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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

What's the big deal with having a whole liquid cooled workstation, and why is it important information for me to know what this dude's hardware is? And seriously, is there something about the rig that is necessary to chew through a dataset with a few million rows?

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Liquid-cooled computers have one major benefit; usually, your computer ages over time, and there's a long period where it's still barely fast enough but you wish you had something nicer. A liquid-cooled workstation prevents you from needing to manage this grey area by catastrophically failing at unexpected intervals.

Had me in the first half.

I looked at using an AIO for my PC build but ultimately went with an air cooler the size of a damned rubix cube and a high airflow case.

My room gets toasty with raytracing titles, lol

Wouldn't your room get equally/more toasty with liquid cooling? That heat has to get dumped somewhere, and liquid would theoretically be more effective at dumping it into your room.

What alternative wouldn’t end up dumping it in your room?

With a liquid cooler you could theoretically have the heat exchanger in a separate room or outside.

Or add underfloor heating to the bathroom. My girlfriend might actually be happy that I'm gaming.

yeah no doubt. Interestingly, I have seen a water cooling setup that dumped heat to a massive outdoor radiator, but that was obviously a one off project.

I'd say I was surprised by the amount of heat a gaming pc can generate these days but when you have a gpu that can consume ~ 400W and a cpu at ~ 100W, only so much my 'space heater that draws pretty triangles' can do, lol.

I might look into undervolting this summer.

Also prevents you from messing with it too much, as any substantial change requires draining and refilling your loop.

I got an Aigo AIO (AC SE 240) off of AliExpress and use it as an automated reminder that my system needs an upgrade: once it stops working (with an upper bound of maybe 4-5 years), I'll know that it's time! Didn't even need to pay extra for that feature!

I had to re-read this three times. My sarcasm detector must be on the fritz.

I never understood this problem. I am positive this is a solved problem in cars. I mean within reasonable timelines — ten years or so — the pipes and the radiator should not leak at all. Especially for something that stays in one place, if we have figured out how to not make it leak for something that travels at 70 miles an hour.

He just does this with all his blog posts, don't overthink it. The tech industry is full of people with unexpected quirks.

We need more of this, not less. This is Hacker News. He gave us exactly what we need to know to exactly replicate his results.

That's how I took it too. You always provide hardware information when publishing any data set that takes a long time to compile.

I think it feels a little bit of an Ad for the hardware, especially the way he describes the case, telling you the exact model and how spacious it is. Bit sus but perhaps he is being OVERLY detailed and just likes telling you he has a bunch of CPU's that are well cooled in a case with two big ugly fans on the front (not into that look at all.)

Though I can totally understand, geeky people love details. I have a habit of getting way too detailed in my writings here. So I then spend most of the time editing it down to be as clear and brief as possible. I refuse to use an LLM for my own thoughts.

I really don't think we should be shaming computer enthusiasts for being enthusiastic about their computers on HN of all places

It had a very 90s/early-2000s tech blog feel to it. Only thing missing was his custom Gentoo build.

I found it delightful. It added character and created a sense of relatability from the outset.

you are visitor 18813!

The 9950X is an excellent CPU at a reasonable price point and works perfectly fine with an ordinary air-cooled heat sink in an ordinary case without stupid numbers of fans. The TDP is just not that high.

source: my 9950X, happily running air cooled.

(Embarrassingly, I have an M4 Max that can almost match it in the CPU-bound workload I care about while sipping some 45W. The rest of the industry really needs to catch up with Apple on power efficiency.)

> 96 GB of DDR5 RAM

Most people drive cars worth less than this.

He could have gotten it when it was still cheap.

It’s no less valuable because he got it cheap.

I too daytrade sticks of RAM.

96gb of ddr5 ram is about $800.

A single stick of DDR5 RAM on Amazon in about $450 now. Three sticks would be $1350. Do most people drive old clankers with less than $1500 resale value?

You still need a few terabytes to enter the real cars territory.

Most people don't own or drive cars.

Where? Even in Europe, 88% of households have a car, and on average just over half of all people.

I have seen global estimates for number of people with access to a car to be about 20%. But can't find a link.

Some related stats [1, 2] from which one can infer that the above number is roughly correct.

[1] https://www.motorbiscuit.com/number-car-owners-world-less-th...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/registered-vehicles-per-1...

I guess if we expand it worldwide that makes sense, though in a discussion about 96GB of RAM it feels like an apples to oranges comparison to bring in the entirety of the world. That is including a whole lot of people who probably couldn't afford the RAM or a car even if they saved most of their income for a decade.

1.6 billion cars in the world. 8 billion people.

If you're not familiar with his blog, he also occasionally does benchmarks of databases & extensions. He starts every post by outlining his setup.

Obviously he's telling you their spec incase you wish to reproduce his results. Why don't you try it and tell us how your result compares.

Why is the top comment criticising a geek for being a geek? He gave us a wealth of information including his exact methodology and queries on how he produced his results. This is an ideal approach. You want just results and "trust me, bro"?

My initial thought was that was a weird choice in this article, but I wouldn't fault someone for being thorough.

Probably a better choice as an appendix, move the good stuff up to the top. But overall its NBD.

It's funny how I started skimming as soon as I saw "My Workstation" without ever consciously perceiving why I had started hitting Page Down, until you mentioned it and I went back to notice what it said there. My brain has really automated web page signal extraction.

I had the exact same thought, particularly when I read there were fewer than 4M records.

I really have to wonder if people truly know how powerful any modern computer is. Like I just assume any modern PC with sufficient storage can handle a database with a billion rows of data. I think my phone probably could.

Now if you were, say, analyzing commercial satellite imagery of the entire US and trying to find rooftop solar, matching it against the database and finding data that wasn't in the dataset, that's something where your computer power would be way more relevant.

Come to think of it, you could probably use such imagery to construct a power generation network from power plants to transmission lines to utility poles. Of course some places have underground cables but there are other datasets for that.

Another interesting project is mapping the growth of solar. This would require access to commercial satellite imagery over time. I'm sure some government agency already does it. Or used to at least. Snapshots years or even months apart are less interesting.

Anyway, I guess the point is the author's computer is capable of way more than I suspect they think it is.

> than I suspect they think it is.

Because he wants to tell you about his computer it means he doesn’t know how capable it is?

I always make sure to downgrade my computer hardware before running a trivial analysis. Every dataset needs to redline the current configuration.

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