Meet Isaac, named after the humanoid robotic life form in the sci-fi comedy spoof of Star Trek called The Orville

Isaac is an opportunistic build I completed in late 2018 after receiving my two pre-ordered RTX 2080ti GPUs to discover that they were not compatible with the PCIe gen 1 slots on the 2006 Xeon MacPro 2,1 PC (which I named Motoko after the Manga character) that I had gotten for free in 2016 and used as my primary workstation for about 2 years. At the time I ordered the RTX 2080ti cards, I was running a GTX 980ti.

Anyway, after a couple of months or so planing out a Threadripper build that I was going to have to spend half a year to a year saving up for, I stumbled on the Xeon E5-2683 V3 14-Core 28-Thread W/ Asrock X99 COMBO on eBay for around $540 and jumped on it. Yes! "$540" was the buy it now price and even at that price others had been trying to low ball the seller. I mean why would you low ball someone selling what was at the time a $1500 CPU plus a workstation motherboard for "$540"? The Asrock X99 Extreme6 motherboard too must have retailed for over $500 new.

I bought the CPU motherboard combo, ordered the RAM, the case, and Kraken X52 AIO (my first ever liquid cooling solution). The Sapphire RX Vega 64 came months later when I was lucky to find another bargain on eBay. Everything else except the Headset and Yeti microphone I already had, either in Motoko, (the MacPro 2,1) or just lying around from older builds or in the case of the Hitachi 320gb drive from one of the hard drive upgrades I made to my PS3 Fat. The Creative Labs T7700 speakers I have had since at least 2007.

Just like the CPU and motherboard, the three 4K monitors were also opportunistic buys, I made over the space of 7 months during three different sales. I got all three of the 4K monitors while I was using Bettie as my workstation with the GTX 980ti. In all three cases at sale prices, the monitors each cost less than the average 1440p 144hz monitors being sold. And well, the higher resolution, meant more desktop real estate for me to write code, read papers or library documentation and have video playing on the third monitor.

Isaac is meant to be more functional than a display piece so he sits underneath my desk and I have not thought about custom cable modes or RGB, but may at some point revisit that starting with increasing the system RAM. Just like Scar 2.0, Isaac runs the elementary OS Linux distribution which I have set up for VFIO/GPU passthrough virtualization. Under this VFIO setup, I have paired the RTX 2080ti on the host Linux system with a Sapphire RX Vega 64 for the Windows 10 guest.

Chances are over the next few months, I will be moving my second RTX 2080ti GPU out of Scar 2.0 and into Isaac and picking up an NVLINK bridge. Mainly because I am looking to do a lot more simulation work over the next while and pretty much all applications I use have native Linux versions or competitors so not using the Windows 10 VM at all anymore. Also the main PC game I play in my down time Star Citizen that I would use the VM for now consistently works on Linux using WINE/Lutris and DXVK.