Suggestions pls: Building a 30-35k worth PC for home lab use

[oj88]

I intend to build a lab server at home just to keep abreast of the latest things from Microsoft; From Lync 2013 to System Center 2012 to SQL 2012. Everything will be virtualized using Hyper-V so things like VT-d, VT-x, EPT, etc. should be supported.

After a 5-year hiatus on building an Intel-based PC, the last being a Core 2 Quad Q9550 from way back, I'm a bit rusty on the bleeding edge. Though, I've recently started reading up and have come up with the following grocery list of sorts, to build my lab/test/dev PC, I still think I'll need all the help I can get. Target budget is just a little over 30k.

Asrock H77 Pro4-M
Intel Core i7-3770
GSkill ARES 16GB (8GBX2) DDR3 1600
HP 331T 4-Port Gigabit NIC

Why Asrock? My homeserver uses an Asrock board and it's been running 24x7 for over 3 years now. Built like a rock. Though, I don't see my lab PC running 24x7, it's nice to know that this brand is reliable. I was originally looking for a board with Q77 chipsets, but apparently, business-oriented boards are not quite popular here and none of the local PC shops sell them. That said, I was forced along the path of consumer boards (Z77, H77, etc.). I didn't get the Z77 as I don't intend to overclock it.... same reason I didn't get the unlocked i7-3770 (the one with the "K"). To me, stability is a tad bit more important.

I went for a 3rd Gen Core i7 (Ivy Bridge) because they're cooler, slightly cheaper, and has a few things that may come in handy when I need to enable some enterprise features.... or so I've read.

As for RAM, I'm starting off with just 16GB and will upgrade to 32GB when budget permits or if my projects demand for more.

I haven't started looking for HDDs but at the top of my head, I think a pair of 500GB 7200RPM SATA3 drives in RAID0 should do. I don't have the budget to go SSD for now.

Please tell me what you think.

[jhnkvn]

Hay nako oj.. di nanaman ako makakatulog ng maaga dahil sa post mo

Budget: 30-35k
Intel Core i5 4440 3.1-3.3Ghz - 8,590
Asrock H87 Pro 4 - 4,680
2 x 8GB Kingston Hyper X Blu 1600 CL10 - 8,000
2 x Crucial M500 120gb - 7,200
Corsair VS450 - 1,660

Total: 30,130

First is that, oj, you're really rusty na. Most consumer desktop chipsets are now on Haswell (8x chipsets) over the older Ivy Bridge (7x chipsets).

One thing I dunno where to source is the HP 4-port NIC so I'm assuming you'll be reusing this from your old rig. In our workplace, I prefer Intel NICs over anything else thanks to its virtualization-friendly nature. I'm actually in the process of waiting for our 5 pcs of Intel PRO 1000 PTs over at Amazon

I left plenty in the budget for your preferred ATX casing which I'll recommend you get Fractal's R-series of silent cases. Since ayaw maglabas ni Fractal Philippines ng R4, the Fractal R3 (3,800php) is still a good case just a bit phased out lang nga. An alternative I'll also recommend is Corsair 300R (3,600php).

Now for the other thing is cooling. You see, for play things and those I expect to be running for server-workloads, I fit them with an aftermarket cooler since I anticipate a rather heavy CPU usage. This in turn causes heat = higher RPM fan = more noise = more annoyance for me. My favorite so far is by far CoolerMaster's T4 (1,300php) which is kinda like a shrunk-down 212. This is by far more of my personal preference as the stock Intel cooler will do an excellent job.

Well, yun headache dito is if you really want Intel's vPro is you need to go for the enterprise Q87 chipsets. But as you observed, trying to get them sa Philippines is a total pain in the ass. I already tried that route na just recently while trying to build a DIY production server for our office but wala talaga ako mahanap.

[jhnkvn]

Now for some of my comments on my choice of part selection:

Intel Core i5 4440 3.1-3.3Ghz. I doubt you'll be needing the additional "4" virtual cores that hyperthreading gives you. If you believe that you would, then pony up the 5,000php more for the i7.

