Workstation questions (9000 USD budget)

[Zapador]

Hi!

I used to play around with hardware all the time when I was a young teenager, but for the past 5 years, working as a photographer, I've owned three powerful ThinkPads and an HP EliteBook - all with 1920x1200 resolution, fast CPU etc., pretty much the most powerful laptop workstations around all costing around 4500 USD. I haven't owned a desktop in that period

But recently I've started working with HD video editing in Premiere Pro and After Effects and then I realized that a laptop just won't do when it comes to such intensive applications - so now I'm in the market for a desktop workstation costing around 9000 USD and with an expected lifespan of 3 years. Since I have changed laptop every 1½ year, if this lasts me 3 I can spend double the money. So it seems to make a lot of sense.

I already own a 30" inch 2560x1600 monitor that I will use for the new desktop, that's why I went for SLI to run anything at native resolution.

I will mainly be using it for Adobe products and in my sparetime for gaming - ofc!

I will add high-end watercooling to CPU and GFX.
By doing that I eliminate the most noisy components which is important.

Also I intend to OC the CPU, having a 3960X and running it at standard speed would be a shame I think.

So here's what I've put together so far:

MOBO: Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5
PSU: Corsair Pro Gold AX1200
CPU: Core i7 3960X
RAM: Corsair Dominator-GT 8x4 GB (32 GB) 2133 MHz CL9
GFX: 2x Asus GeForce GTX590
SYS-SSD: OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 240 GB SSD Max IOPS (PCI-E)
CACHE-SSD: 2x Corsair Force Series GT 120 GB (RAID0 @ MOBO)
HDD: 4x WD Caviar Black 2 TB 7200RPM (RAID 0+1 @ LSI MegaRaid)
RAID: LSI MegaRAID SAS 9240-4i
SOUND: HT Omega CLARO halo XT (PCI, not PCI-E)

But I've got a few questions... that I hope you guys can help me with...

1. Instead of the GA-X79-UD5, is there another board I should consider? Since I like the idea of the Omega soundcard (for headphones) I will need 1x PCI. Also I like that the board is pretty clean, doesn't come with two tonnes of additional stuff like some "gamer"-mobos do.

2. The GA-X79-UD5 with its 8 DIMMs leaves me with a choice of 32 GB 2133 MHz RAM (Corsair Dom-GT, CL9) or 64 GB 1866 MHz (Corsair Veng, CL10) - what would I prefer?
Or with an alternative board with 4 DIMMs either 16 GB 2133 MHz or 32 GB 1866 MHz.

3. Should I add watercooling to the chipset?

4. Any other thoughts on the setup are welcome!!


Thanks

 

[Bobnova]

On your questions:

1) I don't know, which isn't very useful to you.

2) I would go with 4x4GB of ram rather than 8X4 or 8X8, 16GB is far more than almost anybody needs, and the more ram you use the harder time you'll have running it at the full clock speed. On the other hand if you're already doing stuff that takes >10GB, more might not be a bad idea.

3) The chipset doesn't need water cooling, they don't generate a tremendous amount of heat. The CPU MOSFETs definitely need some cooling, but a fan on their heatsink should be fine.

4) Unless you're adding a second high resolution monitor I suspect a single GTX590 will be plenty, you can save a considerable amount of money there.
What do you mean by "cache-ssd"? I'm only familiar with the term when applied to Z68 board's ability to use a SSD to cache a mechanical HDD. Given that the Revodrive 3 X2 is probably faster than the pair of 120GB drives. Are they acting as cache for the mechanical drives?
Similarly price wise, the 3930K gives every bit as much performance as the 3960X once you start overclocking, you can save $400 there.

 

[David]

If you're dealing with very processor-intensive tasks it might be worthwhile looking into multi-CPU configurations. Dual quad (or hex) core Xeons, or perhaps dual AMD Opterons (you can get dual 16-core processors - lots of CPU power if the parallelisation in your software is good).

EDIT: I'd also perhaps drop the dual 590s and go with a single highish-end Quadro card with plenty of RAM to drive that 30 in monitor, seeing as that's what Quadros are made for.

