Best Design Workstation - some fun?

[BernardStewart]

Reading the PC mags and reviews does not give one much of a clue as to the best design for a good mission critical workstation (most are based on pretty bog standard configurations. By ‘good’ I mean powerful, reliable, comprehensive back up, capable of running multiple complex tasks simultaneously.

So a couple of years ago I had to specify my own configuration and have it specially built (Asus MB, single AMD processor, 1Gb 400Mhz RAM, two removable IDE Drives, 4 IDE Drives on a RAID 5 controller, external USB2 HD for backup, multi-boot and so on). This means that providing the MB and chip does not fail one can boot from any of the three drive systems and get at applications and data. In the worst case one can either use the removable drives or the external HD to get at data. And, yes, it does sound very noisy!!

Much has moved on since then with SATA DRIVES, Express, AMD 64 bit chips, more dual processor MBs, quiet and liquid cooling, etc.

So why not have some fun to see who can spec the best advanced workstation? These should not necessarily be the most expensive but provide those features I outlined above.

Any suggestions?

 

[paparazi]

Probably best done of one of the private less formal forums on this site.
But a nice idea
Martin

We like members to GIVE and not just TAKE.
Participate and help others.

 

[BernardStewart]

I am amazed that no one has taken the challenge: my view us that until we get the multiprocessor/multichannel systems AMD are developing we will not get an adequate workstation design.
I have again just upgraded to the AMD XP 3200 Barton chip which now matches the 400Mhz memory, increases the FSB from 266Mhz to 400 MHz, and doubles the L2 cache. Yet whilst this gives a marginal improvement, it does still not provide effective multi-application delivery.

Any system running on a single processor seems to be severely limited. As soon as several applications are run, then it seems that no matter what the processor speed and Memory the single processor workstation is severely limited.

I would welcome further debate on this. I do not believe that faster processor and faster RAM are the holy grail. We need true mutli-tasking if workstations are going to provide effective application delivery. Or am I wrong?

 

[CreamCake]

I usually have little time to spec such things out, unless I need one for myself.
If you have performance issues with your current configuration, take an eyeball at these babies:

http://www.go-l.com/desktops/machl38/architecture/index.htm#puramanchor

And that is the lowest end PC they offer...

It's the PuRam solid state hard disk that really has my interest.

"The Operating system and system files reside on a PuRam™ solid state flash disk with near zero latency and seek times, and burst transfer rates up to 8.5GB/s I/O, capable of over 150,000 I/O requests per second, all with an average of 0.0% CPU utilization. This translates into an effective desktop business productivity of up to 100 times faster than the fastest available hard disk design at any price or configuration."

Then top it off with a new monitor:

http://www.go-l.com/monitors/index.htm