Asrock H87 Pro 4. Truthfully, I'm a ASUS board believer.. especially when it comes to server workstations since they enjoy industry-leading reliability in motherboards (Google: Puget Systems' Most Reliable Brands). Most of our office PCs are Intel's B85 chipset but you'll need the flexibility the consumer-side H87 has. I chose the H87 Pro 4 since this is a ATX board so you have more expansion slots to play with versus the cheaper mATX boards.

2 x 8GB Kingston Hyper X Blu 1600 CL10. My motto in memory is "Most RAM at the most affordable cost". Speed improvements of 1600 to 2000+ is really incremental and so are CAS timings. You'll see them in benchmarks but in real life, it isn't worth ponying up for a "faster" RAM. Kingston's HyperX trade blows with G.Skill ARES... choose whichever is cheapest. I also prefer going for multiple single-channel RAMs over a dual-channel one. Why? Well.. again, incremental lang improvement ng channel differences.

2 x Crucial M500 120gb. They're on-sale right now at PCHub. There's always room for SSDs because I'll always compromise the others rather than compromise on this. Just go for JBOD (just a bunch of disk) setup rather than RAID since you lose TRIM garbage collection capability if you go for RAID.

Don't worry about RAM longevity, unless you plan on going for read/write marathons, their P/E cycles will outlive your PC's life expectancy.

Corsair VS450. Hmm? I have these on our office workstations. Server workstations are on Seasonic's X-series PSUs though. Works like a charm really. Internal parts isn't what I would call "excellent" but it isn't a slouch either. I'd say for the price, I'll get these over any generic PSUs for the sake of filtration and rail stability.

As for softwares.... I know naman kung saan galing mga Server "Datacenter" editions mo :naughty2:

[safeorigin]

question:

1. why not buy RAM with lower CAS latency?

2. why not xeon? not gonna need that igpu anyway.

3. no gpu for openCL?

[oj88]

Hay nako oj.. di nanaman ako makakatulog ng maaga dahil sa post mo

Budget: 30-35k
Intel Core i5 4440 3.1-3.3Ghz - 8,590
Asrock H87 Pro 4 - 4,680
2 x 8GB Kingston Hyper X Blu 1600 CL10 - 8,000
2 x Crucial M500 120gb - 7,200
Corsair VS450 - 1,660

Total: 30,130

First is that, oj, you're really rusty na. Most consumer desktop chipsets are now on Haswell (8x chipsets) over the older Ivy Bridge (7x chipsets).

One thing I dunno where to source is the HP 4-port NIC so I'm assuming you'll be reusing this from your old rig. In our workplace, I prefer Intel NICs over anything else thanks to its virtualization-friendly nature. I'm actually in the process of waiting for our 5 pcs of Intel PRO 1000 PTs over at Amazon

I left plenty in the budget for your preferred ATX casing which I'll recommend you get Fractal's R-series of silent cases. Since ayaw maglabas ni Fractal Philippines ng R4, the Fractal R3 (3,800php) is still a good case just a bit phased out lang nga. An alternative I'll also recommend is Corsair 300R (3,600php).

Now for the other thing is cooling. You see, for play things and those I expect to be running for server-workloads, I fit them with an aftermarket cooler since I anticipate a rather heavy CPU usage. This in turn causes heat = higher RPM fan = more noise = more annoyance for me. My favorite so far is by far CoolerMaster's T4 (1,300php) which is kinda like a shrunk-down 212. This is by far more of my personal preference as the stock Intel cooler will do an excellent job.

Well, yun headache dito is if you really want Intel's vPro is you need to go for the enterprise Q87 chipsets. But as you observed, trying to get them sa Philippines is a total pain in the ass. I already tried that route na just recently while trying to build a DIY production server for our office but wala talaga ako mahanap.

Thanks for the very detailed insight and sorry to ruin your sleep. As I've said in my post, I went for the Ivy Bridge because they're slightly cooler and costs less. Though I admit I did fail to mention that I compared this to the Haswell i7-4770 for apples-to-apples comparison. I pretty much don't need the upgraded GPU in the Haswell architecture as the only use for the onboard video will be to administer the server. I just need something that has the horsepower to do multi-threaded operations (multiple VMs running, for instance), without warming up the whole lab.

