Commercial Desktops vs. Whiteboxes
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People who follow me know that I am pretty "anti-whitebox" for non-gaming machines in most cases. I've always found commercial desktops to be more reliable, easier to maintain and more cost effective for a business. Vendors like HP, Dell, Lenovo and Apple make extremely high quality equipment with extensive testing, great support and long term driver support. You can get them used or refurbed too to bring down the price, although this comes at the cost of lost support.
I have worked with some businesses that had special needs (specifically around high performance, GPU heavy systems) where they found whiteboxes to be far superior for their needs and for an situation like that I can totally see the value.
At NTG we are considering moving to whiteboxes for our Windows machines and want to properly weight the factors. We have internal bench support, which few companies have, which makes supporting whiteboxes easier. All of our desktops in the field have local IT who can easily do part swapping or determine when a desktop needs to be returned and a new one issues. Our "end users" are pretty technical. We are interested in having nicely branded (read: orange and grey) machines with small form factors and low power consumption. We want SSDs. We want Nvidia GPUs. These things are easy with whiteboxes and hard with commercial units. And it looks like we could do whiteboxes far less expensively.
So we are looking for opinions. Does it make sense given our range of needs to change course and begin making custom desktops for ourselves? Or should we stick with our proven cost effective commercial desktops that we have been using for the past fourteen years?
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A large deciding factor, beyond cost, will be what @Mike-Ralston can come up with as a farm factor. How "cool", yet still business-like, does it look while remaining small.
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The idea, of course, will be to standardize on a single design that will be used for all new machines. Not to have each one be unique. Standard parts, standard drives and such are very important.
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@scottalanmiller said:
The idea, of course, will be to standardize on a single design that will be used for all new machines. Not to have each one be unique. Standard parts, standard drives and such are very important.
This part here is what makes it much less of a white box scenario once specs are settled on.
Being able rely on intelligent troubleshooting will resolve most of the user issues that make vendor solutions better for general deployments.
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How many desktops are you looking at?
Can you get the Whitebox vendor is all states that you do business in?
You might want to look at how you'd go about organising warranty claims.- Many different Whitebox vendors makes it hard to claim.
- Another global financial crisis or stock market crash may sink your Whitebox vendor
How flexible can HP, Dell etc be? (not very)
Can a Whitebox get you get exactly what you want from someone who understands the hardware that they are selling? Yes.
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I did this for 3 years. Although I had no hardware issues at all, each time there was a new "line" to create as the components are no longer available or new items come out replacing old stock numbers.
As a small shop i was always worried about replacement parts, but when i moved to Intel boards and Intel processors that situation never came up. I also didn't have much if any warranty info for the client.
For the sake of sanity and since I am a one man band, I decided to provide HP or Dell Pro class PC's which saves a ton on time when pricing for parts. Oh and it seemed each time, I couldn't find the same SFF case.
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@nadnerB said:
Can you get the Whitebox vendor is all states that you do business in?
No vendor, all internal. NTG's own bench services would make them.
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@technobabble said:
As a small shop i was always worried about replacement parts, but when i moved to Intel boards and Intel processors that situation never came up. I also didn't have much if any warranty info for the client.
Well this is for internal use, not for clients. That's another issue. Traditionally we've always been able to say "well we don't use whiteboxes, why should you?" Practicing what we preach is important when dealing with SMB customers. However, the financial and technical factors between us and are clients are quite different in this regard. We have heavier technical needs and our own bench services, for example, and they do not. And our end users are nearly all qualified techs in their own right and even those that are not work in offices full of techs. So the availability of support is extremely high, unlike our customers who normally need to come to us for things like this and using commercial machines saves them support calls that aren't an issue for us.
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@scottalanmiller said:
A large deciding factor, beyond cost, will be what @Mike-Ralston can come up with as a farm factor. How "cool", yet still business-like, does it look while remaining small.
The cooler, the less cost effective. I'm a bit busy, but I'll read the whole post and whip up handful of examples for machines tomorrow.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@nadnerB said:
Can you get the Whitebox vendor is all states that you do business in?
No vendor, all internal. NTG's own bench services would make them.
AKA Me, right?
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@Mike-Ralston said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@nadnerB said:
Can you get the Whitebox vendor is all states that you do business in?
No vendor, all internal. NTG's own bench services would make them.
AKA Me, right?
Pretty much.
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@scottalanmiller Here's 2 to start you off while I come up with more. I've decided that a chassis with a built in PSU is the cheapest way to go. Both of these cases also have the room to possibly do some sort of fancy NTG themed powder coat?
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/QKGsjX - High Powered, Small, Stylish build.
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/RB9hGX - Cheapest Acceptable Rig.
Play with the parts and post a link back, or offer suggestions for things that should be changed? Appreciate the feedback.
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AMD dual core is way too little. We have triple core today and it's not enough.
Integrated GPU isn't enough. We want full NVidia external GPU.
The dual core A series will be one core CPU and one core GPU. That will be pretty awful performance. I was thinking more like four to eight core plus a real video card.
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@scottalanmiller Entirely misinformation. Integrated GPU is more powerful than anyone in NTG, other than me, is currently running, in that Hadron chassis. If you want those kinds of things, we're talking more like $600-$1000 or beyond. What's the target budget here?
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@Mike-Ralston said:
@scottalanmiller Entirely misinformation. Integrated GPU is more powerful than anyone in NTG, other than me, is currently running, in that Hadron chassis. If you want those kinds of things, we're talking more like $600-$1000 or beyond. What's the target budget here?
It's not. Not at all. The AMD A series is super underpowered. It's a CPU and GPU in a single die with each getting some of the cores for their tasks. Not up to anything but basic web surfing usage. No idea why you think this but this is like the confusion around the power in ARM CPUs. These just aren't powerful enough to use.
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@scottalanmiller What are you talking about??? I used an APU for around a year, and it was the A10 - 5700. Worked fine for heavy gaming use, at medium to high settings. Could handle dozens of webpages, and multiple background tasks including Skype and Skyrim, all at the same time. It's much more powerful than the solution that @Minion-Queen uses, and she uses a ton of tasks all at once. Ask her.
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@Mike-Ralston said:
I used an APU for around a year, and it was the A10 - 5700. .... It's much more powerful than the solution that @Minion-Queen uses, and she uses a ton of tasks all at once.
Which one is she using? The A10 is a quad core, so that makes sense that a new quad core would outperform the older triple cores (not older because they are triple, they are actually much older.) But the A6 is only dual core, that's really low.
What is the GPU equivalent to in NVidia, roughly?
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It didn't score too hot on performance.
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Was thinking something closer to....
