Samuel Sieb writes:
On 10/11/19 6:27 PM, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> My requirements are not very stringent. Onboard video and audio will do, as
> long as it works out of the box with x.org, and has reasonable compositing
> and can keep up with full screen video playback. Dual 1GB NIC, a pair of
> SATA drives, and then as many cores and RAM as I can get, hopefully 12 cores
> at least. I guess what I'm really looking for is some place which offers a
> wide selection of hardware that I can match up to within my budget. But all
> the places that I looked seemed to be limited to 5-6 models, and quite
> limited customizations options. I end up with either having my only video
> choices be the latest and greatest Nvidia chipsets that only work with their
> binary blobs (no thank you), or all the 12+ core options are ridiculously
> overpriced Xeons; or they seem to intentionally hike up their prices by
> having no storage options other than high capacity SSDs, for storage.
If you don't mind saying, what country are you in? Would you be comfortable
with building the system yourself? You will probably find it difficult to
get the combination you want otherwise.
USA. I'm ok building everything together, if I can source the motherboard,
chassis, CPU, RAM, and HDDs from one place, and not have to run around
everywhere.
> Dell came pretty close, if slightly pricy. They actually have a workstation
> that they certify RHEL for (but ship with Ubuntu). I would've overlooked
> having to overpay for Xeons (no AMD options), except that I looked at their
> manual. Their motherboards have button cell batteries. Maybe I'm off base,
> but who still puts button cell batteries on their motherboards? Dell can't
> just pay a few more cents for proper NVRAM? So they go with button cells, to
> keep the lights on for the BIOS settings. This is obviously intentional;
> this is their business product, clearly the reason for that is to have the
> CR2032 go flat in a few years, and lose all BIOS settings; but who cares
> since they expect that business will replace their hardware every three
> years. Still, this is just plain silly.
I don't know where you're looking, but pretty much everyone still uses
batteries on the motherboard. It's to keep the RTC going when the power is
off, not just to keep the settings. The only batteries I've had to replace
were on computers that were well over 10 years old.
That's a surprise to me. I haven't opened up my two workstations in several
years, they've been chugging along just fine. I don't recall seeing a button
cell anywhere. But I could be wrong.