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Horrerblade

Member
Joined
Sep 16, 2011
Location
Richardson, Texas
Hey guys, a friend of mine needed a computer that can run Derivative TouchDesigner: https://www.derivative.ca/ without any lag. Budget is about 4k. He wants to be able to out put to as many projectors as possible (he wants to be able to output to 10 displays but i don't know if that is possible), and have a 4k image from a few of those. This is the build that i have speced out: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/x2GBHx. What do you think? is there anything that i should change? I was thinking about going with a Xeon processor but i was not sure if it would be a good fit. Currently he has a core 2 quad @ 2.4 GHZ (i think its a q6600), 8gb ddr2 ram, and a quadro 4000 but whenever he starts the rendering it lags out his computer to where moving any window leaves a trail for a few seconds. Any suggestions?
 
I would.....

See if you can find a 550W, same solid quality PSU. The quadro you have is a 150W TDP card. The CPU is 140W. The rest of the system wont touch 100W on top of that (390W total assuming EVERYTHING is running 100%).

2133Mhz ram is DDR3 territory. I am not sure how his application responds to memory speed increases, but i would look into it to make sure it wont be a bottleneck. Can he use 16GB or does he come close to breaking that already?

Not sure if that card can output to 10 displays at once. Check it out and see if it can. If not, you may need another card to do so...

EDIT: That card can only output to 4 monitors.
 
You'll need to run multiple GPUs to get that many display outputs.
I'd choose two 980's because of their plethora of DisplayPort outputs (you can run multiple displays from one DisplayPort connection, but you're still limited to 4 displays per card).

At this point, you may want a case that has better airflow, but that's up to him.

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/skQ3XL
 
Is a quadro card absolutely necessary? The titan x will do more for significantly less
 
Good question! As far as its performance, it depends...

The quadro drivers are optimized for what the card does (they are not as good as geforce drivers for gaming). So in a many cases, it can still walk a 'gaming' GPU for its compute type functionality (unless you are an original Titan and can switch to double precision mode - Titan X does not have that ability so it may not do more...).

There is also a completely different level of support for those cards versus non Quadro card. If this is for a professional, paying out the nose for a quadro may be the best route due to the efficiency carved out from its own drivers and support. $1800 is a lot to swallow though!

Regardless, that is a great question, assuming the guy plays games in the first place. :)

A good read on the gaming side of things (mentions some things about drivers/optimization)... https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Can-you-game-on-an-NVIDIA-Quadro-GPU-604/

I would be curious to see the flip side of that article ('gaming' GPU performance versus its equivalent).

Edit: old link so dont hang your hat on it these days...but to show you/op some differences..http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/quadro-fx-4800,2258-10.html
 
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My friend is only using this for the program. It is never going to be used for gaming. He wants the absolute best performance possible. I am not married to the idea of the quadro, if going with triple/sli titans is better then I would rather do that. He wants 10 monitors so that might be the best option. He has a quadro 4000 could i use that in any way? Would that be good performance? He wants to have 4k outputs and a few projectors
 
I didn't mean that suggestion for gaming. The titan x is an absolute beast for compute performance. He'd need an m6000 card to get that level in a quadro card. Even with double precision and optimized drivers, I'm still not convinced a k5200 will even touch a titan x. That said, I'm quite unsure, food for thought at this point. I'd imagine 2 titan xs for that budget would render the k520 obsolete.

A lot of the comparisons on the cards are forced crippling of the GeForce vs the quadro and not "real world" examples to my understanding.

Also, 2 titans is 8 4k displays, where the m5200 is 3 or 4.
 
I would be interested to see some benchmarks on the Titan X versus k5200/quadro in general and see where it lands. Even two of them yeah...




On a side note Using the geforce drivers and a non Quadro card will also have a significant difference in support/downtime/RmA return time as well. Weeks to days type difference I read. So that may be a consideration for your friend too horrorb.
 
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The big issue here will be getting the 3x display streams. You'll HAVE to use 3 GPU's of whatever flavor if you stick to nvidia/AMD.

This may be the system you need to put Matrox in, they have GPUs that'll run 8 monitors each.
 
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