Re: Upgrading an HP Z1

On 1/28/2024 11:51 AM, sticks wrote:

> 
> Good stuff.  Thanks Paul.
> 
> I took your advice and got two 32 GB sticks of ram.  I'll put the two 8 GB in my box.
> I did get a Samsung SSD, and two spinner drives, and 8GB for the kid and a 4GB for myself.
> Should get it next Friday and will try getting it in over next weekend. Interested to see if he gets a little improvement.
> 
> sticks

Whether he can work faster, would depend to some extent on
how big the projects are. What the polygon count is like.

The mechanical engineer at work, was complaining about the
speed on his box. It wasn't a lack of money, more the
"orthodoxy" of the situation. Using a Sun Sparc. In his eight
hour work day, it was taking seven hours for a model to load.
Well, look at it. 100 BT Ethernet connection. Distant database server.
Sharing that server with others.

A look at the process execution, showed it was compute bound
as well. Needed a faster processor. Maybe some other box would
have been faster. Some other engineers tried out Windows PCs, but
they purchased the weirdest things (one machine had a bar bridge
in the bottom of it for cooling -- they must have had to search
pretty hard to find such a frightful contraption).

The graphics card on the Sparc, was the biggest one we could find, so no
help there. It wasn't even clear whether the acceleration
in the card was doing anything.

You know a 75W video card, can't be the top card. But unless you know
the complexity of the models being loaded, it's not time to panic yet.

Discrete (optional) graphics
	
AMD Radeon 520 1 GB Graphics Card
AMD Radeon RX 550X 4 GB Graphics Card
AMD Radeon RX 550 4 GB 2 DP and 1 HDMI Graphics Card
AMD Radeon RX 580 4 GB FH PCIe x16 (requires 500W chassis)    <=== Solving vid card limit
AMD Radeon RX 580 8 GB FH GDDR5 (requires 500W chassis)       <===
AMD Radeon R7 430 2 GB VGA and DP Graphics Card
AMD Radeon R7 430 2 GB GDDR5 64-bit 2 DP
AMD Radeon R7 430 2 GB 2 DP Graphics Card
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 6 GB FH Graphics Card (requires 500W chassis)  <===
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 8 GB Graphics Card (requires 500W chassis)     <===
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 8 GB Graphics Card (requires 500W chassis)     <===
NVIDIA Quadro P620 2 GB Graphics Card \_____ These two rows are
NVIDIA Quadro P400 2 GB Graphics Card /      for the CAD guys! Why no rec. for 500W chassis ???

The Quadro P620 then, would have a "certified OpenGL driver" and
the card would "not be held back" when accelerating the calls.

https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/

These benchmarks aren't meaningful for CAD estimation, but the purpose is
to give some  idea where in the spectrum of things, the card fits.

https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/video_lookup.php?gpu=Quadro+P620&id=3954

UHD 630             G3D   1,245                      <=== The graphics chip inside the CPU, its rating

Quadro P620         G3D=  3,610          $   574.55  <=== Presumably a 75W card (from the Z1 G5 list)

Quadro RTX 6000     G3D= 18,933          $ 6,300.00  <=== Priced for business (raytracing performance does not help)

GeForce RTX 4090    G3D= 38,842          $ 1,799.99  <=== best gamer card for comparison, to show what
                                                          a "certified OpenGL driver" is costing you.
                                                          1000W supply recommended (just for transient response!)

( https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Intel+UHD+Graphics+630&id=3826 )

To fit an RTX 6000, might take a significant-sized power supply,
and that's without knowing whether the CPU versus video are
well-mated for the purpose (one having too much unusable horsepower for the other).

The "cooling equation" predicts how many CFM of exhaust fans on the
back of the PC it takes to dissipate 500W. Sometimes the results
either indicate a Hoover-like cooling solution, or that more fans
than will fit on the back, are required.

To measure percentage of P620 occupied, you could try GPU-Z while
CAD work is going on.

( Blue Download bar )

https://www.techpowerup.com/download/techpowerup-gpu-z/

These are the two cards in my machines.

   [Picture]  Furmark got the card to 100% usage

    https://i.postimg.cc/rpzYV8QW/furmark-1050.gif

   [Picture]  Slightly stronger card is borderline power limited

    https://i.postimg.cc/fyprrftk/GPUZ-furmark-1080.gif

You would be using that display, to measure "GPU Load (Percentage)"
to get some idea whether the CPU is using the GPU at any one instant
in time, and how much that matters to workflow.

Windows already has this display, percentage used, in the Task Manager
GPU pane. So adding no additional software at all to W10 or W11,
you have a measurement available while he works. But GPU-Z does
a better job of showing all measurements that are hooked up on the card
(temp, fan speed, slot power etc).

While conventional wisdom (at least, as promoted by a website) is that
more CPU cores are going to help, that generally isn't true. A higher clock
rate helps. But the companies offering product for sale, only
offer higher clock rates, on their slightly larger and more expensive CPUs.
You won't find a very desirable 2 core CPU running at 7GHz for sale
for example.

The CPU on this machine is an example. Only really helps for 7ZIP,
pretty well useless (you could chuck away 2/3rds of it and not notice
on core count). On a server, where a lot of separate executables
run in parallel, like an Exchange Server, a database server, a website
or three, are running, the cores do get used then. And then perhaps
the starvation point is memory bandwidth and how the cores are
connected (mesh or ring) matters. The other processor in the room, is
ring connected, and gives five cores of performance on a six core processor.
So starvation costs 16% of the expenditure. There's not enough memory
bandwidth for the sixth core. And they have laden as many as 28 cores
on stuff like that (so you can kinda guess you don't get 28 cores of
benefit from it).

You can use Maxxon Cinebench and increase the core count and benchmark
and see how badly the curve tips near the top end. That would allow you
to evaluate the internal arch of the CPU (mesh or ring).

   Paul