 

[Horrerblade]

^ SAME AS ABOVE I WOULD DROP ONE OF THE (sorry for the caps) 590's or both of them and just go with a 7970( as you said that you where going to do gaming) but i would go with a quadro for the workstation and what not, if you really want to do gaming i would suggest buying some thing like a benching case and just switch GPU's depending on what you are doing, or get a 7970 and use the igpu for the workstation part through lucid virtue and do you really need 8 tb's of space REALLY? Seems a little like a waste of money but that's just me. Also if i am not mistaken you could probably drop down to 1600 mhz ram to save some money cuz i don't think that you are going to be benching ram any time soon so it would be better cost wise to drop down to the 1600 mhz ram.

 

[Zapador]

Thank you for inputs!

The reason that I want the huge amount of RAM is that eg. After Effects renders previews to the RAM which is nice. I think I can realistically use maybe 10-12 gigs of RAM so going for 16 could seem like a plan - but since it should be the same in 2-3 years I feel safer going for maybe 32. But from your advice it won't be 64 - I guess thats just me being mad even thinking of that

I will most likely be getting a nice Lian-Li case and ensure a good airflow with 120/140mm fans. Should I still put a dedicated fan on the MOSFETs?

Cache-SSD could be a million things, I see that now. I want to use it for keeping videofiles/projectfiles that I'm currently working on. I've seen lots of people over the years use RAIDs and 10 or 15k RPM disks for that, so SSD would really make sense - I think.

The advice on the 3930K seems to make a lot of sense, I've just read through a few articles. Thanks!

I've thought about going for the Dual Xeon configuration and a Quadro but it seems to end up a lot more expensive for what I think will perform about the same. At least I'm not convinced by the hugely expensive Quadro-cards. Is there any good comparison out there?

It's not 8 TB of space but 4 TB since it's RAID 0+1. The reason for this is that I need redundancy, I simply can't risk loosing pictures I've taken for a customer - it could be a wedding. Through time I've lost 5 HHDs, 2 of them being GXP 60's back in the day - what a drive

I've seen a lot of people say that eg. 1600 MHz RAM is pretty much just as good as 2133 MHz RAM in real-life performance, and the only real difference being benchmarking. Would you agree with that?

Thanks

 

[ssjwizard]

Those statements about ram speed scaling mostly effect older architectures. I dont know that Id spend for 4x high end 2133 sticks but surely 1866 should find a nice happy medium between scaling losses and performance gains.

I would suggest 2x 580s over 2x590s anytime. The 590 VRM is weak, and the core clocks are alot lower than that of the 580. The quadros are great for production type work but you will find they are lacking on DX performance. They do run DX instructions BUT they are not optimized for it. Adobe CS 5 supports CUDA acceleration though so you really want to stick with an nVidia card regardless of the model. The important thing for you to look at is what will net you more CUDA cores for your money, not necessarily GPU power.

A SSD will improve load times and any caching that happens substantially I highly recommend one. You dont need to cache your RevoDrive so drop the cache SSDs. Also run your HDDs in 1+0 not 0+1 its far more redundant.

 

[TheGreySpectre]

Case wise personally I would reccomend the Norco 4216 with the 120mm fan bracket you can get form their site to reduce sound, the Norco has the added advantage of having SAS connections on the backplane so you don't need a ton of Sata cables running everywhere. Alternatively if grab one of the Mountain Mods Ascension cases as they are very well suited for watercooling.

I would be wary of the Western Digitals black drives in a raid configuration. I know in larger raids they can drop out (at least with Areca cards). If it is a true workstation I would recommend going with raid certified drives such as the western digital RE-4 drives or doing a lot of research for what consumer drives work best with your raid card ( I know the Hitachi 7k2000/7k3000s work really well with my Areca card)

Graphics: you may want to wait a month or so if your willing to see what Nvidias answer to the AMD 7000 series is. I don't know if AMD supports hardware acceleration in Adobe products, if they do you might want to just pick up 2 or 3 AMD 7970s.

Personally for a workstation I would get a SMP (multi processor) solution but in the end it is your choice.

 

[manu2b]

If you use mainly Adobe softwares, I would suggest to use a nVidia graphic card, as the Adobe products make good use of the Cuda cores.

EDIT: about the ram, that's true, you won't notice any difference between 1600 and 2133, except for benchmarking.