About two years ago, I bought a 5 year old used HP Z440 workstation with a 6 core Xeon E5-1650 v4, 32 GB of RAM and an Nvidia M2000 graphics card for around 800 euros. At the time I wanted to have some CPU processing power with little noise and an Nvidia graphics card that … Continue reading Price Development of My Used Z440 Workstation
In the previous blog post, I’ve been taking a look if and how well Ubuntu Linux runs on a high performance notebook with a state of the art Intel 12800H processor and an Nvidia RTX A2000 8GB GPU. While it took me a bit to set up the system so it wouldn’t sporadically freeze and … Continue reading Ubuntu Linux on the Bleeding Edge: Performance on a Notebook with an Intel 12800H and an Nvidia GPU – Part 2
It’s the time of the year again to have a look back at the things that moved me this year. On the surface, it seems that I had relatively few posts about wireless network technologies. But this appearance is quite deceptive.
Since back in December, I have a ‘Headless’ HP Z440 workstation under my desk with lots of RAM, storage and an Nvidia graphics card to run virtual machines and compute intensive stuff there instead of on my notebook. This works very well in practice and I use X over SSH a lot with virtual machines … Continue reading A Dummy Display Dongle for My Headless Workstation
One of the reasons I bought a used Z440 workstation with a 6 core Xeon CPU and an Nvidia graphics card back in December was to offload and speedup occasional video transcoding tasks. As I wrote at the time, I could get a speed-up of up to 8x over my X250 notebook. Since then I … Continue reading My ffmpeg Cheat Sheet for Video Transcoding
Now that I have my ZFS filesystem spanning several drives in place on my Z440, I wanted to get an idea of how this setup is performing together with the underlying LUKS encryption. And while I am at it, the other questions I had in mind were: How does this compare to the ext4/LUKS combination … Continue reading SSD, ZFS and VM performance – Workstation Power At Home – Part 12
In previous parts of this series I’ve been looking at CPU power, GPU power, virtualization, remote graphical GUIs and networking of my refurbished Z440 workstation. The next thing on my list of things I wanted to improve in my computing setup was storage. So far, I was mostly using ext4 filesystems on partitions on physical … Continue reading ZFS for Storage – A Primer – Workstation Power At Home – Part 10
In addition to running computing intensive applications on my new (refurbished) HP Z440 workstation the other main use case for me is to offload the virtual machines I am running on my notebook today. While I do have 16 GB of RAM in my notebook it becomes more and more difficult to run two virtual … Continue reading Remote Visual Computing with RDP – Workstation Power At Home – Part 5
I guess you have noticed the one or other of my recent articles over the past few weeks about the experience I have gained with my new ‘refurbished’ workstation. While I previously thought that single core performance of x86 processors in high end workstations and particularly in data centers must be so much more powerful … Continue reading Some Thoughts On Single Core Performance – Notebook vs. Datacenter
High processing power comes with high power consumption. I guess that can’t be helped much but one way to reduce the power bill for that number-crunching ‘headless’ workstation under the desk without screen and keyboard is to suspend it at night and at times during the day when it is not needed. As long as … Continue reading Workstation Power at Home – Part 4 – Power and Remote Suspend