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paulca:

--- Quote from: NiHaoMike on April 14, 2022, 03:22:45 am ---
--- Quote from: paulca on April 13, 2022, 09:08:49 am ---You find me a good spec'ed motherboard which DOESNT have RGB.

Where it was an option, I went with the non-RGB option.  You'd be surprised how limiting that can be though.  If you start out by searching for "No god damn unicorn vomit", you find yourself browsing the corporate thin client components.

--- End quote ---
I have yet to find a server board with RGB, granted you'll probably have to buy used to get a reasonable price. It most likely would also include a CPU or two (still top notch performance if not too old) and support for more RAM than you're likely to use anytime soon. The cooling design isn't going to get skimped on either and if you're lucky, it would have a high ambient option (e.g. Dell Fresh Air) that improves things even more.

--- Quote ---Cooling and fans, and their proper configuration, alignment, flows and control is somewhere I spend money because I know it's value in using auto-overclocking components that if you keep them cool, the run faster.  Add £200 to the price of the graphics card itself just for cooling, will usually net you another 20-25% over all performance.  Same for the CPU.

--- End quote ---
The best fans available don't even have RGB options, just loads of power with high quality bearings and variable speed control.

--- Quote from: paulca on April 13, 2022, 03:43:20 pm ---Sounds like you missed the fun stuff.  The big change requiring the tower (and mines a MIDI Tower) is the amount of power these things consume and thus the heat they produce.  320W for just the video card.  Another 120-140W for the CPU.  Another 100W for the mainboard.  That's a LOT of heat to get rid of.  "Why get rid?", all modern components will slow themselves down to remain within thermal limits and stability.  So your lovely 4.6Ghz processor in your latest Z workstation with it's rubbish, "to a budget" cooler, rapidly drops it's clocks to 3.8Ghz as it can't handle the heat output at 4.6Ghz.  You might as well have bought the 3.8Ghz beside it for £300 cheaper.

--- End quote ---
I doubt a proper *workstation* is going to compromise much on thermal design.

--- End quote ---

Server != Workstation != Gaming Desktop.

They all have different requirements and workloads.  The former two are typically tuned for large parallel loads.  The later for heavy single threaded load and real time graphical framerate production.  A server might run a TitanX or A5000 card to run 64 parallel encoder and FX threads on the GPU rendering a 4K video.  A task which can be predicted, planned, optimized and then executed.  A gaming PC hands it a stream of objects, light sources etc. etc. etc. in realtime expecting a frame back in under 20ms and sustain that for hours at 100 frames per second.

When benchmarked, high end servers and workstations tend to out perform gaming PCs on pure parallel compute tasks, especially when they have multiple CPUs and GPUs.  Video editing, timeline scrubbing, rendering and CAD, CAM, aero/hydro etc. etc. simulations run better.  But when it comes to running games on server and workstation hardware, they struggle.  They tend to aim for efficiency and parallelism rather than balls to the wall 100% caned to get those last 10 FPS in live rendering.  So they struggle and underperform.

That's not to say you can't pimp and mod a server board to play games.  But it wouldn't be cheap.  (Linus Tech Tips did build a machine with 8 GPUs in it on a server board, ran 8 VMs, assigned each a GPU and got 8 gamers to play simultaneously on it.  I believe they then tried to show how hard it was to cool with ridiculous aircon units and duct fans etc. etc.  Sure they were playable, but not exactly out performing a standalone rig... and the cost was eye watering).

Turning a rack server into a gaming rig would be very much like taking a Ford Transit and completely refitting it with a Jaquar XJ220 engine and creating a race car out of it.

To extend that further.
Server = Truck.
Workstation = Van
Desktop = Hatchback
Gaming PC = Sports car

Sure the van will carry more stuff and do the whole job faster, but it's just not as much fun.
Berni:
It is hard to avoid RGB lightning on PC parts these days.

If you are after building a fast desktop PC from brand new parts you will get the best bang per buck using parts for gaming PCs. The economy of scale does it's thing here.

Sure you can get even more performance by going into servers and serious workstations but the price of those quickly starts going trough the roof while they are very specialized machines that are overly optimized for a single kind of workload. That dual socket 64 core server board with 1TB of RAM might be awesome for ruining a database server but it is not going to be that great of a desktop machine. Its expensive, its loud, its power hungy, yet a modern midrange laptop will beat it at single threaded performance.

If you have a specialized need go ahead and build a mean powerful machine for the job. Even then just using a server board is not a magic bullet, servers are specialized for certain tasks so you need the right kind of server board and server CPU.

