Workstation/Gaming

[toledo5189]

My main question is would I be able to install for example, 2x 8800gt's and a Quadro FX1500 and be able to comfortably switch between what cards I actually want running. I'm looking to build a computer that well perform well under heavy loads of rendering but also be able to play newer games such as unreal and crysis. What I had in mind is a mobo such as the ASUS P5E3 PREMIUM or the ASUS M3A32-MVP. I haven't decided between AMD and Intel but basically what I'm looking for in a mobo is 3 or more PCI-E 2.0 slots. The final PC would be mainly used for school work which consists of Maya 2008 and Photoshop CS3 and as I mentioned I am into PC gaming.

[blazed]

Well X48 chipset boards for Intel have 3 full PCIe slots, not sure if any AMD/nVidia chipsets do.

Are you sure that a gaming grade graphics card can not provide the workstation performance you need? Faster single cards can actually do quite well with stuff like Maya and 3DSmax, heck a 9800 Pro can run those fine on my school PCs. Its only major stuff like AutoCAD etc that really need workstation cards.

[toledo5189]

Ok yea ill prob give that a try then since a workstation card would be the least of my worries in my build anyway. Also I see that you have the wolfdale xeon series, i haven' t really read into them much but are they as good as the 8400 and 8500 for gaming? Of course its not expected out of a xeon but I heard talk that those xeons wolfdales were good replacements if you couldnt find the 8000 series.

[Firestrider]

Yeah, the E3110 is the same thing as the E8400. It might even be a better overclocker since it's a server processor. Also what justifies the cost of a workstation graphics card? All I can see is that they have more memory. The FireGL and Quadro cards are really expensive like:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814195055

[toledo5189]

Yea i have been looking at the workstation cards now on newegg and they are pretty steep. Im not 100% positive but I almost think that maya 08 and maybe a couple other animation and editing programs do not take advantage of SLI yet. I could be wrong but I thought thats what I heard otherwise I'd get 2 8800GT's w/ 1gb of ram each and that would be plenty of power for what I need.

[blazed]

Biggest difference in a workstation graphics card is the drivers, they'e optimized for certain 3D applications and not gaming. The cards actually use the same components as the gaming versions, and can often be flashed either way. Pretty specialized stuff and the costs reflect that.

You'd probably see more of an improvment going quad core vs dual for your needs, 3dsmax and maya use the extra cores when rendering cutting down alot of the render time, and photoshop uses muliple-threads for filters and some other stuff.