Professionally build workstation comes with support from the manufacturer, like one day replacement on site service. You on the other hand have to deal with rma process from multiple manufacturer with only you to trouble shoot. This is why self built workstation aren't use in a professional money making setting, it just doesn't make sense.
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Apple Made Me Buy a Windows HP Workstation
- Thread starter Mark Holmes
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Professionally build workstation comes with support from the manufacturer, like one day replacement on site service. You on the other hand have to deal with rma process from multiple manufacturer with only you to trouble shoot. This is why self built workstation aren't use in a professional money making setting, it just doesn't make sense.
Replacement parts is another issue. If you need it then no problem. But if you comfortable supporting yourself then that's not to be belittled either.
Btw, let's not confuse single professionals/freelancers with companies who can afford and need the added tech support. We spoke about home builds. That means dedicated professionals who work on their own or with a very small team.
Freelancer don't have time debugging hardware. Their business depends on reliable and supported tools.
You're not getting it.
A dedicated freelancer who knows what he is doing isn't going to need to 'debug' anything. If he doesn't know what he is doing then fair enough, don't build it yourself.
..and a very rapid turnaround. My clients have zero interest in my technical problems. I need a proven setup that is reliable enough I can ignore it and get on with work. I gave up "computing" as a hobby years ago.
Exactly this same situation., had a single cpu 5.1 pushed it to the limit CPU wise.
Fed up with the graphics card issues, yes you could upgrade but the no boot screen was a pain. It just got to the point where it was all getting a hassle.
I wanted something different. I didnt was a black PC Box under the desk, Design says something.
Anyway like the OP I tried an HP Workstation, tried the 800 series but that was getting long in the tooth as well
So went totally sideways and picked up a slightly used Alienware Area 51 R2. It looks different not just a standard PC Box, Its well specced and it has next day onsite support for 3 years! so if anything goes wrong the engineer comes and fixes it. No lugging it back to an Applestore for an exchange.
Plenty of CUDA/Graphics (3x GTX980) and CPU grunt (40 Lane 5930k CPU). and a pile of cash less than a trashcan.
Fed up with the graphics card issues, yes you could upgrade but the no boot screen was a pain. It just got to the point where it was all getting a hassle.
I wanted something different. I didnt was a black PC Box under the desk, Design says something.
Anyway like the OP I tried an HP Workstation, tried the 800 series but that was getting long in the tooth as well
So went totally sideways and picked up a slightly used Alienware Area 51 R2. It looks different not just a standard PC Box, Its well specced and it has next day onsite support for 3 years! so if anything goes wrong the engineer comes and fixes it. No lugging it back to an Applestore for an exchange.
Plenty of CUDA/Graphics (3x GTX980) and CPU grunt (40 Lane 5930k CPU). and a pile of cash less than a trashcan.
There will be a point where lots of personal experiences are accepted as fact, but somebody has to be first.
The freelancer skill is irrelevant. Even the best tech ends up with a bad piece of hardware every once in a while. Having to deal with disparate rma procedure is time consuming and wasted time is a net lost of revenue.
Again, I don't see this happening to someone who is dedicated enough to know what they are doing, research their needs and find an online community who are very often more knowledgable than Support staff.
My first workstation was a dual CPU NT box. I meticulously studied what components I would need, kept the OS very clean, and never had an issue despite filling two CPU sockets, 8 banks of RAM, and five PCI slots. That was back when there was no plug and play. Back when one failed boot up could mean having to reinstall the whole OS. Back when everything was serial ports and IRQs to configure. USB didn't even exist yet.
By comparison people have it soooooo easy today. So I hope you understand why I have to facepalm myself when I hear that a dedicated freelancer can't support his own machine.
Its really a choice. Build it yourself and save money and you provide your own support with lost man hours if something goes wrong. Buy preconfigured workstation with support at a higher cost.
I know one business owner who built two workstations, so if one goes out he has a back up. But he still looses out on man hours either way in repair.
