New Mega PC CAD Build

[Dave Rice]

It’s been two years since the last mega build and boy have things changed. 64Gb with an option of 128Gb of ram is now mainstream. The 10th Gen i7  is a totally different beast to the 7th Gen (thank you AMD) and the NVMe SSD is twice as big and 2/3rds the price.

The ram speed is 3200 up from 2400, the latency is down as is the price, less than half the cost. The only fly in the ointment is the graphics card! Still at least I managed to get one. £400 for a 1660 Ti

Parts should be here tomorrow.

[keith with the teef]

Yes. I noticed a 1060 in my local CEX for £160 and I thought I could easily make £100 on that, but then I noticed it was the 3GB.

[Ed P]

My new rig has two 1TB NVMe drives which I  set the up as storage space drives. It was a lot cheaper to use two smaller drives rather than pay the premium for a 2TB drive. I toyed with the idea of blasting through any VM  I/O blocks by setting the drives up as mirrored storage, but in the end went with simple storage space.

If anyone is unfamiliar with M$ Storage Space (Storage Space ~ software RAID), this blog is a good primer:

https://www.michaelstechtips.com/windows-storage-spaces-performance-simple-vs-mirrored-vs-parity/

[Ed P]

Just a small edit I’d make to the blog, imo Simple Storage spaces is equivalent to JBOD

[Dave Rice]

The mobo has 2 x NVMe x 4 slots, but it’s so quick I decided not to try RAID. VM I/O is another thing thing.

[Ed P]

Dave, the reason I mentioned simple Storage Spaces was that it allows you to make fairly substantial savings (around 15-20% depending on size) in NVM costs albeit with a slightly increased risk. Speed did not really enter into the equation, as I could always move to a mirrored setup if I really needed more speed.

 

[Ed P]

What I DID do was to splurge on RAM , and purchased SoftPerfect Ram Disk software.  A VM run in this really smokes!

[Dave Rice]

I did use Storage Spaces a couple of years ago when messing about using W10 as a server.  It just reconfirmed my commitment to Synology for servers. Somehow I now have three but only bought one, but it has cost me £££ in disks. It does let me set up some HQ / Branch experiments though.

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