MY WORKSTATION BUILD PLANS MAY HAVE CHANGED
Is an ARM Processor in the running for my Workstation?
If you have read my previous post you’ll know that I have recently moved my webserver over to the ARM-based Amprer hardware over on Oracle Cloud. That got me thinking what with apple transitioning over to their own ARM-based Apple Silicone is there an option out there non-Mac workstations that I can use as a workstation/Home Server?
Don’t get me wrong I’d love to get my hand on an M1 Mac and see what I can do with it but I can’t justify the price tag of something that it’s t at least partly upgradable for such a high price.
This leads me to a not so quick Google search to see what is on offer in the ARM desktop and server market. Nearly everything I came across was either ridiculously expensive (£5,000+) or really underpowered unless I wanted to create a compute cluster (Raspberry Pi 4). Whilst I would love to make my own cluster at some point in the future, it’s something that’s going to have to go on the back burner until I have a decent daily driver.
You can imagine my surprise then when I came across a list of supported hardware for VMWare’s ESXi Arm development and found a Workstation Motherboard for around $750. Enter the SolidRun LX2. It’s an arm motherboard that can support up to 32Gb of Ram has a 16 core Arm Coretex A72 processor and 64GB of eMMC storage to install the base operating system.
There are a few things that really excite me though such as the 4 SFP+ ports (that give me a 10GB network connection on each port) an open-ended PCIe X8 slot, an M.2 slot and 4 SATA ports. The best bit is all of this would fit in the mini-ITX case my wife Abi bought me.
But the big question is how much will this all cost compared to my other workstation station idea. Well, let’s compare the two, shall we?
ARM Workstation Setup
| Description | Cost | Qty | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| SolidRun Honey Comb LX2 | £541.05 | 1 | £541.05 |
| 1TB M.2 | £83.99 | 1 | £83.99 |
| 2x 32GB RAM | £149.99 | 1 | £149.99 |
| 500W Power supply | £44.99 | 1 | £44.99 |
| Graphics Card | £239.99 | 1 | £239.99 |
| SFP+ LC Fibre | £19.99 | 4 | £79.96 |
| Total | £1,139.97 |
X86 Work Station Setup
| Description | Qty | Cost | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| MSI Z490I Unify Mini-ITX Motherboard | 1 | £209.99 | £209.99 |
| Intel Core i9-10850K CPU | 1 | £349.99 | £349.99 |
| Thermal Grizzly Conductonaught Liquid Metal Themal Paste | 1 | £7.99 | £7.99 |
| NZXT Krake x53 AIO CPU Water Cooler – 240mm | 1 | £119.99 | £119.99 |
| NZXT C-Series C650 650W Power Suply | 1 | £99.95 | £99.95 |
| Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB DDR4 2666MHz RAM | 1 | £74.99 | £74.99 |
| Segate Barracuda Q5 1TB M.2 PCI-e Gen 3 NVME SSD | 1 | £89.99 | £89.99 |
| AMD RX 580 | 1 | £239.99 | £239.99 |
| Total | £1666.79 |
As you can see there is defiantly a cost-saving, and I’m hoping I can save a bit more as by the time I get around to purchasing whichever workstation Graphics Cards will have hopefully have come down in price. I wasn’t expecting a saving of £526 though. I’m very VERY tempted to switch over to the ARM setup as I’d still have the same graphics power and memory and it would cheaper to run. The only downside I can see is that the i9-10850K has 10 cores/20 Threads at 3.6 GHz compared to the ARMs 16 cores at 2Ghz.
The Power savings along are very tempting and as the workstations, main use will be as a Media Streaming server with a bit of 3D graphics in Blender every now and then, the ARM-based Workstation is starting to look more and more like my future workstation.
What do you think? Which setup would you go for? Let me know down in the comments below and don’t forget to check back soon for another one of my ramblings.
