Case study: Workstation

This is by far the more interesting build. In fact, its ancient and decaying spec sheet was still far more intriguing than the updates that followed. With one of the world’s first six-core consumer processors, 6GB of DDR3 and a prestigious Intel motherboard (yep, it still made them), this system managed to crank out some serious numbers even today, six years on. The hard drive situation was far less desirable — with two SATA II HDDs, it was mostly used a web server, before finally being retired two years ago. Last week, it was a shelving unit. So what did we manage to salvage?

AIM OF THE UPGRADE

This was the biggy. We knew we wanted to upgrade to a more modern chipset. But a more modern chipset requires a brand new motherboard, and a new mobo requires a new processor, which requires new RAM. Like a cascade effect, upgrading one part meant that pretty much everything had to change. We opted to grab an Intel Core i7-5820K to replace the ageing Gulftown processor — it’s cheap, packed with additional PCIe lanes for future upgrades and supports the latest X99 motherboards. Then we had to decide on the memory, upgrading from a tri-channel 6GB kit of DDR3 all the way up to a 32GB kit of quad-channel Crucial Ballistix Elite.

Motherboard-wise, we decided to go for the EVGA X99 Micro 2. It looks crisp and clean, it performs well, and it fits into our shiny new case well, too. On top of that, it gives us plenty of expandability going forward, enabling us to install two add-in cards if needed. We also fit a 240GB Kingston HyperX Predator M.2 PCIe SSD — not the fastest of the PCIe SSDs, but it’s cost effective, and easily knocks the old SATA II drives out of the park.

FREE UPGRADES?

There are a couple of free options on a setup like this. We took the old 2TB SATA II drives, and configured them to operate in RAID 0 to boost sequential read and write speeds. To do this, go into your motherboard’s BIOS settings, find your SATA configuration panel, and change the storage type from AHCI to RAID. Upon restarting, hold Ctrl, and press I repeatedly to get into the RAID menu. Select the drives you want, choose the RAID setup you’d like, and create away. If you’re using RAID 0, it should double your potential sequentials, and if you’re using RAID 1, it mirrors the data on to the second drive, so if one drive fails, you always have an accessible backup.

Then there’s overclocking. Far more useful for rendering tasks on workstations than on gaming PCs, bumping the Core i7-5820K up to 4.2GHz is relatively easy, and shaves off a significant amount of time from your render cycles.

PUMP UP THE PSU

For this build, we opted not to swap out the graphics card. As it’s not gaming PC, but a content creation workstation, it was unnecessary to move away from a high-end card like the 5870 to something more modern, at least until we start using CUDA for rendering. That said, we had to consider that our operating requirements were going to change dramatically in contrast to the old Gulftown rig.

Using pcpartpicker.com, we specced up the requirements for our new upgraded system (including older GPUs and hard drives), which provided us with a good estimate of what our overall power usage was going to be (471W at peak). You should always look for a power supply that provides somewhere in the region of 20–25% more rated power than your system draws from the wall. That way, you’ll never run it at max capacity, and PSUs are generally most efficient when they run at 80–90% capacity.