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Used for: More than a year
Bays and slots to grow into, which we already have
Fan noise under load rules it out of a shared room
It lives in a small server room down the corridor and everybody works on it remotely, which was not the original plan. The original plan was to put it in the office, and that lasted about a week. Under sustained load it is not loud exactly, but it is insistent, and in a quiet room full of people writing it was hopeless. Out of the way it is faultless. Eighteen months of near-continuous work and the only downtime has been ours.
Used for: More than a year
The error log has caught things that would have wrecked a run
It idles at a wattage that made the office manager wince
Whether ECC matters is the argument I had with myself for weeks before ordering, and the honest answer is that it depends what a failed run costs you. Ours are long, and a silent corruption most of the way through used to mean starting again with no idea why. This one has logged corrected errors twice since it arrived, which is twice it did not fall over. That alone paid for the difference
Used for: 6–12 months
Took a clean Linux install without a fight
No operating system suited us perfectly, since the first thing we would have done is wipe it. Straight onto our own build and on the network before lunch!
Used for: 6–12 months
Holds an entire dataset in memory without blinking
The graphics card is the weak link if you want to look at anything
Bought for assembly work in a genomics lab, where the constraint has always been memory rather than cores. Jobs that used to be split across nodes and stitched back together now run in one go on one desk, which, though hardly glamorous, has taken a whole layer of faff out of the week!
Used for: More than a year
Runs flat out for days on end and never wavers
The bundled card is fine for a spreadsheet and not much else
The card is the compromise you make for the memory. It will drive a couple of screens and it will not render a thing, so if you had any visualisation in mind, price a proper one in at the same time. A year in, that is still the only complaint I have.