Re: Upgrading an HP Z1

On 1/28/2024 2:48 PM, Paul wrote:
> 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.

Though I had a hell of a time actually receiving the new SSD drives, I 
did finally get his system all finished up.  It did already have an SSD, 
but at only 256GB, it was too small for my liking.  But the real 
improvement was that ram, put in as you suggested.  I simply removed the 
existing 16 GB, which was in the right slots, and put the 2 32GB sticks 
in.  Wow, what a difference that made.  He had showed me the problem he 
was having when he would force it to render the drawing after making 
changes on certain variables.  Like going from 0.01 to 0.0005.  Before 
the change, you would have to walk away and do something else, taking 10 
to 15 minutes to get it done.  After the 64 GB Ram upgrade, it would 
take less than 30 seconds.  He used to get funny lines in the rendered 
drawing, and no matter what he did, he could not get them to appear.  He 
could grab and rotate the object around effortlessly without any 
stuttering or freezing at all.

The new 1 TB disk does have better read/write speeds, but after 
installing the ram, the improvement was not as noticeable.  I'm sure it 
is better, just not as important.  The initial thought on that was he 
simply needed more room, and a 2nd drive for a backup, which in this 
case was a spinner doing daily backups.

> 
> 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.

This really amazed me when I first opened the box and you were 
absolutely right in figuring out it would be a Quadro card.  I took a 
picture to give the model number and look up, but lost it, darn it. 
Still, cool you knew what it would be.

---snip---

This one works well, he's happy, it is backing up properly, and I 
appreciate the helpful advice!

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