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Showing posts from March, 2020

Single and Dual Xeon workstations builds from components 2017

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Introduction While writing the blog on my latest dual Xeon workstation, I discovered I hadn't written a post on earlier single and dual Xeon builds. So, a quick post on them using photos from earlier. The first was a single Xeon workstation for my son while he was studying mechanical engineering and doing airflow simulation using Solidworks. I used an "engineering sample" (ES) Xeon to cut costs. The details are in the photos. E5-2650 v4 (30M Cache, 2.20 GHz) Having done the single Xeon, I tried a dual Xeon machine. At first, I used ES V4 Xeons, but from different eBay suppliers. I subsequently discovered they weren't exactly the same and would not work. In hindsight, two ES Xeons (same stepping and printing on the case) from the same supplier might work. ES processors only work with some motherboards. I then used two older generation Xeons, V3, with success. E5 2683 V3 2.0 GHz The Micro Systems dual motherboard is not very friendly for running Windows 10, but I

Cheap thrills: Dual boot dual Xeon workstation; Dell Precision T5610 Windows 10 and Hackintosh

I like building and playing with very fast computers but I can't afford new ones. In the past, I have built a dual Xeon from components but even that was quite expensive. However, it is possible to buy old servers and workstations for a reasonable cost and upgrade them with modern components, first off, an SSD. Xeon The machine I bought was a Dell Precision T5610 Workstation 2 x XEON E5-2650 v2 CPUs 64Gb 240Gb SSD 1Tb HDD $900 on eBay AU March 2020. It was first available in 2014 but still quite capable with a total of 16 cores and 32 threads. The machine was booting to a cheap 2.5" SSD via a RAID card. The RAID card is of limited use now as a RAID 1 mirror can be achieved with two nvme SSD drivers in Windows "Storage Spaces". Raid 0 stripping is of little use now as the speed of nvme drives is high. So I removed the RAID card and installed a nvme SSD drive on a cheap generic pci express card. Windows 10 on NVME SSD The first job is to get Windows to run

"Just" my smartphone camera; Computational Photography

After a long time, I have found what I was searching for; improving photographs with computers via multiple frames. I am interested in video for DATV (Digital Amateur TV) and was impressed with some of the image processing in CCTV security systems. However, most of this was based on single images. I had investigated improved day and night, long-distance photography as our house has panoramic views on the Queensland Gold Coast. Most of these techniques used multiple photos from a DSLR and post-processing with Photoshop or similar. Optical astronomers are well advanced. However, the real progress seems to be driven by smartphones. Most people use their phones for photos now, with DSLRs a rarity outside tourist destinations. But phones have tiny cameras with small lenses and image sensor. Computational photography has allowed these small cameras to perform very well for particularly for images, but also video. Smartphone photography, mainly iPhone (Jan 2019) https://theconversation.c