Yeah, I'm comfortable with adding memory, cards, drives, etc. (Ican do the 2012 Mini teardown w/o the instructions anymore.) And although I could probably make a successful PC build, I am not convinced enough of my untested building skills to make costly mistakes. I think knowing one's limitations is important. (i.e., unclogging a bathtub does not make me a plumber.)
And all the time you took reseaching your hardware you weren't doing work for your clients... Which is why no one is doing this.
That and some custom/prefab makers are doing interesting things.
Poster above has their alienware. I am looking at maingear offerings. Both are doing interesting things like angled motherboard installs. the alienware is an eyeballed 45 degree spin. maingear does 90 degrees. either way the angling gets the video card(s) in a better spot to lose some heat. Or it at least it is not becoming that pocket of dead hot air back upper corner of the case. sometimes by the PSU...to be another heat source.
Not seeing any DIY cases do this tbh...if they exist someone please link it as the mobo spin kind of a feature I am considering if I go back to pc.
I don't have a lot of experience with desktop machines but I have built my own and personally never felt they were of the same quality as workstations I bought from PC companies.
I do however have more experience when it comes to building servers. I used to own a web hosting company and my partner once thought we would save time and money building our own servers. He tried for months to find parts would be equal to what we would be able to custom build from Dell or HP and wasn't able to find a reliable supply that would have been cheaper. Then once he ordered some the machines we built in house never had the features or easy access to parts that the servers we ordered from Dell had. Then there is the onsite service Dell provided if we ever had any problems.
We eventually got rid of all those machines and never looked back. It was just not worth it at all...
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That's a very naive look at it. I have consulted in business on hardware purchases for large and small companies for nearly a decade and there are plenty of individuals and small companies, or individuals within larger companies dealing working on custom or bespoke hardware without buying HP, Dell, Lenovo, Fujitsu or Apple workstations. I made a living off supporting people who didn't want off the shelf solutions, or who wanted to really push hardware, or who needed to get the best performance for their money (which often meant building yourself), but my attitude hasn't changed so maybe I am still a little bias, but in my current work I still come in to contact with these people.
I'm not sure where this idea of the big workstation manufactures being infallible comes from either. As someone who has dealt with HP, Dell and Apple on behalf of "power users" who had solutions from them there were often times that wish they had just built their own stuff.
I work with 6 cloud computing/server hosting companies and they all build their own servers from Super Micro barebones. I don't see them in internal enterprise nearly as much, but for those looking to make money from servers they aren't typically doing anything other than taking Super Micro boxes and filling them with CPUs, RAM and storage (and graphics cards in some cases). All brands still find their way in to the storage realm, but my point is plenty of people are custom building.
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There are loads of entities working on the fringes and custom hardware offers all sorts of benefits. This forum has had nearly 10 years of Mac Pro talk by such people, the evidence can be found by clicking page after page.
the Mac Pro was designed and produced to satisfy government pressure to move manufacturing of Apple Products into the USA. The reason the cost is so high is to prove that you can't product a cost effective product in the USA. Its not actually supposed to be purchased, just a proof of US labor concept.
If you take a transcript of Phil Schiller's presentation of the Mac Pro and reverse the words and print it with a column width of 42 you can read a message from the Illuminati down the left column. This is also why Schiller called the Thunderbolt ports "Firewire" multiple times during the presentation, to make the characters fit.
The reaction on notorious Freemason Steve Wozniak's face in the video is also a giveaway.
Rearranging the letter in "New Mac Pro" gives you "Crap Me Own" so surely a new one is coming.
This was a hype fest for the nMP. The only thing missing was a marching band on stage and confetti filled balloons falling from the ceiling!
2006 onwards, that was the generation which made me fall in love with the Mac.
I used to love how upgradable it was, just a little flip of a switch and all the SATA Drives come out, pull out the riser cards and the memory is easily accessible. Even someone people were able to upgrade their CPUs. Even compared to the previous Mac G3, which also had some impressive upgradeability, this took the cake.
