Sandy Bridge workstation

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

As soon as the administrative SNAFU with my NewEgg Preferred Account gets cleared up () I'll be making the jump to a Sandy Bridge workstation.  The Atom experiment I started in March '10 just isn't hacking it anymore.  My new box:

ASUS P8B WS Intel Xeon E3/C206 ATX Motherboard
Intel Xeon E3-1230 Sandy Bridge 3.2GHz Quad-Core Server Processor
G.SKILL Sniper 2 x 4GB DDR3 1333 RAM
WD VelociRaptor 74GB 10000 RPM SATAII 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

In addition to the VelociRaptor, I'll have an identical pair of 640GB WD Caviar Black SATAII drives to build a striped LVM partition across, once the server upgrade is complete.  Plus, I finally get to put my 15-year-old full tower case to good use again.

The best part: all for a fraction of the cost of a Mac Pro.

[Caliga]

  Why no SATA III?

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

Why no SATA III?

Because I'm cheap and have roughly 2TB worth of storage of other types already.   The VelociRaptor was an afterthought; I got an email flyer from NewEgg indicating they were on sale.  I wasn't going to buy a drive at all.

I'm hoping the LGA 1155 socket hangs on long enough to make that board a viable core for the next 2 - 3 years while Intel rolls out and solidifies their next multi-processor socket.  Things like ECC RAM and better hard drives I'll add as I go.

[Norgy]

The LGA-1155 seems to be the "standard" socket, while the enthusiast will get his own socket late this year. I can't imagine why Intel would scrap what is undoubtly a very successful and high-performing socket after just a year or two, particularly when the release was a bit bungled.

The LGA-1366/X58 combo was a bit on the inefficient side compared to the Sandy Bridge setup.

Seems like the 'raptor disks are getting cheaper, and they suffer none of the SSD's problems when it comes to performance loss.
How are the Xeon processors when it comes to power consumption and heat, vM?

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

The LGA-1155 seems to be the "standard" socket, while the enthusiast will get his own socket late this year. I can't imagine why Intel would scrap what is undoubtly a very successful and high-performing socket after just a year or two, particularly when the release was a bit bungled.

The LGA-1366/X58 combo was a bit on the inefficient side compared to the Sandy Bridge setup.

What I'm concerned about is the plethora of actual and planned sockets Intel has gone through over the past couple years.  LGA 1366 was going to be their new multi-chip/high performance socket, with LGA 1156 as the lower performance unisocket complement.  Now, LGA 1156 has been replaced with LGA 1155, LGA 1366 is due to be replaced later this year by LGA 1356 when Intel releases the E5 Sandy Bridge Xeons (the chips that are supposed to phase out the Nehalems in the middle of the server market), and LGA 2011 is coming down the pike late this year or early next year to be the new performance desktop/server socket.  I hope these sockets survive into the Haswell microarchitecture, but the pattern doesn't look good.

How are the Xeon processors when it comes to power consumption and heat, vM?

In general better, considering how sensitive the customers in the Xeon's market segment are to power usage and heat.  The particular chip I'm going to buy loses the graphics core (which I wasn't going to use anyway) and 200MHz of core clock over the i7-2600 for about $75 and 15W less.  From what I've read of user experiences, the Xeons idle at much lower power, also.  (Makes sense for their market.)  Its also not really overclockable, so that helps.

[Zanza]

Aren't 10000 rev harddrives rather loud for a workstation? I would rather spend on a SSD drive for your OS.