I have now owned the Haswell-E PC for six months. It has been my
primary workstation for all of my computing tasks: hobbyist programming,
photo editing, web page authoring, income tax preparation, office tasks,
and storage archive.
My experiences have been very positive. It is great to use a
computer that can overwhelm pretty much any task. My specific
feedback on the components is:
| Item |
Description |
Rating |
Comments |
| Processor |
Intel Core
i7-5960X, 8 cores, 3.0 GHz, 64-bits |
Excellent |
The Haswell-E
CPU makes short work of large program compilations, multi-threaded, and
multi-tasking workloads. It offers ten times the throughput of CPUs
from the last decade. Haswell-E is also extremely good at
single-threaded workloads (these tend not to be compute-intensive). |
| Memory |
64 GB Crucial
DDR4 (8 * 8 GB) |
Very good |
This is a
ridiculous amount of memory. The benefit is that the computer can
cache its disk working set completely in memory. There is no waiting
for disk I/O. One problem is that one of the DIMMs may be marginal -
I once observed errors at an ambient temperature of 95F. I will see
if the problem re-occurs this summer. |
| Motherboard |
Asrock X99
Extreme6 |
Excellent |
Asrock did a
great job on this motherboard. I have had no problems over the last
six months. The only downside is that the BIOS is slow to go from
power-on to the start of booting the OS. |
| Graphics card |
MSI Radeon R7
265 |
Fair |
I would like
this graphics card better if the open-source drivers had actually
worked. Due to buggy drivers, I am running the Radeon with hardware
GPU acceleration disabled. This is embarrassing for a $3K
computer. |
| Monitor |
Asus PB287Q 28
inch 4K monitor |
Very good |
This monitor can
display two pages of tax returns side-by-side with everything readable and
no scrolling. Fonts are rendered beautifully. The increase in
productivity from having so much information on the screen is
amazing. Everyone should own a 4K monitor - you will not go back to
1080p. The only downside is that the TN panel exhibits some color
shift when viewed off-axis. Colors are accurate when viewed
on-axis. |
| Hard disks |
6 TB (two
Seagate 3 TB drives) |
Excellent |
Today, 6 TB may
seem like an enormous amount of storage, but I expect the disks will fill
up at some point during the computer's 15-year lifecycle. |
| Optical disks |
Two LG DVD
rewriters |
Good |
These work
reliably but store only 4 GB per disk (optical disks are starting to seem
like floppies). |
| Power supply |
Thermaltake
SP-850M, 850W |
Very good |
The power supply
works well and runs nearly silently. |
| CPU cooler |
Cooler Master
212 EVO |
Very good |
The tower cooler
keeps the CPU temperatures in the 50s C. That is 20 degrees less
than the radial cooler in an older desktop, and 30 degrees less than the
cooler in a laptop. |
| Case |
Antec Three
Hundred mid-tower case |
Excellent |
This is a very
nice case. Antec should put it back in production. It is a
classic. |
| Keyboard |
Ducky Zero
DK2108 mechanical keyboard, MX red switches |
Excellent |
I can type
faster and more accurately on this keyboard than on any other. If
you have never used a mechanical keyboard, you owe it to yourself to try
one. The MX red switches appear to be out-of-production. I
would gladly buy again. |
| Mouse |
Logitech M100 |
Very good |
This $10 mouse
does everything well. |
| Operating
system |
Slackware
Linux |
Excellent |
Slackware
provides a traditional Unix environment with a complete set of
applications and developer tools. I am running the current
(pre-release) version of Slackware. The Slackware 14.2 release is
likely not far away. |
The marginal DIMM was replaced under warranty, and the GPU open-source
driver finally works.
