7 Key Steps To Building High Performance Systems

A decade or more ago, workstations were for the most privileged. Based largely on proprietary (and pricey) RISC and Unix technology, companies such as Silicon Graphics Inc. became the equivalent of rock stars for engineering departments at universities across the country, and staples in design and engineering departments in business.

Then a funny thing happened on the way to the design studio. Companies, including Intel Corp. with Xeon-based offerings, and Microsoft Corp. with 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Windows Vista, and every major component manufacturer from Asus to Nvidia and Supermicro mastered issues of scale and price and performance. Today, the world of high-performance desktop computing is simply a different animal.

Here are seven steps to offering a high-performance system that's easily customizable and upgradable, and will deliver value.

Step 1: Finding where a performance boost can deliver fast return-on-investment
Whether it's the deployment of a map-based tracking system, 3-D analytics for CRM or sales, or even digital document conversion and management, higher levels of performance can deliver efficiency, improve workflow quality and even cut an organization's costs by a quantifiable amount. Converting formats on a video, or imaging a document on a single-CPU PC vs. a dual-Xeon workstation can mean as much as 10 minutes difference per task. Multiply that by six times in a day, for a $20-per-hour employee, and a new PC could pay for itself in no time. And because you're talking about a custom-build, components and design can always be customized for individual needs.

Step 2: Finding the building blocks
For custom workstation builds, we considered two routes: a bare-bones console from Supermicro, San Jose, Calif., that provided a motherboard, video and audio cards, chassis, fans and power supply, among other components. The system is fairly complete, save for two open CPU slots, hard drives and an optical drive. (The Supermicro also ships with a floppy drive, which we considered nice if not superfluous.) It's a nice system, and one that system builders should consider, based on their need for scale and customization for a specific client. We also considered building a workstation with off-the-rack components, piece by piece. Ultimately, we chose the latter because we wanted to mix and match, tweak and optimize to see what we could come up with.

We got started with our new Test Center workstation testbed largely with off-the-shelf components and software using an Antec Titan 650 chassis, 8 GB of DDR2 RAM at 667MHz, an Asus DSEB-DG motherboard, an Nvidia eGeForce 8400 GS video card and Microsoft Vista 64-bit. Individually, we can recommend each component we used—yes, including Windows Vista 64-bit. Primate Labs' Geekbench 2 64-bit version measured performance, and the system rang up a score of 5356—not the highest-performing system we've built but still very high. It drew more power than a standard desktop: 107 watts idling and 196 watts under a decent workload. The internal temperature never rose more than a couple of degrees above room temperature, and the system remained at or below the lab's ambient noise.

Next: Step 3: Making the decision—32-bit vs. 64-bit