Comment by libertybylaw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by libertybylaw | Hacker News Reader

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I use an old 2013 Xeon Workstation as daily driver and have been very happy with it.

It came with 32 Gigs of cosmic-radiation-shielded RAM, two 16 core processers (1.9 GHZ, granted), and all the peripheral ports I could need. I slapped an old 2016 Nvidia graphics card into it and its been able to do all that I can need and more. Considering I got it for free, it's a great deal.

I would easily have paid $200 for this machine though - I can run a dedicated ubuntu VM with 8GB RAM alongside 100+ chrome browsers no problem.

I equate it to semi-truck cab, as compared to sports-cars of the consumer desktop market. It's not that fast and it gets a bit lower gas mileage (electricity consumption), but it can haul 10 tons of cargo.

Radiation Shielded RAM? Is that an even more expensive kind of ECC?

I think they're mistaking the RAM's heat spreaders for radiation shields.

Heat spreaders were common for DDR2 and DDR3 ECC RAM. Some models, like the KVR667D2D4F5/2G, have temperature warning labels, indicating that it's not a radiation shield.

Such a thin layer of aluminium isn't able stop a significant proportion of gamma radiation.

I'm in the overclocked Xeon 1680v2 gang and loving it.

It's quite capable with a more modern GPU and the X79 motherboard also supports NVMe drives.

What motherboard, please? Can you also boot from NVMe? I was looking into this, have Asus P9X79 PRO.

Ha! I use the Asus X79 Deluxe and yes, I can boot from PCIe. I had a P9X79 Pro before but stupidly wanted TPM support so I replaced with an Asus X79 Deluxe from ebay which had bent CPU pins that I was able to fix.

The TPM support was a waste but I gained the ability to PCIe boot. Before that I was able to boot PCIe on the P9X79 Pro by putting the boot partition on a SATA SSD I believe.

I use these for my drives:

https://a.co/d/2jaYUbM

Thanks a lot! I hoped i'd be able to boot from PCIe, but boot partition on a SATA drive is quite ok too.

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