hours or even days??? (Yeah, I’m dating myself.)

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Thank you all for your replies to date. To clarify, the three 1TB spinners will be run in a RAID5 configuration using mdadm, with cloud backup to either Dropbox or BackBlaze on a daily/weekly basis. Note also that the SSD used as the OS drive is in fact NVMe.

When it comes to part selection, whilst I like the idea of a Seasonic PSU and a different brand spinner (Toshiba, etc), these things are not always available down under. I guess I could order such items from NewEgg, but for a work PC I would rather have a local reseller to yell at should things go pear-shaped.

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super flower and FSP have good availability in AUS last i checked