Cerb, thanks for your very thoughtful response.
About the benchmarks, I wish I knew precisely how they were done, but, yes, it seems like the 4770 gives quite good performance for its price. I've also thought about using the Xeon E3-1230 V2 in two or three computers for the same reason, and wonder whether it would be any more stable for 24/7 100% operation.
With a Xeon E3 V
3 (might as well go w/ current-gen), a C-chipset motherboard, and ECC RAM, you would be able to find logs of any RAM errors. If RAM errors aren't occurring
anyway (common, but unknowable with non-ECC RAM), of course, there'd be no difference there, either.
With a desktop chipset and regular RAM, they are interchangeable. They are not going to be more or less stable because of being branded Xeon.
I've never used a KVM, but that looks like an attractive option. Any special considerations? Thanks!
USB, and whatever you hook up your monitor with (such as DVI), need to be supported. USB+VGA ones are cheaper, but you may get artifacting, usually as crawlies, fuzziness, text looking it's been through a sharpness filter, etc. (personally, I would get a Dell monitor, for something like that, as they tend to be better than average about handling so-so VGA inputs, IME). Going DVI, it looks like Belkin's is crap, but I haven't tried any you can buy, today (I have a 2-port Zonet w/ DVI, but it's long since been discontinued). For just VGA, I've found Trendnet's to be of good overall quality, though.
2. Read and write time aren't very significant for me now, but they could be relatively more important with a faster processor. I'm thinking about a 256GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD just in case. More capacity than I need, but only using it at 50% capacity should improve its lifetime, right?
A little, but it will also improve its performance, having free space. A bit cheaper SSD would be fine, too. The practical differences in performance are nil, unless you're commonly stuck waiting for the PC or your application to unfreeze from random disk access. There are worse ones than others, but a $180 Toshiba Q Series or Samsung 840 Evo (brand new, so maybe let the early adopters check them out, first
🙂), or a $190 or so Crucial M500, Corsair Neutron, or Plextor M5S, will still be tens of times faster at random IO than any HDD, 2-4x faster at sequential work, and have been good drives.
Also, I'd be interested to hear more about your heatsink recommendations. Since I'll be running nearly 24/7 at 100% CPU, I'd rather not skimp in that department.
Above the Core i3s, Intel's stock heatsinks don't stay anywhere near quiet when under load. As the chips have gotten more efficient, and the heatsinks themselves more efficient, the heatsinks have gotten smaller, to save costs. That's pretty much the why in a nutshell.
Bigger heatsinks with more fin area can cool to lower temperatures, but often need more powerful fans to do that, resulting in much noise. Heatsinks with lots of mass, but wider fin spacing, but less total area due to fewer fins, present less resistance, and give better results with lower RPMs, fewer fans, etc., allowing noise to be greatly reduced, and sometimes even not needing a fan on the CPU HSF at all. A handful of makers have models catering to low noise, along with high performance, rather than
just really high performance.
Keeping it relatively quiet and comfortable is also why I'd not go for the AMD. They use significantly more average power, meaning more heat to exhaust from the PCs, and more to exhaust from the room, and a warmer room. They're cheaper for good reason, sadly (it would be nice to have better competition). $5K should be able to fit around 4 i7-based desktops, a KVM, monitor, keyboard, and mouse. If not (depending on how high-end you want to go for each), it can definitely fit 3 of them, with some budget left over.
