Computation Server for under £1000

I was daydreaming and wondering what it would cost to get a top-of-the-range processing server with normal desktop components. 

Then I set myself the challenge of putting together a shopping list for a powerful computation machine (to do video transcoding, for example) for under £1000.

Obviously, Core i7 processors are out - they're fast, but very expensive.

For fast computation, you want plenty of RAM (no slooow HDD I/O), but enough hard drive storage for decent backups of large amounts of raw data.

So here's the shopping list:


Qty       @subtotal
Mobo1£89.99£89.99from Novatech
CPU1£159.98£159.98from Novatech
RAM1£229.19£229.19from Crucial
Graphics1£19.99£19.99from Novatech
HDD5£54.98£274.90from Novatech
CPU Cooler1£32.99£32.99from Novatech
PSU (1000W)1£169.99£169.99from Novatech







Total£977.03



I probably went a bit overboard with 7.5TB of storage (6TB with RAID 5), but feh.

I haven't included shipping with that, but iirc crucial ship free and Novatech have never charged me as much as £23 for shipping, so it should still be below a grand.

...and of course, I've not included a case, but you'd want to build your own - right?


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Micro:Bit and SPI display

I want to explore the full potential of the BBC Micro:bits my school has. Making rock-paper-scissors games and the like is all well and good, and the students love it (for the most part), but it always feels a little bit gimmicky.  But when students really get engaged and suggest ideas for them (e.g. games, compass display), it all gets a little bit cramped and feels like it could  kinda  work, but not really . Then I found out that all the tiny strips on the edge are actually GPIO pins, not just the fat 0, 1 and 2 ones.  Since then, I've wanted to explore what I can do with it. Hence, over the last few days I have been trying to get the microbit to control a TFT display. I first went for this 2.4" display with a touchscreen.  The SPI interface is just for the microSD, not for the screen but I didn't think that would be a problem because the micro:bit has so many pins.  After much frustration, I discovered that there are many of the pins you can't reliabl...
Read more

DCS World with TrackIR under Ubuntu

This is a record of my experience of setting this up.  It's meant more as a record for my future self than a tutorial, but maybe somebody will find it useful. 1 - Install DCS First step, install DCS World via the Steam client as normal.  2 - Install LinuxTrack Linuxtrack Download here: https://github.com/uglyDwarf/linuxtrack/wiki/Downloads   Instructions here: https://github.com/uglyDwarf/linuxtrack/wiki/universal-Linuxtrack-package   Using the gui (ltr_gui) requires qt4 libraries, which I could not find in my standard Ubuntu repositories, so I had to use the ppa instructions here: https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2020/07/install-qt4-ubuntu-20-04 Run ltr_gui from linuxtrack's bin directory to check everything works so far before moving on to get it running under Proton.  3 - Install LinuxTrack into the DCS World prefix NOTE: Attempting to install for Wine games WON'T WORK e.g. here https://github-wiki-see.page/m/uglyDwarf/linuxtrack/wiki/Wine-Games   Th...
Read more

Polygon Triangulator!!

For my 3D games, I've been playing around with ideas around semi-procedural geometry, by which I mean geometry which is generated from a small amount of authored data.  For example, I could draw out the shape of an island in a dozen or so 3D points, and the actual terrain geometry could be generated from that. A big step along the way to that is splitting up a non-convex polygon into triangles.  The triangles mustn't overlap, nor must they cover any space which the polygon itself doesn't cover.  For example, this diagram . Today, I managed to get a python program* running which took a list of 2D points defining a polygon, split it into sub-triangles and displayed them in a tkinter canvas**. I am certain this has been solved by clever people in much better ways, but I still feel proud to have figured this one out (and I haven't managed to break it yet!). The basic algorithm is: Create a temporary copy of the polygon points list start with the three points fro...
Read more