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The 2024 update to my desktop system

I have just upgraded my desktop system. As you can see from the picture below, it is a bespoke system; the third system built using the same chassis.

ASUS Z790 motherboard+components installed in Armor chassis.

The 11 drive bays on the right are configured for six 5.25-inch and five 3.5-inch disks/CD/DVD/tape drives, there is a drive cage that fits above the power supply (top left) that holds another three 3.5-inch devices. The central black rectangle with two sets of four semicircular caps (fan above/below) is the cpu cooling tower, with two 32G memory sticks immediately to its right. The central left fan is reflected in a polished heatsink.

Why so many bays for disks?

The original need, in 2005 (well before GitHub), was for enough storage to hold the source code available, via ftp, from various hosting sites that were springing up, hence the choice of theThermaltake Armour Series VA8000BWS Supertower. The first system I built contained six400G Barracuda drives

The original power supply, aThermaltake Silent Purepower 680W PSU, with its umpteen power connectors is still giving sterling service (black box with black fan at top left).

When building a system, I start by deciding on the motherboard. Boards supporting 6+SATA connectors were once rare, but these days are more common on high-end systems. I also look for support for the latest cpu families andhigh memory bandwidth. I’m not a gamer, so no interest in graphics cards.

The three systems are:

  1. in 2005, anASUS A8N-SLi Premium Socket 939 Motherboard, anAMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4400 2.2Ghz cpu, andCorsair TWINX2048-3200C2 TwinX (2 x 1GB) memory. ARed Hat Linux distribution was installed,
  2. in 2013, an intermittent problem appeared on the A8N motherboard, so I upgraded to anASUS P8Z77-V 1155 Socket motherboard, anIntel Core i5 Ivy Bridge 3570K – 3.4 GHz cpu, andCorsair CMZ16GX3M2A1600C10 Vengeance 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 1600 MHz memory. Terabyte 3.25-inch disk drives were now available, and I installed two 2T drives. AopenSUSE Linux distribution was installed.

    The picture below shows the P8Z77-V, with cpu+fan and memory installed, sitting in its original box. This board and the one pictured above are the same length/width, i.e., theATX form factor. This board is a lot lighter, in color and weight, than the Z790 board because it is not covered by surprisingly thick black metal plates, intended to spread areas of heat concentration,

    ASUS P8Z77 motherboard with cpu+cooling fan + memory etc installed, in original box.

  3. in 2024, there is no immediate need for an update, but the 11-year-old P8Z77 is likely to become unreliable sooner rather than later, better to update at a time of my choosing. At £400 theASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Hero LGA 1700 socket motherboard is a big step up from my previous choices, but I’m starting to get involved with larger datasets andrunning LLMs locally. TheIntel Core i7-13700K was chosen because of its 16 cores (I went for a hefty coolerupHere CPU Air Cooler with two fans), along withCorsair Vengeance DDR5 RAM 64GB (2x32GB) 6400 memory. A 4T and 8T hard disk, plus a 2T SSD were added to the storage system. TheLinux Mint distribution was installed.

The last 20-years has seen an evolution of the desktop computer I own: roughly a factor of 10 increase in cpu cores, memory and storage. Several revolutions occurred between the roughly 20 years from thefirst computer I owned (an8-bit cpu running at 4 MHz with 64K of memory and two 360Kfloppy drives) and the first one of these desktop systems.

What might happen in the next 20-years?

Will it still be commercially viable for companies to sell motherboards? If enough people switch to using datacenters, rather than desktop systems, many companies will stop selling into the computer component market.

LLMs perform simple operations on huge amounts of data. The bottleneck is transferring the data from memory to the processors. A system where simple compute occurs within the memory system would be a revolution in mainstream computer architecture.

Motherboards include a socket to support a specialised AI chip, like the empty socket forIntel’s 8087 on theoriginal PC motherboards, is a reuse of past practices.

  1. July 29, 2024 00:05 |#1

    You may want to watch out for Intel BIOS and microcode updates to work around manufacturing defects in 13th and 14th generation processors:

    https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/26/24206529/intel-13th-14th-gen-crashing-instability-cpu-voltage-q-a?utm_source=taoofmac.com&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=unsolicited_traffic&utm_content=external_link

  2. July 29, 2024 01:17 |#2

    @Fazal Majid
    I take comfort in the wording “… manufacturing issue that was fixed at an unspecified date last year.” and the assumption that the supply chain has a high throughput.
    I have installed the latest BIOS update from ASUS, which includes Intel updates.

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