I never intended to include the HP NIC in the list I posted. To be clear, I already own this card. But since it's already brought up, I also believe that Intel NICs are great. In fact, I'm using an Intel PRO/1000 PT Server NIC in my homeserver right now. But there's an exception to every rule. The HP 331T NIC (based on the Broadcom BCM5719 http://www.broadcom.com/docs/features/hp/331T.pdf) is a true-blue server NIC that I pulled from a production HP Proliant DL360 Gen8. This card is being used in datacenters around the world so I'm pretty sure it's up to the task I plan to use it for.

For cooling, if the stock cooler produces too much racket, I'll just get another Noctua NH-U12P SE2. I use the same in my homeserver and the silence is, wow! (You can see my write-up here Went crazy and installed a monster cooler (pic heavy) - Motherboards and Processors - HomeServerShow Forums). That said, any noise that I can tolerate is fine.

As for vPro, it's a nice-to-have feature, but not a deal-breaker.

Now for some of my comments on my choice of part selection:

Intel Core i5 4440 3.1-3.3Ghz. I doubt you'll be needing the additional "4" virtual cores that hyperthreading gives you. If you believe that you would, then pony up the 5,000php more for the i7.

Asrock H87 Pro 4. Truthfully, I'm a ASUS board believer.. especially when it comes to server workstations since they enjoy industry-leading reliability in motherboards (Google: Puget Systems' Most Reliable Brands). Most of our office PCs are Intel's B85 chipset but you'll need the flexibility the consumer-side H87 has. I chose the H87 Pro 4 since this is a ATX board so you have more expansion slots to play with versus the cheaper mATX boards.

2 x 8GB Kingston Hyper X Blu 1600 CL10. My motto in memory is "Most RAM at the most affordable cost". Speed improvements of 1600 to 2000+ is really incremental and so are CAS timings. You'll see them in benchmarks but in real life, it isn't worth ponying up for a "faster" RAM. Kingston's HyperX trade blows with G.Skill ARES... choose whichever is cheapest. I also prefer going for multiple single-channel RAMs over a dual-channel one. Why? Well.. again, incremental lang improvement ng channel differences.

2 x Crucial M500 120gb. They're on-sale right now at PCHub. There's always room for SSDs because I'll always compromise the others rather than compromise on this. Just go for JBOD (just a bunch of disk) setup rather than RAID since you lose TRIM garbage collection capability if you go for RAID.

Don't worry about RAM longevity, unless you plan on going for read/write marathons, their P/E cycles will outlive your PC's life expectancy.

Corsair VS450. Hmm? I have these on our office workstations. Server workstations are on Seasonic's X-series PSUs though. Works like a charm really. Internal parts isn't what I would call "excellent" but it isn't a slouch either. I'd say for the price, I'll get these over any generic PSUs for the sake of filtration and rail stability.

As for softwares.... I know naman kung saan galing mga Server "Datacenter" editions mo :naughty2:

More virtual cores, the better. It just means I can run more VMs concurrently. Since this is just a practice/POC server, I won't be load-testing it with real-world traffic. All that's needed is maybe 2-3 test users/clients connecting to it.

As for the mobo, Gigabyte, Asrock, Asus, and Intel are my favorite boards. It just so happened that the Asrock won the coin toss. :D

Two 120GB SSDs (240GB with RAID0) is unlikely to be enough. A single 500GB SSD would be better but the cost is, well.... never mind. ;)

The choice for PC case is still open. I already have my eye on a small micro-ATX case... I just don't have my notes with me now. For the PSU, I'll probably just skip the 80+ models and just get any of the Value but true-rated models such as the Antec VP-450P.

Software? MSDN sub. Grey area, maybe, but not as bad as getting it from tor sites.

question:

1. why not buy RAM with lower CAS latency?

2. why not xeon? not gonna need that igpu anyway.

3. no gpu for openCL?

