Rockwell Software - Core i9 or Xeon

In the last month I built a new workstation, I9-9900K (8 core, 16 thread), 16GB RAM, Samsung 970 EVO NVME. Installed 32GB Optane but then found out it only boosts traditional SSD's, not NVME.

Boots from completely off to windows login screen (win 10 pro) in about 10 seconds.

In a previous company my worksation was an I9-7980XE (18 core, 36 thread)... was nice too but for every day (engineering) use the 9900K seems faster.

mister x said:

Go for 32 gig RAM 4000, a Taichi x390, 850 w power supply, cases are pretty wide open, just size for your cooling decisions, 280mm liquid Cooler - lots of good options there too. Definitely a NVMe m.2 1 tb ssd, say WD Black. Maybe 2 with your $. GPUs depend on your main apps, but if it's just Rockwell, there's gforce in the $600 range that should be fine. Or Nvidia Quadro I believe is spec for AutoCad. i9k Coffee Lake you can overclock if needed. What's your monitor plans?

Sorry, missed that it will be leased, disregard everything I said lol. Not sure what to tell you about that, you're right about the $10k now...

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Exactly, as soon as you go name brand the price is inflated, leasing makes it worse, but good for accounting and taxes I guess (world is run by CFO's, wag the dog).

As for monitor plans, I will have to stick with my 28" 4K Samsungs for now.

Maybe next year's budget can include a monitor upgrade.

I really appreciate your feed back Mister.

the_msp said:

In the last month I built a new workstation, I9-9900K (8 core, 16 thread), 16GB RAM, Samsung 970 EVO NVME. Installed 32GB Optane but then found out it only boosts traditional SSD's, not NVME.

Boots from completely off to windows login screen (win 10 pro) in about 10 seconds.

In a previous company my worksation was an I9-7980XE (18 core, 36 thread)... was nice too but for every day (engineering) use the 9900K seems faster.

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Thanks, great information!

I was looking at the HighPoint SSD7110 NVMe RAID Controller.

parky said:

It still won't stop Rockwell, "Not responding" lol

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lmfao nailed it!

celichi said:

I am not so sure about overkill.

I could be running multiple VMs at once in an SE development and testing environment.

6 cores is not going to cut it.

Right now I have Xeon E5 with 1 CPU and 4 cores and it is a dog.

Also 8 gigs of ram is what some call the min for just Windows 10 OS, never mind VMware and supporting a Guest and a Host + the Rockwell software. With 8 gigs, I would be getting into page file memory pretty fast.

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I think if you look at actual benchmarks, you'll see that you can't really compare # of cores or even GHz as processor development happens so quickly. 4-core Xeon E5 means nothing since they've been out for years and the older ones are easily outclassed by even budget processors now.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+9+3900X&id=3493

Check this list out. Notice that cost does not directly correlate to performance, and Intel is generally not the best bang for the buck. You can get a heck of a lot of performance for much less than your budget.

Of course I understand if it's not your money, then shoot for the moon!

celichi said:

I am budgeting for a new Work Station desk top tower Computer. Less than $10k.

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Paul, I am guessing you are not the owner of the business? I am also looking for a new desktop but I am trying to be less than 2k, I wish Dell still had the option of "build you own" they are very limited in the customization these days but I am still trying to get one, I was looking at the 3630

I would get the new Ryzen 9 3900X (12 cores, 24 threads), 32GB 3200MHz DDR4 RAM and a mobo with the new x570 chipset and NVME PCI-E 4.0 SSDs which are extremely fast.
https://www.newegg.com/gigabyte-aorus-1tb/p/N82E16820009012

The above setup shouldn't cost more than 2000$.
If you don't like AMD, Intel's i9-9900k is a great alternative.
Anything else is an overkill for your needs.

where do you work or what industry are you in that they actually provide you a workstation that doesn't have you twiddling your thumbs!

geniusintraining said:

Paul, I am guessing you are not the owner of the business? I am also looking for a new desktop but I am trying to be less than 2k, I wish Dell still had the option of "build you own" they are very limited in the customization these days but I am still trying to get one, I was looking at the 3630

