2024-02-15 19:41:40
A mathematics teacher attracted the attention of social media following ordering a powerful PC for a staggering sum of money. $10,000 dollars (almost $10 million Chilean pesos). The request he made to a university’s IT support department sparked speculation regarding the true purpose behind this extravagant acquisition.
The unusual story was revealed through a post – now deleted – on Reddit titled “I work in the IT department and I saw that a math teacher made a special request…” In this post, the user shares images of the impressive equipment requested by the teacher, which includes a Thread Ripper 5965WX processor, an RTX 4090 graphics card, and “It also ordered 3 SSDs with a total of 7.5 TB of storage and a dual boot system for Windows and Linux.”
“The university paid for this and this is easily a $10k PC… the brothers will probably play StarField following they finish work”he jokes.
Speculation regarding the true purpose of this powerful device soon flooded the comments of the post, with many users suggesting that the professor might have more recreational than academic intentions.
Do you really need it?
Among the responses, jokes from gamers stand out suggesting that the professor might be using the powerful configuration for games, such as the long-awaited StarField. One of the comments ironically: “Well friend, it’s regarding having good hardware to simulate finite element models and Cholesky equations, while Cyberpunk is running.”
“Buy a Threadripper and a 4090, Solve some math problems, The job is done, Minecraft RTX at maximum possible settings with additional shading mods,” someone else said ironically, while another rightly says that the order is “The adult version of ‘But I need it for school, Mom.’”
However, some voices call for calm, arguing that a computer with high-end gaming PC features might be totally adequate for the teacher’s work: “That’s nothing. He used to work on mathematical models. We had funds that we had to allocate to infrastructure. That meant a $20,000 PC with 96 threads and 128 GB of RAM (this was 2013),” adding that a 4090, “is a good platform for mathematical calculations. And mass storage is definitely a sign of that.”
“If they are doing graphics theory or machine learning, they will need an Nvidia GPU with more than 12 GB of RAM. Your options are 3060, 4080 or better and Nvidia Tesla (5k each),” another noted.
In any case, the IT department employee who shared the story later claimed that his publication was humorous. He indicated that he originally planned to share the anecdote as “a joke I would tell some of my friends, but I guess it wasn’t received the same way here, I guess now that I reread the comment I posted, it sounded pretty nice. I guess it was because I tried to give context too formally. I also understand why a math teacher needs it. I gave all those reasons you gave me to my coworkers who questioned why he needs a PC like that.”
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