Brigs Lab's

Appro­pri­ate title, i try­ing to make a guide with a pic­ture of a desk­top PC work­sta­tion entry to mid­dle level with max­i­mum bud­get is $ 1000. Opti­miza­tion on pro­cess­ing speed is the key of a work­sta­tion, gam­ing machine dif­fer­ent from the more fea­ture DirectX ren­der­ing capa­bil­i­ties of GPU power alone. Before too long before i say­ing thanks to GX Com­puter Ban­dung for sup­ply all the require­ments of this guide.

CPU

With Intel Core I5 pres­ence which is a deriv­a­tive of the Core i7 with reduc­tion in sev­eral fea­tures includ­ing tripple-channel mem­ory inter­face and QPI (Quick path inter­face) is replaced with DMI (Direct Media Inter­face) and just using dualchan­nel DDR3 SDRAM. QPI are more opti­mized for mul­ti­ple proces­sor socket design such that 2U or 4S for main­stream Intel desk­top con­nec­tiv­ity using DMI com­pared to con­nect­ing directly QPI band­width of PCI express lane with a CPU. I5 750 Core 2.66GHz them­selves with sport­ing 8MB L3 cache and this is why i selected as the proces­sor for work­sta­tions. Unlike the ‘big brother’ i7 860 that using Intel hyper thread­ing fea­tures tech­nol­ogy and faster speed (2.8GHz).  Both of them have also equipped with Intel Turbo boost ver­sion 2 that we can switch to enable BIOS fea­tures C-State Tech and set the C — State limit on the C6. This fea­ture is able to bring this 750 Core I5 to 3.2GHz in sev­eral appli­ca­tions that require power horse process.

Core i5 750, 2.66Ghz Quad­core CPU with sport­ing 8Mb L3 cache

Moth­er­board

For the moth­er­board i’m choos­ing one prod­uct from Asus is a valu­able vanilla P7P55D under $ 200. The Fea­ture fairly com­plete and most impor­tantly the PWM con­fig­u­ra­tion is taken pretty good with this Core I5 750 ‘fly to sky’

Asus P7P55D Vanilla with 12 phase PWM

Mem­ory
Fast proces­sor, great mobo use­less if not paired with a mem­ory that can react quickly and big enough to demand data from the CPU. From sev­eral choos­ing dif­fer­ent ven­dor, i’m decide to choose one prod­uct ver­sion of Team Extreme DDR3 LV (Low Volt­age) 2x2Gb PC 12800 with low latency CL7 1.65v that have been opti­mized for Core I5 plat­forms. Our source tells me that that mem­ory still using a lit­tle cheap Elp­ida BBSE based IC that rated PC16000 CL9.

Team Extreme DDR3 PC12800 CL7 1.65v

Graph­ics Card
For a VGA work­sta­tion selec­tion impor­tant enough to be able to opti­mize the per­for­mance of the pri­mary sys­tem. In order to sup­port the use of green com­put­ing power that is cur­rently emerg­ing  then we choose a Col­or­full Geforce 9600GT 512M DDR3 with a 256bit inter­face. This chipset is quite old but was still able to con­sider bring­ing a sys­tem for work­sta­tion needs. If you choose for gam­ing ori­ented con­sid­er­ing look­ing for more mod­ern GPU with shaders and very high demand com­put­ing will be selected. And if you’re professional-level edit­ing i will choose Quadro GPU or FireGL for meet the pow­er­horse the sys­tem, but in these case we can run­ning out the budget.

The older GPU like GF 9600GT but still favor­able for entry level

HDD
For the HDD is con­sis­tent with the needs and the exist­ing bud­get, for that i’m choose WD Caviar Blue 320GB equipped 8m buffer cache.

WDC Caviar Blue 320Gb series with SATA 2 inter­face and 8Mb Buffer.

Power sys­tem
Sys­tem which has quickly will not sur­vive long with­out a strong PSU. For meet the require­ment the sys­tem mea­sure for a 400W FSP Saga  II for $45 and CBM AZZA LC 319 chas­sis series that has been equipped with a 80% effi­ciency with a peak power of 450W con­tin­ues. For AC cur­rent sta­bil­ity of power plant reseource is likely to fluc­tu­ate i pickup a FSP 650W UPS that has been equipped with mon­i­tor­ing soft­ware sys­tem. Over­bud­get slightly from $ 1000 but the sys­tem is ready to work non-stop oper­a­tion 24/7.

