£2000 Workstation Build - Ideas?

[Twincharged]

£2500 Workstation Build - Ideas?

Hi Guys, I posted a while back about building my first pair of PC's which were to be used for 3D modelling and rendering. I ended up going for a pretty standard 4770k setup due to budget constraints.

Business is starting to take off and it's time to expand and I have another build request for you guys.

Budget £2500 MAX, although I would be interested to see what i could get for less than that.

Requirements:
-PC will be used for 3D modelling using 3D Max and Maya.
-Rendering in VRAY and Keyshot
-Dual CPU
-Cooling is key, our machines run at high load for days at a time.
-Reliability (as above)
-Graphics card that will utilised by the software.

If anyone could make any suggestions it'd be greatly appreciated.

 

[Doomedspeed]

I don't know if you need hard drives but i added them anyway..

As you will see i went over budget (quite considerably), I may have gone overboard on the graphics.. If you reign it in and get a Quadro 2000 instead that brings it much closer to your desired budget..

I assume you do more rendering than modelling..

YOUR BASKET
1 x PNY Nvidia Quadro 4000 Graphics Card - 2GB - GDDR5 SDRAM £719.99
1 x Asus Z9PE-D8 WS Dual Socket C602 Chipset (Socket 2011) DDR3 Motherboard £459.95
1 x GeIL EVO Corsa 64GB (8x8GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C10 1600MHz 2x Quad Channel Kit (GOC364GB1600C10DQC) £399.95
2 x Intel Xeon E5-2620W 2.00GHz (Socket 2011) - Retail £329.99 (£659.98)
1 x Silverstone TemJin TJ09 Windowed Big Tower Case - Black (SST-TJ09B-W) £173.99
1 x Samsung 250GB SSD 840 EVO SATA 6Gb/s Basic - (MZ-7TE250BW) £142.99
1 x Seasonic X-Series 650w '80 Plus Gold' Modular Power Supply £119.99
3 x Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST2000DM001) HDD £68.99 (£206.97)
2 x Prolimatech Megahalems Rev C CPU Cooler £42.98 (£85.96)
4 x Akasa AK-FN058 Apache Black Super Silent 120mm Fan - 4 Pin PWM £9.98 (£39.92)
Total : £3,046.66 (includes shipping : £30.80).



Within budget (and assuming you already have mass storage drives available:

YOUR BASKET
1 x Asus Z9PE-D8 WS Dual Socket C602 Chipset (Socket 2011) DDR3 Motherboard £459.95
1 x PNY Nvidia Quadro 2000 Graphics Card - 1GB - GDDR5 SDRAM £419.99
1 x GeIL EVO Corsa 64GB (8x8GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C10 1600MHz 2x Quad Channel Kit (GOC364GB1600C10DQC) £399.95
2 x Intel Xeon E5-2620W 2.00GHz (Socket 2011) - Retail £329.99 (£659.98)
1 x Silverstone TemJin TJ09 Windowed Big Tower Case - Black (SST-TJ09B-W) £173.99
1 x Samsung 250GB SSD 840 EVO SATA 6Gb/s Basic - (MZ-7TE250BW) £142.99
1 x Seasonic X-Series 650w '80 Plus Gold' Modular Power Supply £119.99
2 x Prolimatech Megahalems Rev C CPU Cooler £42.98 (£85.96)
4 x Akasa AK-FN058 Apache Black Super Silent 120mm Fan - 4 Pin PWM £9.98 (£39.92)
Total : £2,520.43 (includes shipping : £14.75).

 

[Twincharged]

Sorry for the delayed response!

Thanks for taking the time to look into it. I believe i was asking a lot for the budget i set.

Couple questions, is 64Gb the maximum memory for that motherboard? From what i can see it is the only dual socket available on over clockers. Out of curiosity what are the other options, for example i know of people that have dual cpu machines with several hundreds of Gb's of RAM.

I'm also confused with what to do graphics card wise.

We do everything from scratch, that is modelling, through to texturing/materials and then render and post, so it needs to be a pretty all round machine.

Obviously quadro and fire pro cards are specifically geared for this sort of thing but they seem to be really low on specs for the money compared to your everyday gaming cards, am i missing something?

Thanks again

 

[joeyjojo]

I'd be looking at a G34 build personally. Check out Biffa's build log "Project Nostromo". The spec when he sold it last month (for £1100) was as follows:

4 x 6274 (equiv) 2.2Ghz 16 core Opterons (running at 3.2Ghz)
32 GB Corsair DDR3 1333Mhz
Supermicro H8QGi+-F motherboard
Xigmatec Elysium Case
Watercooled with
Aquacomputer blocks
D5 Pump/Res
120.2 and 120.3 Radiators
Scythe GT Fans
1000W Coolermaster PSU

64 threads will really help you with modelling and rendering. That board will take up to 1 TB (yes, one terabyte) of memory.

Obviously quadro and fire pro cards are specifically geared for this sort of thing but they seem to be really low on specs for the money compared to your everyday gaming cards, am i missing something?

The biggest difference is memory bandwidth and double precision compute performance, which are both crippled in gaming GPUs.

 

[Twincharged]

I'd be looking at a G34 build personally. Check out Biffa's build log "Project Nostromo". The spec when he sold it last month (for £1100) was as follows:

4 x 6274 (equiv) 2.2Ghz 16 core Opterons (running at 3.2Ghz)
32 GB Corsair DDR3 1333Mhz
Supermicro H8QGi+-F motherboard
Xigmatec Elysium Case
Watercooled with
Aquacomputer blocks
D5 Pump/Res
120.2 and 120.3 Radiators
Scythe GT Fans
1000W Coolermaster PSU

64 threads will really help you with modelling and rendering. That board will take up to 1 TB (yes, one terabyte) of memory.



The biggest difference is memory bandwidth and double precision compute performance, which are both crippled in gaming GPUs.

That makes a lot more sense, obviously i can't afford to deck it out right away so the option of being able to add memory and graphics cards later down the line is quite important.

Just been having a browse into the Opteron route and i have to say it sounds pretty awesome Only issue I'm having is those kind of parts seem quite hard to source, they don't really seem to sell them on your typical PC hardware websites.

Also, (this may be a dumb question) on a quad cpu board, is it possible to only run two cpu's and then add the other two later down the line? or do all 4 sockets need to be in use at all times.

 

[JonJ678]

Dual vs single socket isn't as easy a choice as it sounds. 2.5k will get you a couple of 2ghz intel processors with 1333mhz ecc ram, or a single 4.5ghz one with 2000mhz normal ram.

How certain are you that the two slow processors will serve you better than one fast one?

If looking at amd, be aware that eight "cores" gets you four floating point units. An intel eight core gets you eight floating point units. There's a rather big gap in performance between the two as a result.

I suspect you'll be better off seperating the systems. The requirements for modelling are quite different to those for rendering. One system, probably the current 4770k one, for doing the modelling work and a small cluster for rendering. Google "render farm". The idea is to network a lot of similar computers together and render across all of them simultaneously.

 

[joeyjojo]

Dual vs single socket isn't as easy a choice as it sounds. 2.5k will get you a couple of 2ghz intel processors with 1333mhz ecc ram, or a single 4.5ghz one with 2000mhz normal ram.

If looking at amd, be aware that eight "cores" gets you four floating point units. An intel eight core gets you eight floating point units. There's a rather big gap in performance between the two as a result.

Fair point about bulldozer having shared FPUs, but if you look on ebay £750 buys you 4x 6262's for a total of 32 FPUs and 64 integer units. The value for money of these for parallel workloads is unbeatable.