Even the laptops of that generation, remove the battery and you have access to the Hard Drive and the Memory. I was really impressed. While PCs you had to go through hoops to get access to the hard drive, and in some cases even the memory, Macbooks it was all right there in front of you.
The best part, your essential upgrades did not void your warranty. You were totally safe. There were issues still but nothing compared to the PC manufacturers of the day, you generally felt like you were get reasonable high quality laptop at a reasonable price.
I went back to PCs for a while, but I remember looking at all the new shiny Macbooks with envy. Eventually when my PC died, I just replaced it with a Macbook Pro.
Now, I'm looking at upgrading my Macbook Pro and I just can't justify buying another Mac. Everything is soldered on to the motherboard. Nothing gets updated. The Macbook Pro is running ancient processors, GPUs, you can't upgrade the memory unless you spend significant sums of money. Even the battery is no longer user serviceable.
Instead the focus on the iPad, a device which is a neat toy, but honestly I could not imagine spending hours writing doing serious work on it. Try writing a dissertation, a factum or anything on an iPad, you will be clamoring for a laptop quickly if not a fully fledged desktop PC.
The really sad part, now I look at PC Laptops with envy. Microsoft seems to have gotten its act together and basically given Apple a run for its money.
Compare the Surface Book and iPad Pro, I much rather have the former cause it is a good all around device. A good toy and a good computer, while the iPad Pro is an amazing toy but sucks for real work.
How about the Razer Blade, an amazing device all around: looks spectacular and here is the real kicker, it runs current generation hardware.
I used to love how upgradable it was, just a little flip of a switch and all the SATA Drives come out, pull out the riser cards and the memory is easily accessible. Even someone people were able to upgrade their CPUs. Even compared to the previous Mac G3, which also had some impressive upgradeability, this took the cake.
Even the laptops of that generation, remove the battery and you have access to the Hard Drive and the Memory. I was really impressed. While PCs you had to go through hoops to get access to the hard drive, and in some cases even the memory, Macbooks it was all right there in front of you.
The best part, your essential upgrades did not void your warranty. You were totally safe. There were issues still but nothing compared to the PC manufacturers of the day, you generally felt like you were get reasonable high quality laptop at a reasonable price.
I went back to PCs for a while, but I remember looking at all the new shiny Macbooks with envy. Eventually when my PC died, I just replaced it with a Macbook Pro.
Now, I'm looking at upgrading my Macbook Pro and I just can't justify buying another Mac. Everything is soldered on to the motherboard. Nothing gets updated. The Macbook Pro is running ancient processors, GPUs, you can't upgrade the memory unless you spend significant sums of money. Even the battery is no longer user serviceable.
Instead the focus on the iPad, a device which is a neat toy, but honestly I could not imagine spending hours writing doing serious work on it. Try writing a dissertation, a factum or anything on an iPad, you will be clamoring for a laptop quickly if not a fully fledged desktop PC.
The really sad part, now I look at PC Laptops with envy. Microsoft seems to have gotten its act together and basically given Apple a run for its money.
Compare the Surface Book and iPad Pro, I much rather have the former cause it is a good all around device. A good toy and a good computer, while the iPad Pro is an amazing toy but sucks for real work.
How about the Razer Blade, an amazing device all around: looks spectacular and here is the real kicker, it runs current generation hardware.
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While this borders on conspiracy theory logic, its not without a fragment of truth. At the time of the nMP intro Apple was getting hammered with bad press for exploiting slave like labor practices in China. So the move to U.S. assembly was largely a P.R. move. And if you need a P.R. win it just makes sense to use the Mac with lowest unit sales to pull that off.
The redesign can be explained by a number of more likely motivations. Among them would likely be:
1) Reduce material costs
2) Reduce size and weight to reduce shipping costs
3) Reduce configuration options to reduce product support issues
4) Create a show piece to allow Apple to wag its design wang in everyone's face
My conspiracy is that 4 was a bigger motivation than any of the others.