
The God Box (2004) - ecliptik
https://archive.arstechnica.com/guide/system/godbox.html
======
dmayle
The total price is just a hair of $9.7k ($13,290 is 2020 dollars)

It's interesting looking at the breakdown, because in some cases prices are
similar, and I think in some other cases, the smart money has changed.

For instance, a really high end motherboard (X570 or threadripper) will still
be in the $500 range, but there are now available options going up to $800.

The closest CPU option is 32 cores 3970X TR, but it runs $2000, not the $2400
they spend (again, 2020 dollars)

256GB of DDR4 ECC RAM (instead of 4GB) will cost about $1200, not the $1350
spent.

GPU options, however, will run into $1200 for an RTX 2080 Ti rather than the
$800 they spent.

SCSI cards are no longer necessary, as NVME is the smart play, and PCIE 4.0 is
the high-end play.

They only spend $600 on the system drive ($827 if you include the
controllers), but for a God Box, I'd put in an Optane PCIE card for $1300.

For $1440 in storage drives, you're either looking at dual 4TB SSDs if you
want SSD speed, or an external 4-bay NAS with 3 8TB drives.

Optical drives are out, which just leaves backup and case. I know nothing
about tape storage, so I won't comment on that, but in the case world, you now
have interesting options like the TureMetal UP10 which allow you to run this
system entirely fanless, but for somewhere in the $700-$1000 range.

~~~
greggyb
> The closest CPU option is 32 cores 3970X TR, but it runs $2000, not the
> $2400 they spend (again, 2020 dollars).

Sticking to HEDT, rather than server components, the 3990X is available,
appropriately enough, at $3,990 retail. This is 64 cores.

> 256GB of DDR4 ECC RAM (instead of 4GB) will cost about $1200, not the $1350
> spent.

This is not possible as a combination right now. Threadrippers (as is the case
for all mainstream and HEDT processors from AMD) can only use unbuffered
DIMMs. The largest unbuffered ECC DIMM I have been able to find is 16GB, which
maxes out at 128GB with 8 DIMM slots (I haven't seen larger for any TR
motherboards).

> For $1440 in storage drives, you're either looking at dual 4TB SSDs if you
> want SSD speed, or an external 4-bay NAS with 3 8TB drives.

If it's a capacity play, you can easily get more than 3x8TB if you install
into the tower directly, rather than a separate NAS. Especially with
Threadripper, the motherboards tend to be large and 3rd gen need massive
cooling solutions. There should be room for at least 4-8 3.5" drives in the
tower.

Still, the modern god box is a good sight better than the old one.

~~~
dmayle
> Sticking to HEDT, rather than server components, the 3990X is available

It's true that I left that out. It's not entirely clear to me whether the
budget is unlimited or not in the God Box. Back in 2004 you could go higher
budget than they did with the Opteron 850, but the market wasn't as clearly
segmented as it is today.

> Threadrippers (as is the case for all mainstream and HEDT processors from
> AMD) can only use unbuffered DIMMs

I hadn't realized that. There are 32GB ECC UDIMM's on the market (e.g.
[https://memory.net/product/m391a4g43mb1-ctd-
samsung-1x-32gb-...](https://memory.net/product/m391a4g43mb1-ctd-
samsung-1x-32gb-ddr4-2666-ecc-udimm-pc4-21300v-e-dual-rank-x8-module/)), but
that raises the price to around $2k.

> If it's a capacity play, you can easily get more than 3x8TB if you install
> into the tower directly

Yes, but we're talking smart money, At the time, the NAS didn't exist, and
with 10Gbe, the bandwidth is high enough to make it not worth keeping in-case.

I personally think the sweet spot is somewhere in the $2k-$3k range. That gets
you 16 cores, 128GB ECC, 2TB NVME, 10Gbe, RTX 2070/2080

~~~
greggyb
Aw man! That RAM was not available two months ago. I recently built a 3970X
machine and was frustrated at the lack of 32GB ECC UDIMMs.

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ytjohn
I was trying to figure out why, if money was no object, they chose 4GB of RAM
vs the 16GB they said the board supported. Then I remembered about the 32-bit
OS 4GB limit. While XP 64-bit came out in 2001, it was only for Itanium 64-bit
processors. It wasn't until 2005 that XP and Server 2003 would have supported
64-bit, and therefore anything over 4GB.

Kind of a difficult time to plan your system build, here 64-bit processors are
out, motherboards capable of supporting vast quantities of ram, but unable to
utilize that outside of Linux. However, this "God Box" would have been
excellent for 2004. Then in 2005, you could upgrade to XP Pro 64-bit, and go
ahead and spend your unlimited funds to quadruple your RAM.

~~~
2J0
My 2005 Dell dual Xeon 3.9Ghz box with 8GB RAM is floating around, we used
VMware and more memory than that though and the nvidia card has half a gig and
my box had four 15k 146GB Fujitsu drives on a LSI R10 with iirc 1GB BBU RAM
cache , this was fiscal 04 iirc

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sharkjacobs
> A floppy drive is still a basic tool for system construction

In 2004! I grew up using Macs, so this is wild to me. In my candy coloured
little world the floppy drive was finished in 1998 when Steve Jobs told me it
was.

~~~
Maakuth
IIRC the recommended way to provide possibly missing storage drivers to
Windows XP installer was via floppy disk. XP was the go to Windows version in
practice until Windows 7 release in 2009!

~~~
imglorp
After they got tolerances figured out, 1.44 mb floppies were dependable and
just about 100 pct guaranteed on all PC hardware, from whiteboxes to servers,
oscilloscopes, routers, even clunky laptops. They made sense for little stuff
like sneakernet and drivers for a long time.

~~~
himinlomax
Just curious, why do you write "pct" instead of using "%"?

~~~
HocusLocus
Why did you write out the entire word why instead of 'y'?

~~~
himinlomax
You do realize that the entire word would be "percent," don't you?

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firecall
Old Ars Nostalgia!

New Ars isn't a patch on what it was. But then the world has changes I
guessed. Ars seems to be more about TV show reviews these days :-/

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greggyb
Pretty timely, LTT has published one of their appropriately-named
"Compensator" builds, where they make the most obscene off-the-shelf PC
possible.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkfbg-
sHwDo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkfbg-sHwDo)

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gok
Would get a single threaded Geekbench score of around 250, similar to that of
a 2013 iPhone.

~~~
RachelF
are the Geekbench benchmarks equivalent across versions of Geekbench?

~~~
gok
They are normalized but also they've run this chip on Geekbench 5:
[https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/708](https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/708)

[Technically, that's an Opteron 275 instead of a 250, but they're quite
similar. 250 was clocked a bit higher but had slower memory and no SSE3]

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time0ut
Oh wow ars old site design is making me nostalgic.

~~~
RachelF
Yeah, back in the days before their 2007 Conde Nast pivot and they moved
towards softer stories.

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hnuser123456
firefox

document.getElementsByTagName("td")[15].width = "85%";

