man, this matte 1440x900 LED-backlit laptop screen is so gross... scrolling text makes the whole screen blink... makes me want to tear my eyes out @_@

I think it's TN :/

no offense to Tamil Nadu >_>

the acronym refers to a terrible type of LCD though :P

@allquixotic haha

thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Flux-Capacitor.aspx

@CanadianLuke good read

the government contracting world isn't like that anymore though

now it's just as cutthroat as the rest of the corporate world

your job isn't needed for 3 days? take a hike! we'll figure out how to hire some H-1B to take your job starting on Monday.

here

@allquixotic hey im here

@StealthRT ;p

figured you'd stop by

first: one thing you need to understand about Xeon CPU model numbers is that not all Xeon "v-something" CPUs are equal; in fact, they are quite different in architecture, CPU socket, etc.

whats on your mind?

correct. 22nm, etc etc

an E3-1275v2 is a completely different processor with completely different performance characteristics and a different CPU socket than an E5-2650v2

...which has nothing to do with the fab size

(since they are both 22nm)

ah

the E3 processors are mainstream, whereas the E5 and E7 (!) processors are EP and EX, respectively

gotcha

the E5 are the server equivalent of the desktop's "Enthusiast Performance" series, but you can have multiple processor sockets on a single motherboard

quick question: where should i post this question on stackexchange?

and the E7 can go up to quad processor I think, and there is not even any desktop equivalent

@StealthRT nowhere

there is no question and answer site on the stackexchange network where this question is appropriate or allowed

there never will be

wow

every single question of this type is 100%, extremely, completely localized TO YOU, in this point in spacetime, in your country, with your specific budget

it will never be allowed because the answer, if it comes, will help exactly one person

someone else might come along with half your budget; then what do they do?

or they might come along in, say, 2017, and all these CPUs are outdated

they'd have to ask a new question

so we'd have one question for each person who has any problem of this category, which is precisely what we don't want

still a question/answer website is just that.

it's not a Q&A site for any question you can imagine

it's a Q&A site for questions whose answers are reusable

gotcha

if the number of people who could ever benefit from the information in the answers is approximately 1, the question will never be appropriate on the SE Q&A sites.

but it's fine in chat :P

naturally...

we talk about stuff just like your question, in this chat, all the time

it's one of the prime "use cases" of this chatroom I guess

so do you have any input on what would be the "best case" in my choosing the correct path for the server and/or desktop?

@StealthRT it depends on what you'll be doing on the desktop, mostly -- if you'll be doing any kind of 3D gaming, you pretty much won't be able to run ESXi and expect decent performance on the gaming

video might even lag, no guarantees

just developing like i am currently doing. Hardly ever play anything

..dont have the time :)

basically if you are only using the desktop for simple 2D programs and maybe some video, you could run your desktop as a VM on a single very powerful physical computer with a bunch of server VMs too

then you just have to attach peripherals and at least a basic graphics card to the server

if you have the money to buy a high-end Xeon server with one or more E5 or E7 processors and high-end storage and memory, you could certainly build one mega-box that does all your development, hosts multiple instances of Windows Server and provides a headed (aka not headless) desktop environment to login to with your peripherals (USB keyboard/mouse and monitor).

if i get a nice graphics card, say a Geforce, would it act as it would if i had it on a desktop PC in front of me?

if i do something in photoshop, will photoshop know its a geforce?

@StealthRT the problem is that virtualizing a graphics card imposes significant overhead

ESXi's physical OS is not a usable operating system, which means that any OS you run on top of ESXi must be running under a hypervisor

every existing hypervisor that exposes a physical graphics card to a guest adds significant overhead, slowing down the performance and possibly introducing bugs and removing features

hum..

your other option is to buy a very inexpensive and small desktop, like an Intel NUC, which would eat up something like 5% of your budget, and attach your peripherals to that and use its integrated IGP for "native" graphics performance (though, not the best for gaming, but AWESOME for video and web surfing), and connect it to the server with gigabit LAN and remote desktop into the server

you could then have the server be completely "headless", and use one of the VMs in the server as your main "desktop" OS with all your browsers, IDEs, etc installed, and the remaining VMs as pure server OSes

example: Windows 8.1 or Windows 7 client OS in one guest, then Server 2012 R2 in the rest

remote desktop over gigabit LAN is quite nice, generally speaking

i currently have an AIO dell 27" touch with i7 quad, etc

a NUC would be a downgrade then probably

yes.. and THAT pc, to me, is slow....

hence why i want to move to a XEON

wait, which kind of i7 is it?

gen 3 i tink

tink = think

huh... an Ivy Bridge system is slow when you aren't even gaming? does it have an HDD, or an SSD?

and how much RAM?

