If you are looking for a fast and affordable workstation, consider the Fujitsu Siemens Celsius V830 series. Personally, I am running a dual AMD Opteron 254 machine, as this processor is rather cheap compared to the fact that the Opteron 254 model is an extremely fast single core processor that’s available surprisingly cheap. This may be due to a marketing perception that “dual core”, for some reason, may sell better.
Under Suse Linux 10.1 64-bit, the performance was very good (2005-2007); the machines of the Celsius line are comparatively affordable, quality wise, very well built, and design wise rather sturdy. The machine really is comfortably silent, as Linux supports dynamic frequency scaling of the processor. Under Fedora Core 7 64-bit (July 2007), the performance for floating point array operations is much better.
Setting up the Fujitsu-Siemens workstations with Linux, I encountered some issues that I’ll explain further down below in this text.
Here are some rough comparison figures of current machines available running IDL 6.2 with a thread-pool optimizing version of ‘JDs Test’. I highlighted some excellent results, and I have highlighted the systems running full and stable 64-bit (for larger data).
Maybe this table could serve as a rough guideline for evaluation; I personally seem to favor a 64-bit AMD dual-processor machine for floating-point array operations. If you want to do some fast 3D game playing, however, you may find that other machies could get that done better.
| Computer, OS | CPU, Memory | JDs Test, tpool optimized result (sec) {tpool_min_elts} (CPU usage) | time_test2 (sec) | Neverball 3D experience |
| IBM Intellistation 275; AIX 5.2 64-bit {2004} | 2x IBM 1.45 GHz Power4 two-way / 12 GB RAM | 0.65 {5 to 9.7E6} (~220%) | ca. 0.70-0.72 | n.i. |
| Fujitsu Siemens Celsius R670; Windows Vista 64-bit (2010) | 2 x Intel XEON 5590 3.33 GHz 8MB Turbo Boost | 0.04-0.05 {1-5} | .. | n.i. |
| Fujitsu Siemens Celsius V830; Suse Linux 10.1 64-bit {2006} | 2x AMD Opteron 280 / HT 1 GHz system bus, 32 GB RAM (max. 32 GB) | 0.09-0.10 {15000} (161%) | ca. 0.63-0.65 | +++ |
| Fujitsu Siemens Celsius V830; Fedora Core 7 64-bit {2007} | 2x AMD Opteron 254 / HT 1 GHz system bus, 8 GB RAM (max. 32 GB) | 0.14 @ {4E+14} (130%) | 0.48 | n.i. |
| Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo P; Fedora Core 8 64-bit {2007} | AMD Athlon X2 6000+ 3.0 GHz / 3 GB RAM | 0.13 {5} (-) | 0.49 | n.i. |
| Asus Desktop PC; Fedora Core 7 64-bit {2007} | AMD Athlon X2 5200 2.6 GHz / 2 GB RAM | 0.15 {5} (-) | 0.58 | ++ |
| Asus Desktop PC; Windows Vista ULtimat 32-bit {2007} | Intel Quad Core 2, 2.4 GHz, 3 GB RAM | 0.34 {3E12} (-) | 0.96 | n.i. |
| Fujitsu Siemens Celsius V830; Suse Linux 10.1 64-bit {2005} | 2x AMD Opteron 254 / HT 1 GHz system bus, 8 GB RAM (max. 32 GB) | 0.56 {25} (140%) | ca. 0.51-0.53 | +++ |
| Asus A6T Notebook, Suse Linux 10.1 64-bit {2006} | AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-52 1.6 GHz, HT 800 MHz, 2 GB RAM | 0.22 {~3125} | ca. 0.78 |
+++ |
| Asus A6T Notebook, Windows XP Pro SP2 (32-bit) | AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-52 1.6 GHz, HT 800 MHz, 2 GB RAM | 0.22 | ca. 1.34-1.42 |
n.i. |