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Mine came in about £1K, excluding the GFX card which I had from a prior build and also excluding monitors.

geniusintraining said:

Paul, I am guessing you are not the owner of the business? I am also looking for a new desktop but I am trying to be less than 2k, I wish Dell still had the option of "build you own" they are very limited in the customization these days but I am still trying to get one, I was looking at the 3630

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I think you'd do far better staying away from Dell if it's your personnel budget. I like Dell, own one myself, and bought an XPS 13 for the GF, but for customization, forget it - too pricey. At 2K USD you should be able to build a pretty hot Intel or Ryzen system. Look at the parts I listed above, and you could probably even get a good GPU off eBay at a great discount.

rupej said:

I think if you look at actual benchmarks, you'll see that you can't really compare # of cores or even GHz as processor development happens so quickly. 4-core Xeon E5 means nothing since they've been out for years and the older ones are easily outclassed by even budget processors now.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+9+3900X&id=3493

Check this list out. Notice that cost does not directly correlate to performance, and Intel is generally not the best bang for the buck. You can get a heck of a lot of performance for much less than your budget.

Of course I understand if it's not your money, then shoot for the moon!

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This E5 has served me well for 4 years, 5 months, 2 weeks, and 2 days.

Time for a Silver or Gold Upgrade.

Are you referring to AMD?

geniusintraining said:

Paul, I am guessing you are not the owner of the business? I am also looking for a new desktop but I am trying to be less than 2k, I wish Dell still had the option of "build you own" they are very limited in the customization these days but I am still trying to get one, I was looking at the 3630

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No, I am not the owner. Been here 13 years, and I generally very good with company money, however I live and die with my PC.

This is why I need a Local RAID setup for OS and DATA = $$

I need multi-core+, not unusual for me to have 2 VMs+ VMs running while testing and development.

I think a lot of people have not priced out Workstations on Dell or IBM website lately.

I don't think Rockwell Software is very efficient. How or why does it take 5 minutes to create a 15 meg run time file?

PC are friggin expensive, RAM is crazy and CPUs can be thousands just for the chip.

We are running out of these precious elements on this planet. Demand is far greater than supply.

V0N_hydro said:

where do you work or what industry are you in that they actually provide you a workstation that doesn't have you twiddling your thumbs!

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Pharma, Pure Water, OEM.

Exactly, I spend too much time waiting when I could be writing some sweet code.

mister x said:

I think you'd do far better staying away from Dell if it's your personnel budget. I like Dell, own one myself, and bought an XPS 13 for the GF, but for customization, forget it - too pricey. At 2K USD you should be able to build a pretty hot Intel or Ryzen system. Look at the parts I listed above, and you could probably even get a good GPU off eBay at a great discount.

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I talked to my Manager and IT, they will only buy new from Dell or IBM...not going to complain.

I sent them a link to the place in TO called the Delta Server Store, and they have some killer Dells for $1600 - $2400 cdn (64gb - 256gb of DDR3, dual 8 core, 2.9 ghz, E5-2960, 500g SSD).

See what happens.

My boss said, this is your only tool, and it needs to work 100%.

At Delta we buy Dell computers because we have an account and get discounts. However, for some applications I like the Intel NUCs. We have many. I replaced my old Mac Pro with an Intel Nuc at work. It cost half as much and is 3 times as powerful but it is also 10 years newer.

Ditto the comments about SSD. The NVME SSD are great. I buy 1TB SSD from Amazon. I use them in my NAS ( Synology DS1019+ ) newer.
The CPU is not as important as the SSD.
I often do video work now. I7s are fast enough although I have an I9 at home.
Graphic cards are another big expense. I don't see where PLC programming or any programming needs more than the built in graphics capability.
I got a GTX1080 to play games. Not the shoot em up type. I wanted the CUDA cores for playing chess. PLCs software does not need this. In this case the NUCs with built in graphic cards work well enough. Just get 2400 MHz memory and at fast NVME SSD for the main system disk.