[buro9]

Paul, did you consider buying an existing workstation like the HP Z840 ( http://store.hp.com/us/en/mdp/business-solutions/z840-workst... ) or similar?

I did this a number of years ago and never regretted it and dual-Xeon has really helped with DxO PhotoLab and Adobe Lightroom processing time (compared to all the other computers I had access to).

Even years later I still believe that this is performing better than something I could've built myself. I think of computers like cars, in that if you upgrade 1 part significantly for performance (i.e. the engine) that it forces upgrades to everything else (i.e. brakes, chassis, cooling). A pre-built workstation balances all of these things to give one package where all of the potential is achievable.

[fyfy18]

Following on from this, if you don't need the latest hardware (i.e. you are currently using a laptop as your main device), you can buy used workstations on eBay rather cheap.

At the end of 2016 I bought a three year old Dell T3600 with 32GB ECC RAM and a 8c/16t Xeon E5-2670 (Sandy Bridge) processor. I just threw in a modern graphics card (GTX 1060) and SSD, and it's perfect for my needs. Total cost was under €600.

I still have a laptop, so if I'm out I will just SSH in to work.

[cheeze]

+1 here. Buying used professional grade gear is the way to go. I just built a fileserver with better passmark than threadripper for 700 dollarydoos (plans for lots of concurrent transcodes), and got ECC ram to boot.

[hugg]

Looking at that, you can only get workstation graphics, which is something he did not want since he does occasionally play games.

[buro9]

Low spec the graphics card and replace just that one component.

You'd still get a more RAM support (and ECC at that), heavy workload CPU support, and most importantly a motherboard designed to shove that much data back and forth between the CPU, RAM and other devices.

What I realised with my gaming builds before is that the weakest link was just shifting the data around. The CPU was seldom maxed out, the RAM seldom straining under the workload, the storage not fully saturated... it was all constrained by how these bits fitted together and how the motherboard set the constraints on those components.

e.g. the Core i7-8700k compared to a Xeon E5-2637 v4 https://ark.intel.com/compare/126684,92983 the increased CPU cache, extra bus speed, more memory channels make a difference.

I basically doubted my ability to build a gaming rig that balanced all of the components to give the best performance for the money spent (for the same use-case as Paul)... that could rival one of the big company workstations. And when I looked at the money I was spending, I saw that HP were delivering more for each $ I spent.

In my case I purchased a standard HPZ800 (it's a few years ago!) and replaced the graphics card. It's great for gaming, and really strong for photo work (also have a Sony a7rii) and for video encoding.

Both routes (self-build rig vs workstation) are valid, just curious whether Paul went through those considerations too.

[jjeaff]

I think by the time you built up that dell system to match the custom rig, it will be much more expensive. ECC has no benefit here (for anyone really). And while you get more cores and cache with Xeon, the 6 core overclocked i7 with double the clock speed would surely outperform except in the most parallel of processing applications.

As for picking all the perfect components that work together, there are myriad of people and places online crowdsourcing and benchmarking the perfect configurations. I doubt Dell is putting much thought and testing into their configs beyond reliability and cost.

[jjeaff]

There would be no difference at all for him with ECC ram. Except for slightly lower performance.

[PStamatiou]

Hey - ah that did not come to mind, no. Was a bit over-enthusiastically into the idea of making a project out of this and building one.