Posts: 5,287
Joined: May 2013
Reputation:
181
Location: Where's North?
Items (6) ▼
Posts: 5,287
Joined: May 2013
Reputation:
181
Location: Where's North?
Items (6) ▼
June 21st, 2013 at 1:50 AM
Personally, I love computers, and do quite a bit of projects at the computer. A good workstation can definitely make a big difference. Unfortunately I don't have a whole lot of money on hand, but given I had the resources, my dream workstation would be...
Desktop with
16GB DDR3 RAM
Intel i7 CPU
3TB Hard drive for data, with 300GB SSD for storage
Dual-boot with Windows 7 ultimate and some linux distribution
Two monitors at 1920x1080 pixels
Laptop with
8GB of RAM and another i7.
And of course the really awesome extras of a decorated desk area with neon lighting, printers, lighted keyboards, and what not.
Of course a setup like that would be ridiculously expensive. My actual workstation looks nothing like that. So, what would your dream workstation look like?
June 21st, 2013 at 2:11 PM
Posts: 5,287
Joined: May 2013
Reputation:
181
Location: Where's North?
Items (6) ▼
Posts: 5,287
Joined: May 2013
Reputation:
181
Location: Where's North?
Items (6) ▼
June 21st, 2013 at 2:16 PM
That's one awesome rig. I'm a little surprised they aren't going for the i7 chips in that rig, but I can see why as well.
June 21st, 2013 at 2:24 PM
Yeah, i7 is powerful, but i5's are powerful too for gaming.
Posts: 5,287
Joined: May 2013
Reputation:
181
Location: Where's North?
Items (6) ▼
Posts: 5,287
Joined: May 2013
Reputation:
181
Location: Where's North?
Items (6) ▼
June 21st, 2013 at 2:35 PM
Hyperthreading never really does seem to be very good for gaming purposes. It always seems like once you get four cores, the clock speed is what counts the most.
I still think that if I had the ultimate rig, I'd take the i7s anyway just for the bragging rights, but if it makes no difference there's really no point haha. 
June 21st, 2013 at 2:59 PM
Man, if I had google fiber, I'd also get a powerful server computer to host minecraft (if they allow gaming scripts) for free instead of paying for it.
Posts: 5,287
Joined: May 2013
Reputation:
181
Location: Where's North?
Items (6) ▼
Posts: 5,287
Joined: May 2013
Reputation:
181
Location: Where's North?
Items (6) ▼
June 21st, 2013 at 3:06 PM
That would be pretty awesome. I know I certainly couldn't run a server from my internet connection because I get terrible speeds.
Can the i5 line of CPUs be overclocked? I believe they can, and if that's the case you could get them up to like 4.5GHZ for the ultimate minecraft experience.
June 21st, 2013 at 4:37 PM
Yeah, even if you have a good server pc, if your upload speeds are bad, then it will take a real toll on server to client lag. And the other way around if your PC is crappy and your upload speeds are exceptional.
Posts: 5,287
Joined: May 2013
Reputation:
181
Location: Where's North?
Items (6) ▼
Posts: 5,287
Joined: May 2013
Reputation:
181
Location: Where's North?
Items (6) ▼
June 21st, 2013 at 4:38 PM
Sadly most ISPs have very poor upload speeds these days. I'm one of those people that gets better upload speeds than download speeds, but even still it's only 1.8mbps and that's nowhere near suitable for a minecraft server haha.
June 21st, 2013 at 4:40 PM
The server for minecraft (like other things) is very poorly optimized, and uses a LOT of bandwidth. I'd be surprised if up to 500mb up was good.
Posts: 5,287
Joined: May 2013
Reputation:
181
Location: Where's North?
Items (6) ▼
Posts: 5,287
Joined: May 2013
Reputation:
181
Location: Where's North?
Items (6) ▼
June 21st, 2013 at 4:44 PM
I've heard that it isn't very well designed. It's nice that it uses java so that it will run well on Linux systems, but besides that it could use some optimization for sure.
June 21st, 2013 at 5:10 PM
I think that's one of the game's flaws. Java, when combined with poor programming = extreme cpu usage. But the nice thing is that it's cross-compatible with any platform that supports it (all major OS'es, for example)
Posts: 5,287
Joined: May 2013
Reputation:
181
Location: Where's North?
Items (6) ▼
Posts: 5,287
Joined: May 2013
Reputation:
181
Location: Where's North?
Items (6) ▼
June 21st, 2013 at 5:13 PM
One advantage though is that CPU power is increasing almost on a yearly basis these days. Unfortunately minecraft seems to like having a higher clock speed more than having a lot of cores, and lately technology has been moving towards the direction of more cores. In fact, clock speeds have dropped somewhat in server platforms for the higher-end CPUs since putting a ton of cores in the CPUs tends to be better for server platforms.
June 21st, 2013 at 7:19 PM
I wonder, would you get an i9 if it existed?
Posts: 5,287
Joined: May 2013
Reputation:
181
Location: Where's North?
Items (6) ▼
Posts: 5,287
Joined: May 2013
Reputation:
181
Location: Where's North?
Items (6) ▼
June 21st, 2013 at 7:30 PM
Not sure what they'd do to the i9 line to make it different than the i7 haha. Maybe put 8 cores in them and make them hyperthreaded so you have a total of 16 logical cores?
If you were going to go that route, you might as well get an E5 xeon or something haha.
June 21st, 2013 at 7:32 PM
I wonder how worth it would 128 bit processors be.
Posts: 5,287
Joined: May 2013
Reputation:
181
Location: Where's North?
Items (6) ▼
Posts: 5,287
Joined: May 2013
Reputation:
181
Location: Where's North?
Items (6) ▼
June 21st, 2013 at 7:37 PM
Most computers don't really need to process 128 bits of data at once anyway, so I doubt it would be a real performance improvement. Even 64 bit processors aren't a huge performance improvement over 32 bit processors.
June 21st, 2013 at 7:50 PM
Well, 32 bit processors AFAIK only support 3gb of RAM (or is that just Windows being Windows?)
|
