Workstation Update

Posted on 3 mins read

Way back in 2017, I built a cheap data science rig for $600. You can read about the build here. Since that post, I added a mid-tier NVIDIA GPU for machine learning, and some hard drives for more storage. Otherwise, it’s been pretty bullet-proof for the last 3 years.

While it was a great solution for what needed at the time, eventually it’s shortcomings were increasingly obvious. Those were:

  • Efficiency (or lack there of): 16 cores of 2012-circa Xeon processors pulled roughly 200W on their own. Add in the other components, and I measured 500-600W draw from the wall when it was at 100%. While not terrible, it would definitely heat up the room. Nice in winter, but a bummer in summer. When the computer lived on campus in a room with industrial climate control, it was not noticeable. In my 100 sq ft office, it was very noticeable. When I had weeks of work to run on it, I saw it in our electricity bill.

  • Noise: The motherboard I used was meant for a Intel workstation with chassis sensors to monitor temperatures. Without these present, it used a sensible-ish default of running the CPU and system fans at 100%. The workstation sounded like a small airplane, even at zero load. While fine initially and great for thermals, it got old.

  • Size: To house the dual socket E-ATX motherboard, I needed a large case. Very large. Approximately 60L large. On campus, I had tons of room, so it was never an issue. In my small home office, I was acutely aware of just how big it was.

  • Performance: The Xeon processors I used were no slouches for 2012, and for a time CPU performance gains were minimal so there was no real incentive to update. Even when I bought them for $30 in 2017, their performance still held up. Then, AMD got their Zen processors to market, and everything shifted. The Xeons started to show their age with heavily multi-threaded workloads. Benchmarks showed my 16 Xeon cores below AMD’s 6-core Ryzen 5 3600 in both single and multi-threaded workloads, all while using 140W less.

  • COVID-19: Wait, you might be wondering, how did COVID affect your workstation? In the before times, I highly valued mobility - I often would work from coffee shops, the library, etc. Most of my work was done on a laptop, and I only used the workstation for big jobs. With COVID, suddenly I was spending all my time at home. I have a dock for my laptop, but then I got the worst points of laptops (relatively poor performance) without the benefits (mobility). I yearned for working at the desktop. However, the above points made it less pleasant if not outright difficult.

So, I decided to update the workstation. The goals are a smaller, quieter, more efficient, more powerful workstation. More details soon.