The God Box (2004) | Hacker News Reader

The God Box (2004)

archive.arstechnica.com

37 pointsecliptik23 comments

The total price is just a hair of $9.7k ($13,290 is 2020 dollars)

It's interesting looking at the breakdown, because in some cases prices are similar, and I think in some other cases, the smart money has changed.

For instance, a really high end motherboard (X570 or threadripper) will still be in the $500 range, but there are now available options going up to $800.

The closest CPU option is 32 cores 3970X TR, but it runs $2000, not the $2400 they spend (again, 2020 dollars)

256GB of DDR4 ECC RAM (instead of 4GB) will cost about $1200, not the $1350 spent.

GPU options, however, will run into $1200 for an RTX 2080 Ti rather than the $800 they spent.

SCSI cards are no longer necessary, as NVME is the smart play, and PCIE 4.0 is the high-end play.

They only spend $600 on the system drive ($827 if you include the controllers), but for a God Box, I'd put in an Optane PCIE card for $1300.

For $1440 in storage drives, you're either looking at dual 4TB SSDs if you want SSD speed, or an external 4-bay NAS with 3 8TB drives.

Optical drives are out, which just leaves backup and case. I know nothing about tape storage, so I won't comment on that, but in the case world, you now have interesting options like the TureMetal UP10 which allow you to run this system entirely fanless, but for somewhere in the $700-$1000 range.

> The closest CPU option is 32 cores 3970X TR, but it runs $2000, not the $2400 they spend (again, 2020 dollars).

Sticking to HEDT, rather than server components, the 3990X is available, appropriately enough, at $3,990 retail. This is 64 cores.

> 256GB of DDR4 ECC RAM (instead of 4GB) will cost about $1200, not the $1350 spent.

This is not possible as a combination right now. Threadrippers (as is the case for all mainstream and HEDT processors from AMD) can only use unbuffered DIMMs. The largest unbuffered ECC DIMM I have been able to find is 16GB, which maxes out at 128GB with 8 DIMM slots (I haven't seen larger for any TR motherboards).

> For $1440 in storage drives, you're either looking at dual 4TB SSDs if you want SSD speed, or an external 4-bay NAS with 3 8TB drives.

If it's a capacity play, you can easily get more than 3x8TB if you install into the tower directly, rather than a separate NAS. Especially with Threadripper, the motherboards tend to be large and 3rd gen need massive cooling solutions. There should be room for at least 4-8 3.5" drives in the tower.

Still, the modern god box is a good sight better than the old one.

> Sticking to HEDT, rather than server components, the 3990X is available

It's true that I left that out. It's not entirely clear to me whether the budget is unlimited or not in the God Box. Back in 2004 you could go higher budget than they did with the Opteron 850, but the market wasn't as clearly segmented as it is today.

> Threadrippers (as is the case for all mainstream and HEDT processors from AMD) can only use unbuffered DIMMs

I hadn't realized that. There are 32GB ECC UDIMM's on the market (e.g. https://memory.net/product/m391a4g43mb1-ctd-samsung-1x-32gb-...), but that raises the price to around $2k.

> If it's a capacity play, you can easily get more than 3x8TB if you install into the tower directly

Yes, but we're talking smart money, At the time, the NAS didn't exist, and with 10Gbe, the bandwidth is high enough to make it not worth keeping in-case.

I personally think the sweet spot is somewhere in the $2k-$3k range. That gets you 16 cores, 128GB ECC, 2TB NVME, 10Gbe, RTX 2070/2080

Aw man! That RAM was not available two months ago. I recently built a 3970X machine and was frustrated at the lack of 32GB ECC UDIMMs.

I was trying to figure out why, if money was no object, they chose 4GB of RAM vs the 16GB they said the board supported. Then I remembered about the 32-bit OS 4GB limit. While XP 64-bit came out in 2001, it was only for Itanium 64-bit processors. It wasn't until 2005 that XP and Server 2003 would have supported 64-bit, and therefore anything over 4GB.

Kind of a difficult time to plan your system build, here 64-bit processors are out, motherboards capable of supporting vast quantities of ram, but unable to utilize that outside of Linux. However, this "God Box" would have been excellent for 2004. Then in 2005, you could upgrade to XP Pro 64-bit, and go ahead and spend your unlimited funds to quadruple your RAM.

My 2005 Dell dual Xeon 3.9Ghz box with 8GB RAM is floating around, we used VMware and more memory than that though and the nvidia card has half a gig and my box had four 15k 146GB Fujitsu drives on a LSI R10 with iirc 1GB BBU RAM cache , this was fiscal 04 iirc

Physical Address Extension would've been an option, no?

> A floppy drive is still a basic tool for system construction

In 2004! I grew up using Macs, so this is wild to me. In my candy coloured little world the floppy drive was finished in 1998 when Steve Jobs told me it was.

I remember being horrified in 1998 when they killed the floppy. As a mac repair tech, we used them constantly, and the cost increase from shifting to boot cds was maddening.

By 2004, I'd made my peace with it and had stopped including them on my PC builds.

IIRC the recommended way to provide possibly missing storage drivers to Windows XP installer was via floppy disk. XP was the go to Windows version in practice until Windows 7 release in 2009!

After they got tolerances figured out, 1.44 mb floppies were dependable and just about 100 pct guaranteed on all PC hardware, from whiteboxes to servers, oscilloscopes, routers, even clunky laptops. They made sense for little stuff like sneakernet and drivers for a long time.

Just curious, why do you write "pct" instead of using "%"?

Why did you write out the entire word why instead of 'y'?

You do realize that the entire word would be "percent," don't you?

I got my first computer in 2000 and used floppies all the time in 2000-2002 to share files with my best friend. My next PC in 2004 also had a floppy drive, though I used them less and less often (I used CD-Rs in 2005, and then USB sticks starting in 2006). Only in 2008 I had a PC (laptop) with no floppy drive.

Old Ars Nostalgia!

New Ars isn't a patch on what it was. But then the world has changes I guessed. Ars seems to be more about TV show reviews these days :-/

Pretty timely, LTT has published one of their appropriately-named "Compensator" builds, where they make the most obscene off-the-shelf PC possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkfbg-sHwDo

Would get a single threaded Geekbench score of around 250, similar to that of a 2013 iPhone.

are the Geekbench benchmarks equivalent across versions of Geekbench?

They are normalized but also they've run this chip on Geekbench 5: https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/708

[Technically, that's an Opteron 275 instead of a 250, but they're quite similar. 250 was clocked a bit higher but had slower memory and no SSE3]

Oh wow ars old site design is making me nostalgic.

Yeah, back in the days before their 2007 Conde Nast pivot and they moved towards softer stories.

firefox

document.getElementsByTagName("td")[15].width = "85%";

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