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Re: 3d modeling machine

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On Wednesday 24 April 2013 01:29, Joshua Whalen conveyed the following 
to comp.os.linux.hardware...

> I'm building a workstation for a friend [...]
> 
> My budget is $2500, and the machine must do the following: Fast 3d
> card, good quality (and widely supported, pleez) raid controller card
> (I don't think we can do scsi here, so we're talking a sata parity
> raid, or else I'll just go with an external thing like a mini-g)
> 
> What I guess I need help with is logic board, processor, and cards. I
> could also use some advice on where to buy.

If it has to be professional-grade hardware - as opposed to consumer-
grade home-and-office PC stuff - then I would recommend going with one 
of the following motherboard manufacturers, but without that I specify a 
particular motherboard and processor combination for you, since mileage 
may and will vary, and so will price tags.

  ° Tyan
  ° Supermicro
  ° Gigabyte (their professional series)
  ° Intel

If the machine is to be used as a 3D workstation, then you probably want 
to have a quad-core processor chip, or possibly even a multi-chip 
motherboard, but that's going to cost you a lot more.  

In the event of an Intel motherboard, you will of course not have the 
option to go with AMD processors.  The other manufacturers offer boards 
for either Intel or AMD processors.  In some cases, you can even buy 
such systems as barebones, i.e. the motherboard is already mounted into 
a chassis - for professional-grade stuff, this typically boils down to a 
rack-mountable flip-over mid-tower chassis - along with a certified (and 
possibly redudant) power supply, and typically also with hot-swap drive 
bays.  You then simply pick the model of motherboard, the processor type 
and the amount of memory and disk storage, and the machine will be built 
for you and shipped to you.

The advantage of going with a professional-grade motherboard is that the 
motherboard will most probably still come with a legacy BIOS chip on it.  
Consumer-grade motherboards on the other hand are all migrating (or have 
already migrated) to a UEFI chip, because Microsoft demands that 
hardware vendors who wish to boast the "designed for Microsoft ® Windows
™ 8" sticker on their machines must have a UEFI with the Secure Boot 
feature enabled.  And UEFI is already an ugly mess to set up in the 
first place, but with Secure Boot it becomes an even uglier mess.  I'm 
not going to go into the details here, but "Google is your friend".  (On 
x86, Secure Boot can usually be disabled in the UEFI firmware, and there 
typically also is an option to have the UEFI mimic a legacy BIOS.)

Another thing you should keep in mind that truly professional-grade 
stuff typically uses ECC memory, which is a lot more expensive than 
regular memory, and such motherboards are typically also very picky on 
account of the types and brands of memory modules.

As for a RAID adapter, you can't go wrong with Adaptec.  You definitely 
want a PCIe RAID adapter.  Most of Adaptec's true RAID adapters can be 
driven by the "aacraid" driver module, which is part of the upstream 
Linux kernel, so no extra driver needs being installed.  3Ware, Qlogic 
and LSI also make very good RAID adapters which are supported in the 
upstream kernel, but I myself have only used Adaptec, so that's the only 
kind I can really comment on.

Also bear in mind that parallel SCSI is not quite mainstream anymore, 
even for high-performance stuff.  SAS (Serially-Attached SCSI) is the 
norm now, albeit that you can also get away with enterprise-grade and 
RAID-qualified SATA disks.  Not all SATA disks are usable in RAID 
configurations because some have timing issues which cause the adapter - 
or the operating system, in the event of software RAID - to see a disk 
as malfunctioning when it's actually still functioning properly.  This 
is why special RAID-qualified SATA disks were brought onto the market.  
SAS disks are always RAID-qualified, but then you're in a higher price 
segment again.  SAS and SATA disks can typically be connected to the 
same RAID controllers, and a decent SAS/SATA RAID controller supports 
hot-swap.

For video adapter cards, you could go with either AMD/ATi or nVidia.  I 
am rather partial to nVidia myself.  However, the question here is "Is 
your friend going to be using that machine for gaming, or is this a 
professional-grade graphics workstation?"  In the latter case, if you go 
with nVidia, you may want to contemplate their (more expensive) Quadro 
range.  If not, I'd recommend one of their GeForce models.  nVidia's 
proprietary drivers for UNIX also support CUDA, so that your GPU becomes 
an extra general purpose number crunching unit.  I don't know whether 
AMD/ATi has an equivalent technology - if they do, then I'm not aware of 
it.  

Either way, don't settle for on-board graphics.  While those may be 
sufficient for home and office desktop PCs and maybe even for some 
simple gaming, they usually suck at the heavy 3D stuff, and they 
typically share their memory with the main system RAM.  You don't want 
that.

Speaking of RAM, as I said earlier on, ECC RAM is expensive.  But for a 
serious 3D workstation, I would recommend it, and I would put in at 
least 8 GiB.  And of course, you want a 64-bit distribution on there.  
There is no valid excuse anymore for still sticking to a 32-bit 
distribution on a machine with 64-bit processors.  Most 64-bit 
distributions for x86 come as multilib, meaning that they are 64-bit 
where possible, but that they also contain a number of 32-bit shared 
libraries for that stuff which hasn't been ported to 64-bit yet, and 
then this 32-bit stuff can run seamlessly alongside of the 64-bit 
software.
 
> I usually use apple hardware for myself, but my friend has expressed a
> preference for generic pc hardware, and I can't really argue against
> that, given the state of apple's obvious bee-line back to closed
> proprietary crap again.

Not just that, but the time when Apple used really high quality hardware 
(such as SCSI when everyone else was using PATA) is also already 
confined to the history books.  With Apple, you pay for the design.  
It's supposed to be some kind of artistic thing, and you are part of a 
self-proclaimed elite if you buy one.  But what's inside is not 
particularly of any better quality than standard off-the-shelf stuff you 
buy at a generic PC store.

-- 
= Aragorn =
  GNU/Linux user #223157 - http://www.linuxcounter.net

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Thread

3d modeling machine Joshua Whalen <joshuafwhalen@gmail.com> - 2013-04-23 19:29 -0400
  Re: 3d modeling machine Aragorn <stryder@telenet.be.invalid> - 2013-04-24 03:29 +0200
    Re: 3d modeling machine Christoph Schmees <cjws@nurfuerspam.de> - 2013-04-24 20:17 +0200
      Re: 3d modeling machine Aragorn <stryder@telenet.be.invalid> - 2013-04-24 23:42 +0200
        Re: 3d modeling machine Soupe du Jour <soupedujour2000@gmail.com> - 2013-06-26 18:57 +0000

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