A lot of people have wondered what's involved in building a workstation-class PC vs. a gaming PC. This thread is for them.

First and foremost, the most important part of a workstation is stability. Not speed, not overclocking, not frames per second. Stability. Since this is a workstation, it's going to be used for work, and if the machine isn't rock-solid it's going to cause a lot of wasted time.

So when figuring out which parts you want to put in your workstation you need to spend time finding out which products are the most reliable. Sadly, there aren't really a lot of companies to choose from. Most companies devote their time to squeezing out the highest amount of performance for gamers and overclockers and don't spend enough time on quality control.

So let's get started on the components themselves:

Processor

You really have 3 choices for CPU's in a workstation-class machine: Intel's Pentium 4, Intel Xeon and AMD's Opteron. The Xeon and Opteron are better chips but oftentimes your budget won't allow for this class of chip. In those instances you will be best to go with the P4. Why the P4 instead of the Athlon64 or Pentium-M? The P4's longer pipelines and larger cache help it with the software used on workstations. With the Xeon and the Opteron you also have the option of going with dual processors, something which helps in EVERY workstation-level application.

Between the Xeon and the Opteron it's really application specific. Even then there is usually very little noticeable real world performance difference between the two. Just make sure you choose the 800mhz FSB "Nocona" Xeons or the 2xx-series Opterons for the best performance and upgradeability.

Motherboard

This is really the heart of the stability/reliability issue. Motherboards have a lot of stuff going on with them, so you want to make sure you get a board from a company with a long-proven history of reliability -- and there's not many. For Intel boards you really have Intel and Supermicro (and maybe Asus); for AMD boards you have Tyan and ... that's pretty much it, unfortunately. As I said, not a lot of choices.

Intel really has the advantage here, which is one of the main reasons I generally continue to recommend Xeons over Opterons. If AMD could convince Supermicro to build boards for them it would be a huge win in the workstation market.

When choosing a motherboard you also need to make sure you get one with the right chipset. Different chipsets have different features, so you need to get one that has what you want. If you need PCI-X and AGP you'll need chipset A. If you need PCI-E and PCI-X you'll need Chipset B. Do you want DDR or DDR2 RAM? Onboard SCSI? How many SATA ports? It's questions such as these that you will need to answer to get the right board for you.

Memory

Not much to say here other then make sure you get ECC RAM. If the motherboard you picked doesn't use ECC RAM, it's not the right motherboard for you. Leave it for the gamers.

Get at least 1GB of it, preferably in 2 sticks to use dual channel memory. Brand is also important here. I would generally only buy from Crucial for workstation memory. I'm not sure anyone else has near the reliability history they do.

Storage Controller

This is really personal preference in 2005. In the past it was SCSI or nothing. However, with SATA now available and offering great performance it's a tougher call. SCSI still offers the ultimate in performance with 15,000RPM drives and less CPU utilization, but SATA offers larger size drives at far cheaper prices. SCSI drives also tend to last longer (they have a higher mean-time-between-failure [MTBF]) so that may be a concern.

No matter which one you choose, you're going to need a controller for them. Even if the motherboard you choose comes with SCSI or SATA onboard, it's not going to be sufficient for building a proper storage array. You might be able to utilize a couple of the ports for the system/boot drives, but you'll still want a RAID controller for the storage drives. Recommended brands are 3ware for SATA and Adaptec for SCSI. I'd also recommend buying a PCI-X controller if your motherboard supports it.

Storage

This is one of the most important areas of the entire machine. I'm going to break it down into 2 areas: system/boot drives and storage drives.

For system drives you're going to want the fastest and highest performing drives for your chosen controller. For SCSI this is 15,000RPM drives of 74GB (Seagate Cheetahs) and for SATA this is 10,000RPM drives of 74GB (Western Digital Raptors). You are going to want 2 of them. You will then put these into a RAID-1 mirror for complete redundancy. Should a drive fail you will lose nothing. 74GB is more than enough since this mirror is only going to hold your operating system and whatever applications you will be installing.

For storage drives it's a bit tougher. It really depends how much storage you need. I *highly* recommend cheaper SATA drives for storage since you can get drives with 300-400GB each for far cheaper than SCSI disks of 1/3rd the size. Even if they fail more often you will still come out ahead money wise. Besides, you'll have a redundant array so your data will be secure. The other tough choice depends on what type of workstation you're building; graphics and CAD will be fine with RAID-5 but video-editing will need a RAID-10 array for extremely fast write speeds.

So let's say you want 500GB of storage space. For graphics and CAD workstations you would buy yourself 3 250GB drives and put them into a RAID-5 setup on your RAID controller. This will give you 500GB of usuable space. For video-editing workstations you are going to need to buy 4 250GB drives and put them into RAID-10 configuration which will still only give you 500GB of usuable space. Your write times are going to be above those of RAID-5 however, so the extra drive cost is worth it.

Video

This is other super important aspect of building a workstation and it highly depends on what type of system you are setting up. So we'll take it one setup at a time.

For a graphics workstation, utilizing things such as Photoshop & Illustrator, 2D quality is the most important. Color accuracy and RAMDAC quality are the biggies. You want something that will give you a signal that's completely clean without any ghosting or blurriness. There's only one videocard brand that really dominates in this area and that's Matrox. I would highly recommend a Matrox P650 (for dual monitors) or P750 (for three monitors). Unfortunately, at the current time they are both available in AGP only. For PCI-E users you'd need to step up to the Parhelia APVe. Same quality, just some extra features you don't need and a higher pricetag.

For video editing rigs you're going to want some extra equipment. You're likely going to want the same card as above but you're also going to want a proper video capture card. You're going to want something like the Matrox RT.X100 or Pinnacle Studio AV/DV. These will give you features like hardware mpeg encoding.

For 3D workstations you need the most specific cards of all -- cards with excellent image quality AND excellent 3D quality. There's a big difference between 3D gaming cards and 3D workstation cards. People think that because ATI and nVidia use the same core on both lines that the only difference is some firmware hack that reports your card as a FireGL or Quadro. This is a misguided belief. Gaming cards are designed for speed. They want to render as many things as possible as fast as possible. Workstation cards are designed for quality. You don't want to see just some of the textures, you need to see all of the textures. You don't need 2-3 light sources rendered without slowdown, you need 16 light sources rendered without slowdown.

As such, you have about 3 choices: a nVidia Quadro card, an ATI FireGL card or a 3DLabs Wildcat card. You're probably looking to spend $1000-$1500 no matter which one you choose. Specifically, I would choose the Quadro FX 3400 (the lowest priced card based on the Geforce 6800 series) for $1350 (PCI-E only), the FireGL V7100 (based on the X800XT) for $950 (PCI-E only) or the Wildcat Realizm 200 for $850 (AGP). I'm a 3DLabs fan myself, but with the new ATI & nVidia technology they may not be up to the same performance. Usually I find their render quality to be superior though.

Everything else inside the machine is the same as any other PC.

-MrD

Well done Mr.D - For the sake of fairness you might want to point out that LSI as well asTekram offer perfectly dependable scsi solutions at significant savings.

Notice Mr.D's thread is rated. (I gave it a 4) If you find a thread useful, meaningful or just "like" it, why not RATE it? Just a thought...

While I probably won't be giving any 1's or 2's (seems "mean") I will be rating well written relevant threads That is all.

Gaming PC is better

Dumbest. Post. Ever.

Do you realize that gaming PCs and workstations are completely different things?