Is there a good alternative to workstations in the consumer realm?

[Brett Harrison]

I could spend 10K on a HP workstation but I believe that with the right components I could build something reasonably reliable for perhaps 1/3rd savings.

If anyone has gone down this path I would greatly appreciate advice.

 

[David Kuhn]

I've built machines around supermicro barebones systems in the past and had decent results - not sure about saving a third though... and have not done it in years. They tended to have much simpler cooling designs and rely on loud high velocity fans instead... so while you may save money you may find that the compromises aren't worth it.

 

[Brett Harrison]

Good to know, David. I am leaning towards just renting a HP workstation. I thought though that i7, dual CPU motherboards and the Titan would do a pretty comparable job.

 

[David Kuhn]

These days I don't have time to mess around with homebrew so I just buy what I need (Z820's lately), but I can definitely commiserate with folks who get sticker shock when they load them up. Another vendor I like who might give you a better price than HP is Boxx... (www.boxxtech.com iirc), I've purchased a couple systems from them and while they weren't cheap they were a bit cheaper than HP... and they had a solid product.