However for the kind of stuff people do at home on a PC it turns out that "gaming PCs" are the most performant PC you can get on a reasonable budget. These computers have a decent core count CPU that also has top notch single threaded performance, a decedent amount of RAM running at high clock speeds, a fast SSD(>3GB/s on NVME), lots of cooling that is optimized to be quiet, powerful hardware accelerated graphics (that also include video encode/decode acceleration and compute), extra slots for expansion cards.. etc All in a machine that costs around 1000 bucks brand new(Well maybe not right now with the component shortage shitshow).

It is all you need for compiling code, CAD software, content creation etc... and if its your thing they can also run games afterwards. Very few things out there it couldn't do.

If you want ECC then go ahead and just buy a board/CPU that supports ECC RAM sticks and a Quadro card.

And if you find it fun to mess with fancy and obscure server hardware, go ahead and hoard together some machines from the used market and do some neat stuff with them. IT can be a hobby too.
themadhippy:
After many years and ££££ i gave up trying to maintain a gaming pc and just bought a games console.No more chasing the latest graphics card or trying to tweak the last bit of performance whilst putting up with the noise of multiple fans,now the computer sits,almost silently doing everything it needs to.My last console cost less than the new motherboard/proccesor /power supply /case upgrade loop i would need to complete to play the latest games i wanted at a decent speed.  An added advantage is the abundance  of second hand games available for the console.
free_electron:

--- Quote from: Berni on April 14, 2022, 10:36:35 am ---It is hard to avoid RGB lightning on PC parts these days.

--- End quote ---
Really ? i must be looking in the wrong places. then. Supermicro motherboards , Smart Modular Tech and Micron technologies RAM , Samsung SSD's. no RGB in sight.
Berni:

--- Quote from: themadhippy on April 14, 2022, 11:59:00 am ---After many years and ££££ i gave up trying to maintain a gaming pc and just bought a games console.No more chasing the latest graphics card or trying to tweak the last bit of performance whilst putting up with the noise of multiple fans,now the computer sits,almost silently doing everything it needs to.My last console cost less than the new motherboard/proccesor /power supply /case upgrade loop i would need to complete to play the latest games i wanted at a decent speed.  An added advantage is the abundance  of second hand games available for the console.

--- End quote ---

Doesn't mean you have to use a gaming PC for actual gaming if it is not your thing.

Just that due to the economy of scale these are the most powerful PCs that you can get for a good price. For example i seen a lot of mechanical engineers carry around gaming laptops (The ones with the ugly gamery design that screams gaming computer from a mile away). They also don't like the looks of it, but the reason they have one is that those laptops are powerful while still being relatively cheep. They let them quickly open very big 3D CAD models and manipulate them smoothly.

For me personally i never been into gaming consoles. I would have a decent PC in any case, so i just stuck a decent GPU in there for doing a bit of gaming here and there. My current GTX 1070 cost me 180€ about 3 years ago, i even downclock it since its plenty fast. The cheapest new PS5 is 400€ so over twice as much (while it has no optical drive so no used games). PC games can be had on sales for 10 bucks a piece, or if i want to avoid giving the developer/publisher any money (i reserve this for the asshole ones with shitty business practices like EA, Ubisoft..etc) then i pirate it. Buying and installing a game on Steam is just as easy as on a console, just press install and then run.


--- Quote from: free_electron on April 14, 2022, 01:54:04 pm ---
--- Quote from: Berni on April 14, 2022, 10:36:35 am ---It is hard to avoid RGB lightning on PC parts these days.

--- End quote ---
Really ? i must be looking in the wrong places. then. Supermicro motherboards , Smart Modular Tech and Micron technologies RAM , Samsung SSD's. no RGB in sight.

--- End quote ---
Well i should have said more the gamer-y visual designs.

Don't think i have seen any SSD with RGB yet. More that most of the cost effective high performance PC parts have gamer marketing plastered all over it. For example the WD Black SN750 M.2 SSD i recently bought has a all black design with funky fonts all over it, even says "High performance Gaming NVMe SSD" on the box. It was simply the cheapest high performance 1TB SSD that can do sustained writes in the GB/s ranges all day long without eating up the write endurance any time soon. Most of the motherboards these days have some decorative gamery designs to make them look "cool". All the cheep high performance CPU coolers have gamery designs plastered all over. The high quality PSUs have all black cables because it looks cooler...etc

I would actually prefer it if PC components looked more like they did in the Pentium 3 days of bland green boards. But i just buy whatever performs well for a good price. Sure server stuff might be even better built and sometimes offer a little bit more performance but i am not willing to pay 2x or 3x or 4x the normal price for that luxury. My desktop PC is not a mission critical control center for a nuclear plant. If it dies then il just fix it. My PCs have always been reliable so far.
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