Silly Budget build for a serious purpose...please help

SlickTrick

SlickTrick

SlickTrick

Associate
Joined
16 Apr 2015
Posts
10
Hi people.

Building a system with a high budget. My red line is £10,000. Target is £8000 roughly (anything under that while having a system that does what I need it to I will consider this a victory)

I need this system to do the following :

1) Smash games...utterly
2) Develop gaming assets using industry standard software (max/maya/blender/unreal engine 4 etc)
3) High profile model rendering/sculpting
4) Potentially dealing with number crunching while rendering out visualisations like they do in the oil and gas industries
5) Particle development
6) Video encoding
7) Video/photo editing (basically I have the full adobe CC suite and various plugins)
8) Be able to display 4k resolution with relative ease (scenario would be showcasing software/renders/ gaming environments etc on a large plasma screen)

I am planning to order in all the parts and build it myself. The slight snag is I havent built a water cooled system before....done my homework and researched the main principles and hardware like a boss but if you guys could focus on this area (particularly fittings/tubes combo) to give me guidance that would be awesome. :D

I have roughly an extra £1000 to play with inside my budget "green zone" so if there is any aspect of the system which is blatently stupid and you find yourself saying "why would you get/not get that?" then please shout out.

My proposed selection of goodies:


YOUR BASKET
3 x OcUK GeForce Titan X 12288MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £899.99 (£2,699.97)
1 x Intel 5960X Extreme 3.00GHz (Haswell-E) Socket LGA2011-V3 Processor - Retail (BX80648I75960X) £869.99
1 x Corsair Vengeance 64GB (8x8GB) DDR4 PC4-19200C14 2400MHz Quad Channel Kit - Black (CMK64GX4M8A2400C14) £719.99
1 x Samsung 1TB SSD 850 PRO SATA 6Gbps 3D NAND Solid State Drive (MZ-7KE1T0BW) £469.99
1 x Asus Rampage V Extreme Intel X99 (Socket 2011) DDR4 EATX Motherboard £359.99
1 x SuperFlower Leadex Platinum '8Pack Edition' 2000W Fully Modular "80 Plus Platinum" Power Supply - Black £349.99
1 x Cooler Master Cosmos II Ultra Tower Case - Black £299.99
1 x Aqua Computer Cuplex Kryos XT .925 Silver Edition - Socket 2011 £249.95
1 x XSPC Twin D5 Dual Bay Reservoir/Pump Combo £199.99
2 x Watercool HTSF2 LT Radiator - 480mm - black/silver £117.98 (£235.96)
3 x EK Water Blocks EK-FC Titan X - Nickel £89.99 (£269.97)
1 x EK Water Blocks EK-FB KIT ASUS R5E - Nickel £74.99
1 x OcUK Value Blu-ray / DVDRW combi SATA - OEM £44.95
3 x EK Water Blocks EK-FC Titan X Backplate - Nickel £26.99 (£80.97)
3 x Three Fan Bundle - Overclockers UK & SilverStone - 120mm FQ121WC Watercooling Radiator Fan £20.99 (£62.97)
1 x Arctic Cooling MX-4 Thermal Compound (20g) £19.99
2 x Koolance LIQ-705 Liquid Coolant Bottle, Low-Conductivity, 700mL (Colorless) £14.99 (£29.98)
3 x EK Water Blocks EK-AF Angled 90 Degrees G1 / 4 inch - Black £9.95 (£29.85)
2 x Primochill Primoflex Advanced Tubing 19/13 - Clear £5.99 (£11.98)
1 x Mayhems Dye Ocean Blue 15ml £5.48
1 x XSPC LCD Temperature Sensor (Blue) V2 £4.99
17 x EK Water Blocks EK-ACF Fitting 13/19mm - Black £4.49 (£76.33)
Total : £7,188.42 (includes shipping : £16.85).





Minor points :

Sound levels from the fans are not that much of an issue.
Colour scheme is black/silver/blue
Hard disk drives are already sorted and so havent been included in this list.
Im guessing the total weight of this system might be high? :eek:
 
Last edited:
Have you thought about a system by 8pack? added benefit of overclocked system, Why don't you give OcUK a call and see what they can do for you?
 
Would your work/play not benefit from having two or even three SSD's instead of one? I'm thinking (1) OS/programs boot drive, (2) games drive, (3) scratch disk for rendering.

You could make do with two as a 1TB is large enough for the OS/programs and games, although perhaps it would be nice to host the games on a separate drive, for reinstalling OS if needed without the hassle of transferring all the games and then back again etc. A separate scratch disk is always recommended.