FSP Saga II 400W and CBM AZZA series for the power and chasis

CPU cooler
Rapid sys­tem with 24/7 over­clocked requires a good cool­ing sys­tem to reduce heat gen­er­ated. Apart from cir­cu­la­tion cas­ing that has been equipped with a 12cm fan intake and out­take of 9cm and 12cm fan then the CPU must also reduce heat due to over­speed. For the pur­pose i choose a prod­uct from the noc­tua NH-U12P series that has been equipped with 4 Heat­pipe and dual 12cm silent ball bear­ings from the noc­tua high per­for­mace Fan.

Noc­tua U12P Spe­cial Edi­tion will be fit­ted equip­ment for CPU Cooling

LCD Mon­i­tor
Use of LCD with enough res­o­lu­tion is needed once in the use of this design field. So an AOC 917VW + which already has a native res­o­lu­tion of 1440×900 60Hz, has a response rate of 5ms (gray to gray) and con­trast ratio of 6000:1. With prices rang­ing around $ 140 then this prod­uct can be an option for this work­sta­tion system.

AOC 917VW+ with Dual Input Ana­log and DVI

Sys­tem Test and Bench­mark

Core i5 Sys­tem
Core i5 750 ($220)
Asus P7P55D ($190)
Team Extreme LV 12800C7 2x2Gb ($132)
Col­or­full GF 9600GT Green ($80)
WD 320Gb Blue Caviar ($45)
AOC 917VW+ ($140)
Noc­tua U12P ($65)
FSP SAGA II 400W (45)
CBM Azza ($50)
UPS FSP 650W ($60)

AMD X4 Sys­tem
AMD X4 B50
MSI 790FX GD 70
OCZ AMD Plat­inum 2x2Gb DDR3 12800 C7
2x HD 4850 Cross­fire
WD 320Gb AAKS
Ther­mal­right 120X
PC Power n Cool­ing 750W

Soft­ware :
Win­dows 7 x64 RTM 7600 with lat­est patch update
Nvidia Force­ware 191.07 whql
ATI Catal­ist 9.10
Adobe Pho­to­shop CS4 x64 Edi­tion
Specview­perf 8.0 (32bit)
Adobe Media Encoder x64
Cinebench R10 x64
PCMark Van­tage 1.0.10 x64

Core i5 setup 24/7

With good air­cool­ing and air­flow we can man­aged our test Core i5 750 between 4Ghz until 4.5Ghz depend your proces­sor and sys­tem of course. I decided for these tweak bring the core sta­ble in 4Ghz daily using just only need 1.36V CPU core and 1.35V MCH. For The sys­tem mem­ory for safety use i rec­om­mend using vdimm not more than 0.5v than IMC. So for daily i using only 1.72V rather with tight latency 6−7−6−18 1T at 1600Mhz. So far sys­tem has been test sta­ble run­ning Intel Lin­pack stress­ing more than 6 hours con­tin­ues with mod­er­ate CPU load tem­per­a­ture in stress max at 78c in ambi­ent room 24c.

Adobe Pho­to­shop CS4 x64 speed test filtering

With scheme from Dri­ver­Heaven bench­mark test, we can look how Intel Core i5 per­form in Adobe Fil­ter­ing speed test. In same speed you can look  Core i5 is fastest about 25% than AMD Phe­nom II X4.

Cinebench love core and speed, in the top chart you can see the real per­for­mance of mul­ti­core and oper­at­ing sys­tem in 32 and 64bit mode. In OGL test a dual GPU HD 4850 in AMD Phe­nom II rig can’t be com­pare with fastest CPU.

Specview­perf 8.0 is a sim­u­la­tion mod­el­ling for 3D appli­ca­tion such as 3D Max and Maya ren­der­ing. The mix between GPU and CPU power will bring the good result. In Catia and 3D Max the mix­ing HD 4850 and AMD Phe­nom II X4 run­ning so fast here but in Maya test Intel Core i5 with oldies Geforce 9600GT bring back the trophy.

In encod­ing video test Intel Core i5 750 is faster about 23% faster than AMD Phe­nom II in same speed at 3.75Ghz.

Syn­thetic bench­mark like PC Mark Van­tage was design­ing to mea­sure capa­bil­ity over­all sys­tem to run­ning Win­dows Vista and 7 with appli­ca­tion such are mul­ti­me­dia con­tent cre­ation, gam­ing and daily productivity.

So this time my arti­cle, hope­fully can give the user a pic­ture for all who want to build a mod­ern work­sta­tion sys­tem with­out hav­ing to break down all your sav­ings in Bank.