1. I'm with jhnkvn that more RAM is better than a slightly faster but lesser RAM.

2. a. Xeons are expensive.
b. They require a server board, and
c: Server boards are expensive (if you can find one),

3. Not sure what this question is about

[jhnkvn]

question:

1. why not buy RAM with lower CAS latency?

2. why not xeon? not gonna need that igpu anyway.

3. no gpu for openCL?

1. RAM performance is dependent on two things: speed (e.g. 1666ghz) and latency. You can say a higher speed but higher latency is self-negating. However, ram performance is very incremental. Benchmarks usually shows a ~1-5% speed difference and that itself is imperceptible in real-life performance. It's best to get more -- at least you can use more of them.

2. This is due to cost. For example, a single Intel Xeon E5 2407 (4 cores, 2.2ghz) costs Php27,500 SRP pricing on a HP ML350e. Not to mention you need the supporting motherboard chipset (the enterprise-class Q chipset) that's very hard to find in the local market.

3. Intel's Ivy/Haswell already have built-in GPU in the form of Intel Graphics (formerly known as Intel Graphics Accelerators IGAs) that will utilize OpenCL if need be.

The difference between server-class and desktop-class "stuff" all boils down to stability lang naman. But stability comes at a cost. I won't think about running our SAP ERP system off an i7 but I wouldn't mind for our machine monitoring logs to be on a i5. Assuming you don't need to throw in 190 RAM chips inside a server rack, sa totoo lang... Xeons are over-rated. The only reason why I'm going for server-class is because of ECC RAM :naughty2:

--

*oj88

My choice for Haswell is easy. It's the latest Intel microarchitecture. Although it isn't a huge jump much like Ivy Bridge was for desktop users, single and multi-thread performance should be better than Ivy Bridge. I also noted the increased temperature and power consumption but these can be shrugged off. You can always throw in an aftermarket cooler (you should in fact if you plan on keeping the server under load constantly) to lower down temperatures after all. Besides, running it at 50Cs isn't what we call "extremely hot" in this day and age :gayfight:

Another factor is that newer architectures fares better since they're newer. Parts are easier to procure now and eventually over the long run. Think of it this way: C2D era LGA775 is still relatively easy to still procure nowadays.. but P4's Northwoods aren't.

As a side-note, just wanna ask.. can you do an experiment sa HP DL360 Gen8 server niyo? you see, I have a newer DL380p G8 server arriving but I ordered it without hard drives as I plan on experimenting with enterprise solid-state drives. Since HP's SSDs are insanely off-the-charts when it comes to pricing, I went to purchase 2.5" drive carriers from eBay and Intel DC S3500 drives off Amazon.

Yun problema kasi sa G8 is that it began throwing diagnostic and monitoring stuff sa G8 drive carriers often causing a screen to boot that it's an unauthenticated drive when using SSDs. If you do attempt to bypass it, there's two things that will happen: (1) if the SSD doesn't have SMART temperature readings, the system thinks it's overheating and it'll shut down. (2) if the SSD has temperature readings, it should hum along without the monitoring G8 drives have (sorry for them, I have no need for LED indicators on my drive bay).

So I was wondering if Samsung PRO 840s have temperature readings that is read by HP. If you have any of them idling around, pa test naman sa DL360 G8 you see.. even I'm not sure if Intel's datacenter-class S3500 wouldn't give me headaches on the DL380p

[oj88]

Thanks jhnkvn. Haswell it is.

What do you think of the i7-4770 paired with a H87 board from any of the manufacturers I mentioned?

On HP servers and SSDs, iLO4 is simply draconian. The slightest deviation of the results from any of the several system checks that it does will cause the server to display a fault and then shut down. I neither have the time nor the patience to think up ways to go around it. Hence, I'm building my own white box so I can have my way.

In one situation, somebody wanted to replace the noisy fan on a G8 Microserver. However, the stock fan has 6 pins. Replacing it with a 4-pin aftermarket fan didn't work and depending on how the pins were lined up, will either cause the server to shut down or run the replacement fan at full speed, among other annoying results. Another owner programmed an Arduino to read the PWM signal from the server and produce a fake tach signal back. He had some limited success but he would still occasionally get a red or amber fault light from the server.