My Rig

My computer is the most important part of my job, thus I need much horsepower and I spend some serious money when I am about to build a new rig or to do some hardware upgrades. My work often involves compiling large software projects, virtualization having multiple virtual machines running simultaneously and of course having dozens of open browser tabs most of the time. I need many CPU cores and plenty of RAM available.

Built 2003

It was back in 2003 when I built my first Xeon rig with 2 X Xeon Prestonia CPUs and 2 X TwinMos 500MB RAM sticks. I scored the CPUs on eBay and I bought the Asus PC-DL Deluxe motherboard. It served me well for 6 years with some minor hardware updates.

Built 2009

In 2009 it was time to get a new machine, so I went for the (new back then) Intel i7 920 and the Asus P6T motherboard with OCZ Gold 12GB (6 x 2GB) DDR3 1600 RAM sticks and a XFX GTX 275 graphics card. It was a hell of a beast for its time and it served me well with no problems for 7 years.

Built 2016

In 2016, due to my demanding work tasks, I decided to go for a Xeon rig again with plenty of RAM. After some research and digging on the web, I finally settled on the Asus Z10PE-D8 WS, which supports 2 X Xeon LGA 2011-3 (both V3 and V4 for the latest motherboard revisions). I scored 2 X Xeon E5-2620 V3 CPUs and 4 X Samsung M386A4G40DM0-CPB 32GB DDR4 LRDIMM ECC registered memory modules on German eBay. I bought the Asus Z10PE-D8 WS motherboard, the Asus GTX 1080 Founders Edition graphics card, the EVGA 1600W G2 PSU, 2 X Noctua NH-U12DX i4 CPU coolers, a Samsung 950 Pro 512GB M.2 for the OS, a Samsung 850 Evo 1TB SSD as the working drive, 2 X WD 3TB Red NAS drives in a mirroring RAID for backing up all my data and, last but not least, the Corsair Obsidian 750D Full Tower ATX case to enclose all these components.

Specs

• CPU 2 X Xeon E5-2620 V3
• CPU FAN 2 X Noctua NH-U12DX i4
• Mobo Asus Z10PE-D8 WS
• RAM 4 X Samsung M386A4G40DM0-CPB 32GB
• VGA Asus GTX 1080 Founders Edition
• SSD Samsung 950 Pro 512GB M.2
• SSD Samsung 850 Evo 1TB
• HDD 2 X WD 3TB Red NAS
• CASE Corsair Obsidian 750D Full Tower ATX

Logical CPUs in Windows 10 Task Manager

MAXON Cinebench R15 results

Upgrade 2020

Time flies, and in 2020 I upgraded my rig’s CPUs to 2 X Xeon E5-2667 V3, with a total of 16 cores @ 3.2GHz. I also purchased a Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe M.2 SSD 2TB for the OS drive. The bad thing is that after a BIOS upgrade, I discovered that one of my 4 RAM sticks was faulty, which downgraded my RAM from 128GB to 64GB, until of course I hit an eBay bargain!

MAXON Cinebench R20 results

DiskMark results

Upgrade 2025

At the end of 2024 the dual Xeon rig retired, and an HP Z6 G5 workstation with a 28 core Xeon w7-3465X took its place. Read all about it in My 2025 Workstation: HP Z6 G5.