Upgrading My Local Steem Backup Witness/Development Node with a New Xeon CPU by cryptos

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upgrade · @cryptos · Oct 11 '16

$0.16

Upgrading My Local Steem Backup Witness/Development Node with a New Xeon CPU

<center>![upgrade](https://i.imgsafe.org/ce2f9aa10c.jpg)<br></center>

Today I have upgraded the PC I'm using to run a Steem witness node on at home with a new Xeon CPU, a 10-core, 20 threads one... not that the system needed the upgrade, it was running just fine with the old Core i7 CPU. What I'm seeing as a required upgrade however in the very near future is the RAM as it is currently only 16GB (4x 4GB DDR4) and it will need to go up to 32GB to have enough space for the growing requirements of the Steem blockchain... especially when you also use the node for development.

 
<center><br>![upgrade2](https://i.imgsafe.org/ce301eb65d.jpg)<br></center>

The old CPU was an Intel Core i7 5820K - a 6 core, 12 threads one that already offered more than the needed performance. Especially now that mining Steem with a CPU is pretty much pointless with the miner-witness queue dominated by only two miners apparently using private GPU miners. Frankly said with the current price of Steem mining even with a GPU might not be that much worth it, but that is an entirely different topic.  
 

<center><br>![upgrade3](https://i.imgsafe.org/ce301ae4e2.jpg)<br></center>

As you can see I'm using water cooling on my Steem node, I'm actually using custom water cooling on all of my PCs at home and I have been cooling them with custom water cooling for many years already. That started many years ago with overclocking and now, even when I'm  normally not overclocking the computers I use, I still prefer to have a custom water cooling than to deal with air coolers...


<br>If you have a question or want to add something, then please leave a comment below.

---

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👍 pal, laonie, me-tarzan, cryptos, oaldamster, alexgr, hisnameisolllie, somebody, kimziv, wingz, xiaohui, kafkanarchy84, geke, lemouth, moon32walker, laonie10, elyaque, asmolokalo, levycore, cjclaro, laonie3, laonie4, laonie5, laonie2, laonie6, laonie7, laonie8, laonie1, bacchist, midnightoil, bola, matrixdweller, myfirst, laonie9, sisterholics, inversion, clement, miketr, steevc, koskl, laonie11, anasz, kendewitt, lloyddavis, dpapadimitroylas, elfkitchen, robotev, remlaps, drinkzya, wongshiying, dimon14, flysaga, pery, birds90, runridefly, xianjun, nelyp, better, steem1653, xiaofang, royalmacro, xiaokongcom, greatness, dave-hughes, and 30 others

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@alexgr · Oct 11 '16 (edited)

>Today I have upgraded the PC I'm using to run a Steem witness node on at home with a new Xeon CPU, a 10-core, 20 threads one... not that the system needed the upgrade, it was running just fine with the old Core i7 CPU. What I'm seeing as a required upgrade however in the very near future is the RAM as it is currently only 16GB (4x 4GB DDR4) and it will need to go up to 32GB to have enough space for the growing requirements of the Steem blockchain... especially when you also use the node for development.

You can trade extra cpu power for less RAM, by using zram. Zram compresses and decompresses RAM in real time at the expense of CPU, but you can then fit more things into the RAM section.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram

👍 cryptos, inversion, alexgr

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@cryptos · Oct 11 '16

Thanks, I'll look into that, but with the current low prices of RAM there is really no point in not adding some more physical memory...

👍 alexgr

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@matrixdweller · Oct 11 '16

would love to see a post explaining your cooling system in more detail

👍 cryptos

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@cryptos · Oct 11 '16

Might do a post about that as well at some point... ;)

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@steevc · Oct 11 '16

That's a mighty chip. What sort of power does that use? I can imagine it would get pretty hot. Are you using Steem you've earned to pay for hardware?

👍 cryptos

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@cryptos · Oct 11 '16

Intel  Xeon Processor E5-2650 v3 (25M Cache, 2.30 GHz), it has a TDP of just 105W and that is under full load of all the cores, so not actually very power hungry under normal operations... the desktop Core i7 5820K is with a TDP of  140W (has less cores, but higher operating frequency).

I still have not used any of the Steem Dollars earned to purchase anything physical... all my earnings for the first month went into purchasing more Steem Power when the price was much higher than it is now. Then some of the more recent earnings I have used to purchase a ticket from SteemFest and not that much is left, but the rest I'll use to finally get something... maybe some cool hardware to review on Steemit.

👍 inversion, steevc

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@steevc · Oct 11 '16

I'm impressed that the power requirements do not go up. I don't keep up with developers in processors these days. I got a quad core AMD a couple of years back and haven't felt the need for more power.

I hope in time we will be able to shop directly with Steem Dollars. Have fun at SteemFest.

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