{"id":2661,"date":"2013-09-02T11:24:21","date_gmt":"2013-09-02T00:24:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/?p=2661"},"modified":"2013-09-02T12:19:16","modified_gmt":"2013-09-02T01:19:16","slug":"bleg-for-a-new-machine-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/2013\/09\/02\/bleg-for-a-new-machine-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Bleg for a new machine (part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week I <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/2013\/08\/30\/bleg-for-a-new-machine\/\">blegged for help in designing a new machine<\/a>, and I got almost 50 extremely helpful comments and a handful of private emails.\u00a0 Many thanks to all those who gave advice.<\/p>\n<p>I mentioned that I want browser and JS shell builds to be fast, and that I want the machine to be quiet.\u00a0 There were two other things that I didn&#8217;t mention, that affect my choices.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I&#8217;m not a hardware tinkerer type.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t particularly enjoy setting up machines &#8212; I&#8217;m a programmer, not a sysadmin \ud83d\ude42\u00a0 I like vanilla configurations, so that problems are unlikely, and so that when they do occur there&#8217;s a good chance someone else has already had the same problem and found a solution.\u00a0 So that&#8217;s a significant factor in my design.<\/li>\n<li>I turn off my machine at night. And I use lots of repository clones (I have 10 copies of inbound present at all times), typically switching between two or three of them in one session.\u00a0 So I stress the disk cache in ways that other people might not.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Here&#8217;s my latest configuration.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t expect anything other than perhaps minor changes to this, though I&#8217;d still love to hear your thoughts.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>CPU.\u00a0 The\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.cplonline.com.au\/cpu\/intel-core-i7-4770-3-4g-8mb-lga1150.html\">Intel i7-4770<\/a>.\u00a0 I originally chose the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cplonline.com.au\/cpu\/intel-core-i7-4770k-3-5g-8mb-lga1150.html\">i7-4770K<\/a>, which is 0.1 GHz faster and is overclockable, but it lacks some of the newer CPU features such as support for virtualization and transactional memory.\u00a0 Since I won&#8217;t overclock &#8212; as I said, I&#8217;m not the tinkerer type &#8212; several people suggested the i7-4770 would be better.<\/li>\n<li>Motherboard. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cplonline.com.au\/motherboard\/asus-lga1150-z87-plus-motherboard.html\">ASUS Z87-Plus.<\/a>\u00a0 I originally chose the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cplonline.com.au\/motherboard\/asus-z87-c-motherboard.html\">ASUS Z87-C<\/a>, but was advised that a board with an Intel NIC would be better.<\/li>\n<li>Memory. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cplonline.com.au\/memory\/kingston-32gb-4x8g-2133mhz-khx21c11t3k4-32.html\">32 GiB of Kingston 2133 MHz RAM<\/a>.\u00a0 No change.<\/li>\n<li>Disk. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cplonline.com.au\/hard-drives\/samsung-840-pro-series-512gb-ssd-mz-7pd512bw.html\">Samsung 840 Pro Series 512 GB<\/a>.\u00a0 No change. Multiple people said this was overkill &#8212; that 256 GB should be enough, or that the cheaper <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cplonline.com.au\/hard-drives\/samsung-840-evo-series-500gb-ssd-mz-7te500bw.html\">840 EVO<\/a> was almost as good.\u00a0 But I&#8217;ll stick with it;\u00a0 those disks have a really good reputation, it should last a long time, and I really like the idea of not having to worry about disk space, especially with two OSes installed. And apparently the performance of those drives diminishes once they get about 80% full, so having some excess capacity sounds good.<\/li>\n<li>Graphics card.\u00a0 Multiple people agreed that the Intel integrated graphics was powerful enough, and that the Intel driver situation on Linux is excellent, which is great &#8212; I don&#8217;t like mucking about with drivers!<\/li>\n<li>Case. The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cplonline.com.au\/computer-cases\/fractal-design-define-r4-usb3-0-black.html\">Fractal Design Define R4 (Black)<\/a> was recommended by two people.\u00a0 It looks fantastic (my wife is in love with it already) and is reputedly very quiet.<\/li>\n<li>Optical drive.\u00a0 A <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cplonline.com.au\/optical-drives\/samsung-sh-224bb-bebs-oem-24x-oem-dvd-writer.html\">Samsung DVD-RW<\/a> drive. Unchanged.<\/li>\n<li>Software. Several people suggested using Virtual Box instead of VMWare for my Windows VM.\u00a0 I didn&#8217;t know about Virtual Box, so that was a good tip.\u00a0 Someone also suggested I get Windows 7 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cplonline.com.au\/software\/microsoft-windows-7-professional-64bit-oem.html\">Professional<\/a> instead of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cplonline.com.au\/software\/microsoft-windows-7-home-premium-64bit-oem.html\">Home Premium<\/a> because the latter only supports 16 GiB of RAM.\u00a0 Ugh, typical Microsoft segmented software offerings.<\/li>\n<li>I didn&#8217;t mention monitor, keyboard and mouse because I&#8217;m happy with my current ones.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This looks like an excellent set-up for a single-CPU, quad-core machine.\u00a0 However, multiple people suggested that I go for more cores, either by choosing 6-core or 8-core server CPUs, or using dual-sockets, or both.\u00a0 I spent a lot of time investigating this option, and I considered several configurations, including a dual-socket machine with two <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cplonline.com.au\/cpu\/xeon-e5-2630-2-3g-15mb-6core-lga2011-1900033.html\">Xeon E5-2630<\/a> CPUs (giving 12 cores and 24 threads) or a single-socket machine with an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cplonline.com.au\/cpu\/intel-i7-3970x.html\">i7-3970X<\/a> (giving 6 cores and 12 threads) or a\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.cplonline.com.au\/cpu\/xeon-e5-2660-2-2g-20mb-8core-lga2011-1900056.html\">Xeon E5-2660<\/a> (giving 8 cores and 16 threads).\u00a0 But I have a m\u00e9lange of concerns: (a) a more complex configuration (esp. dual-socket), (b) lack of integrated graphics, (c) higher power consumption, heat and noise, and (d) probably worse single-threaded performance.\u00a0 These were enough that I have put it into the too-hard basket for now.<\/p>\n<p>Ideally, I&#8217;d love to build two or three machines, benchmark them, and give all but one back.\u00a0 Or, it would be nice Intel&#8217;s rumoured <a href=\"http:\/\/www.extremetech.com\/computing\/158824-haswell-e-to-offer-ddr4-support-up-to-eight-cores-in-2014\">Haswell-E 8-core consumer machines<\/a> were available now.<\/p>\n<p>Still, daydreams aside, compared to my current machine, the above machine should give a nice speed bump (maybe 15&#8211;20% for CPU-bound operations, and who-knows-how-much for disk-bound operations), should be quieter, and will allow me to do Windows builds much more easily.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks again to everyone who gave such good advice!\u00a0 I promise that once I purchase and set up the new machine, I&#8217;ll blog about its performance compared to the old machine, so that any other Mozilla developers who want to get a new machine have some data points.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week I blegged for help in designing a new machine, and I got almost 50 extremely helpful comments and a handful of private emails.\u00a0 Many thanks to all those who gave advice. I mentioned that I want browser and JS shell builds to be fast, and that I want the machine to be quiet.\u00a0 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2661"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2661\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}