SSD for the main OS (win 8.1) and 2TB for other stuff

8GB ram (which i take up 90% each time i do stuff)

xeon can support more ram as well, which i like :)

I'm pretty sure a Xeon isn't going to improve your performance, to be quite honest. I'm not sure what workload you are running on the desktop that makes it seem slow, but with an Ivy Bridge processor and an SSD, the only thing I could think that would really benefit from improvement would be to quadruple your RAM.

yeah to do that in this thing would be around $500

and i bought it for $1400

id rather not place a band-aid on it rather than get something more powerful (and better upgrade-able)

well... my recommendation would be... if money were no object, I'd get a desktop with a Haswell i7 (something like an i7-4770K or even a Devil's Canyon like the 4970K), with 32 or 64 GB of DDR3 with the highest-available memory bandwidth, and a really fast SSD like a 1 TB Samsung 850 Pro, and just run off of the integrated graphics

like I said, if you aren't writing any programs using OpenCL or CUDA or DirectCompute (GPGPU APIs), and you aren't playing 3D games, then you don't need to spend/waste money on a good graphics card.

yeah thats $$$$$ :)

@StealthRT you're talking about Xeons with more RAM than a Haswell desktop processor can support.

relative to how much that would cost, a Devil's Canyon desktop is PEANUTS.

practically an afterthought.

May need to run some Unity3D

Charley brown?

:)

a (very!) good desktop with high memory bandwidth, high IOPS and a good mainstream CPU (mainstream as opposed to the -E series, which basically triples the price for 15% performance gain) will run you around $3000 with a good GPU, from soup to nuts, not including a display.

a dual-processor Xeon E5v2 server will run you about three times that.

you can probably shrink it to $2000 and still get something good, but I have no idea what you're running, so I don't know how to trade off stuff.

hum

thanks for taking the time to chat with me and explainnig stuff that i havent thought about, @allquixotic

i gotta run now :)

Shit's expensive. I think you can make it work with some effort, though.

Good luck.

thanks!

@allquixotic Heh. I just read that after quadrupling the RAM (4x1GiB to 4x4GiB) on my Xeon 3323 based server

and adding a DRAC

@Hennes nice

damn that's an old proc though :P

Aye. Dell R300 poweredge.

1U server

that predates Nehalem?

I just changed the ram (leaving two slots empty) to test the new memory

Aye. Nehalem -1

:/ no EPT

The nehalem i920 is in my desktop

not a virt server :P

Nah, plain old hardware. 1U. FUn to toy with

i7-920 is still suitable I guess; my dad uses one for mindless card games and machine gun camping in the latest Modern Dootie shoot'em'up

swapping 15K RPS sas drives with a SSD.

timing buildkernels

Vailnly trying to add SAS2 (6.0GB) to a build with no power connectors except those build into the SAS/6iR and PSU combined cable

my upgrade cadence is usually defined by whenever he can't stand his computer and wants an upgrade :P

I'll then get help with the funding for it and he can have my old sys

I got a nice new RAID card now collecting dusta nd I am using the old (SAS 13.0Gb/sec - no cache) RAID card from the server

my next will probably be mainstream Broadwell, since Haswell-E is just too expensive -_-

Xeon 3323 witrh server and 2GiB was Eur 50.25 plus shipping

And server as spare parts to an old personal server (R300 with a Xeon 3363)

So I got two sets of spare parts. One of which will serve as a NAS

Now if I only could speed that up. I wonder if 10Gbit NICs in the (to be backuped desktop and in the server) would help

@allquixotic its my dad's name, used as a psudosirname

@bob se app + pushbullet desktop. Phone notifies me mainly. Pushbullet let's me see notifications on my phone

Also phone is auto silent after 11 until 7

@JourneymanGeek Pushbullet refuses to send anything from my Desktop to my phone...

Weird.

Well, that's not entirely true. It seems to store them up, then bulk send them randomly.

@allquixotic that's a good upgrade cadence :p