| Fujitsu-Siemens Celsius H240 Laptop; Windows XP Pro {2006} | 1x Intel Core Duo 2.16 GHz / 2 GB RAM | 0.45 {~1} | ca. 0.65-0.76 | n.i. |
| Acer Veriton 3500, Windows XP Pro {2003} | 1x Intel Pentium 4, 2.4 GHz / HT 400 MHz Front Side Bus / 1 GB RAM | 0.56 {~2} | ca. 0.96-1.09 | n.i. |
| Acer RC500, Windows XP Home {2005} | 1x Intel Pentium 4, 3.2 GHz / HT 800 MHz Front Side Bus / 1 GB RAM | 0.42 {~1} | ca. 0.87 – 0.92 | + |
| Apple Powermac G5, OS X 10.4.7 / X11 {2003} | 2x IBM PowerPC G5 2.0 GHz / 8 GB RAM / original logic board | 0.51 {>15000} (140%) | ca. 1.01-1.10 | ++ |
| Apple Powermac G5, OS X 10.4.7 / X11 {2004/2006} | 2x IBM PowerPC G5 2.0 GHz / 2.5 GB RAM / 2006 replaced logic board | 0.41 {>15000} (140%) | ca. 1.05-1.10 | ++ |
| Asus Notebook N73JQ Series{2011} | Intel R Core TM i7 CPU 1,6 GHz / 6 GB RAM | 0.092 {>625} (56%) | ca. 0.51-0.53 | perfect |
| Asus Notebook G750JH Series{2014} | Intel R Core TM i7 CPU 2,4 GHz / 32 GB RAM | 0.037 {5} | ca. 0.36 | perfect |
| HP Envy H8-1560ez{2013}, Windows 8 | Intel R Core TM i7-3770 CPU 3,4 GHz / 16 GB RAM | 0.031 {>9E+20} | ca. 0.14 | perfect |
| “Origin PC” EON 17X 17-inch laptop {2015}; Windows 10 | Intel R Core TM i7-6700 CPU 4,0 GHz / 32 GB RAM | 0.024 {5} | ca. 0.112-0.115 | perfect |
| “ACER PREDATOR 17” 17-inch laptop {6/2018}; Windows 10 | Intel R Core TM i7-7700HQ CPU 2,8 GHz / 64 GB RAM | 0.0166 {5} | ca. 0.117-0.148 | perfect |
Initial Linux setup (2005)
Setting the Fujitsu-Siemens PC up with Linux was a bit of a nuisance, until I figured out what Linuxes to stay away from and how to actually proceed.
PCI: Probing PCI hardware (bus 00)
PCI: Transparent bridge – 000:00:09.0
ACPI: PCI Root Bridge [PCI1] (0001:00)
PCI: Multiple domains not supported
The Fujitsu-Siemens Celsius v830 workstation is, according to the manufacturer, certified to be ‘Linux compatible’, yet, the current Fedora Core 4 and Ubuntu-distributions yield the precise same error, “PCI: multiple domains not supported”.
One option consists in starting into BIOS configuration upon start-up of the machine, where you should try if you could set your SATA-Controller to ‘compatible mode’ (or, if you have enough harddisks to do so, ‘RAID’); what won’t work is the setting ‘native mode’.
Since the BIOS on the Celsius v830 may not have the option ‘compatible mode’ (for some reason), you could theoretically set your system to ‘RAID’ (requiring two or more matching harddisk drives).
Now I don’t have matching harddisk drives, so I went ahead and got SUSE LINUX 10 (from opensuse.org).
The first install (minimal install) installed alright but yielded a ‘black screen’ after start. So I installed it again, this time with all packages (‘complete install’) and including all available online-updates (you can do these as part of the installation procedure).
If you are looking for detailed information about how to install Linux on a Fujitsu Siemens Celsius H230 notebook (Slackware, in this instance), check this link by Daniel Duris.
Later setup experience (2007)
As of July 2007, I found that current Debian 4 and Fedora Core 7 installations work flawlessly. Suse 10.2 and Ubuntu Feisty Fawn have issues installing.
Due to a very good performance under Fedora Core 7, I decided to use this distribution.
