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Used for: 1–3 months
It has changed what we bother to attempt
Bought for a research group where six people share the machine over a scheduler, so it is rarely idle and the queue is the only thing anyone argues about now. What has changed is not that jobs are quicker, although they are. It is what people are willing to attempt. When a run took the whole night, you thought hard before starting one, and a mistake cost you the whole of the next one too. When it takes an hour, you try the thing you were unsure about, and the science moves quicker for it. Two of the students have run experiments this term that nobody would have bothered with on the old hardware. It is loud when it is busy, it draws a lot, and it lives in a room of its own for both those reasons. Worth every penny of the grant.
Used for: 3–6 months
Scrubs a long timeline without a proxy in sight
Audio post, so the specification that mattered was not really the processor. It was whether the thing would be quiet enough to sit in the same room as a microphone, and the honest answer is almost. At idle you cannot hear it over the air conditioning. Under a long bounce you can, faintly, which is why it lives behind a baffle. Five months in, no dropouts, no crackles, no session that has fallen over. For the money that is exactly what I wanted!
Used for: 3–6 months
Quicker at everything than the machine it replaced
Comes bare, so factor a licence into the price
does exactly what was asked of it and has never once made me wait
Used for: Less than a month
Memory that finally matches the size of the models
The card is a display adapter and nothing more
Ordered knowing the graphics would be modest, because the work here is all processor and memory, and even so the card is more basic than I pictured. Fine for our purposes. Do check it against yours
Used for: 1–3 months
It replaced a pair of machines and does the work of both at the same time, which has freed a desk and taken a whole set of licences off the renewal list!
Used for: 6–12 months
One machine now does what three used to
The power draw is noticeable if you pay the bill yourself
We consolidated three ageing machines onto this one and the electricity was part of the argument, although not in the direction you would guess. It draws plenty under load, but the three it replaced drew more between them and spent most of the day idling. Eight months in, the bill is down and the room is cooler, which nobody in the office had thought to predict.
Used for: 6–12 months
Set it up once and then forgot about it
Ten months of running simulations overnight and the only time it has been off is when the building lost power.
Used for: More than a year
Overnight jobs run for months without a failure
Getting at the memory slots is a genuine faff
Adding memory was the one job that made me put the kettle on first. The shroud comes out, a fan carrier comes out, and there is a cable that runs exactly where your hand wants to be. Nothing broke, but it is not the ten-minute job the diagrams imply. Worth it, though. The whole reason for buying a machine like this is that you can keep feeding it, and the work has grown into everything we have given it. A year and a half on, it is doing more than it was on the day it turned up, which is not something I could say about the laptop it replaced.
Used for: 1–3 months
Compiles and simulates at once without either slowing
Under sustained load it is too loud for a room with people in it
The noise is the thing to think about carefully, and nobody puts it in a specification. At idle it is inaudible. Under a two-hour sustained load it rises to a note that fills a small room, not a whine and not a roar, but a constant presence that you become aware of by mid-afternoon. We moved ours into the corridor cupboard with a lead through the wall, and since then it has been perfect. Eight weeks of that arrangement and I would not go back. If you are putting one on a desk in a shared office, go and listen to one first.
Used for: More than a year
Has never once needed anything doing to it
Runs a dozen virtual machines all day and still has memory going spare!