thinking about Haswell desktop

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Sep 05, 2013 at 10:44:49AM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> My current desktop is old (Core 2 Quad Q6600).  Not bad, but I'm thinking 
> about a new system.  I guess that I can expect double the processing 
> speed.
> 
> Some tentative thoughts.
> 
> AMD isn't in the game, unless you focus on bang for the buck.

I haven't bought one in a long time.  When the nvidia chipsets ended
for them, they stopped being interesting, and also the core 2 and never
finally made intel interesting again.

> If I'm going to live with a new system indefinitely (perhaps longer than 5 
> years if innovation continues to be slow), I might want to get more things 
> right.
> 
> Reducing 24/7 power usage would seem worthwhile.  The Intel processors 
> with "S" suffix save some power and are not too expensive or slow.

So make sure you get an efficient power supply, and such.

> It would be nice to have ECC.  Seems to require XEON :-(  More expensive 
> processor, more expensive motherboard, more expensive RAM.  I'm ignoring 
> this direction initially.

Yeah I think I would do that too.

> VT-d (for PCI bus virtualization) would seem nice.  Sadly, VT-d support is 
> a complex mess:
> 
> - not available on K suffix Haswell processors.  That's OK, there are a 
>   lot of other features missing on K suffix processors that make me not 
>   want them.
> 
> - most LGA 1150 chipsets (i.e. Haswell-supporting) can support VT-d, but 
>   many BIOSes don't.  Only Q87-chipset motherboards seem to be good bets;  
>   there are not a lot of them.  What a silly, stupid situation.
> 
> - see <http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2326402>
> 
> Any thoughts / hints?

If you want vt-d, it seems that the xen users think asrock is the best
bet.  They claim all boards with Intel Z87, H87, Q87 and B85 chipsets
made by asrock can do vt-d assuming you pick a CPU that can too.
I have no experience with asrock so far.  I always use asus boards,
but apparently most of those don't do vt-d except the high end (socket
1366 or 2011 these days, and even there there were bios issues that
needed resolving to get it working).

Now much as vt-d is neat, I have no idea what I would use it for at home.
vt-x on the other hand is very useful for virtual machines in general.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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