Your budget seems high enough to tweak the spec and include a dual socket motherboard together with two Xeons, if that would help increase performance noticeably (I don't really know, just a thought). You could ask about this in the CPU section if interested, unless this was already answered when you did your homework.

And another thought is whether having a mix of Titans for play and Quadros for work tasks would be better than three Titans. The older Titans and even the GTX 580 beat the Titan X at double precision stuff. SLI is also possible with Quadros. Seems to me that to handle everything as efficiently as possible, and for the money you're going to spend, you'd want to be well-armoured for whatever work. Then again, the benefits may not be very noticeable. As above, this could be asked about in the Graphics section before splashing out on anything, unless you are sure that for your work the Titan X is the best solution.
 
You're going to need more drives, an ssd in a system like that is going to be a bottleneck. Adobe recommend 3-4 drives to split is, cache, assets and output for video with CC. Raid5 is probably a good shout here.

Also, for this level of work on the sort of budget you've got I'd be seriously considering dual Xeon. A single i7, no matter how awesome it is, is really going to struggle with doing the computing you're asking of it as well as feeding data out to multiple drives and GPUs. Plus it'd give you room for more RAM if needed.
 
Why are you even looking at a 850 as an SSD? Its slow, try a Intel 750 which is multiple times faster.

Also go do some research about the titanX and you will see its lost the double precision that the Titans were famed for. So while its a good gaming card its compute performance is not as strong.

The case you picked is lush, but does it take all that water cooling stuff inside it? the quad 120mm rad for example I cannot see where it goes. With a Phanteks - https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-019-PT&groupid=2362&catid=2674 - you can.
 
You might want to consider something like this (someone else will be able to improve on it, I've been out of the building game for a while!)

5x 1TB disks in RAID5 for the asset and output drive,
SSDs as OS and Cache drives,
Slightly slower but a massive 40 logical cores from the Xeons for huge power in threaded apps such as blender etc,
Still plenty of budget left for a case and cooling system of choice and a 3rd Titan/extra PSU power if you think you need it

YOUR BASKET
2 x Intel Xeon E5-2660 v3 2.6GHz 10-Core with Hyperthreading (Socket 2011-3) - Retail £1189.19 (£2,378.38)
2 x OcUK GeForce Titan X 12288MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £899.99 (£1,799.98)
1 x Corsair Vengeance 64GB (8x8GB) DDR4 PC4-19200C14 2400MHz Quad Channel Kit - Black (CMK64GX4M8A2400C14) £719.99
1 x Asus Z10PE-D8 WS Intel X99 (Socket 2011) DDR4 EATX Dual Socket Workstation Motherboard £429.95
2 x Intel 730 Series 480GB SSD 2.5" SATA 6Gbps Internal Solid State Drive (SSDSC2BP480G4R5) £269.99 (£539.98)
1 x SuperFlower Leadex Platinum 1600W Fully Modular "80 Plus Platinum" Power Supply - Black £224.99
1 x Asus Xonar Essence STX II £184.99
5 x Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (WD1003FZEX) HDD £62.99 (£314.95)
Total : £6,606.68 (includes shipping : £11.25).

 
Damn if you're spending that much give OCUK a call and see what deal they can do for you. I would also consider an 8 Pack build for overclocking, warranty and peace of mind.
 
Would a proper serious work machine you could leave doing work related stuff and something a little more modest for gaming on not be a better solution?

You'll make compromises in both (e.g you'd probably be better served with a workstation graphics card rather than high end gaming cards for the rendering work). You could stick quite a bit of stunning hardware in both and likely come out with 2 machines that were far stronger overall.
 
:( Wrote a full post then I was randomly logged out and lost it.

Thanks for looking into this for me guys :cool:

The priority for the system is in this order

1) Gaming/3d modelling
2) video/photo editing
3) The rest I listed comes after. The number crunching aspect is just a potential thing it might be used for but at the moment is not the main role of the build....consider it to be a "nice to have" thing.


On the SSD feedback : I agree :D

The only thing I was worried about initially with getting pcie slotted SSDs was because of space issues with the tri SLI cards and all the watercooling components. If you guys dont think this will be an issue then...sure why not? ;)
I will roll with multiple faster SSDs.

Motherboard / CPU feedback: Good shout Cyanide on this. If you think its doable getting in that board with a double cpu along with all the cooling solution and other hardware then I am all for that.
As for CPU performance with things like Blender I think it will only affect the viewport right? I plan on using the gfx cards for rendering. Regardless having perfectly smooth operation while working on high poly models would be awesome.
With 2 slightly slower CPUs vs one faster one what would the effect be on gaming in general?...Is there a thread in the CPU section somewhere that covers this issue? I couldnt find one :rolleyes:

On the subject of the graphics cards : I looked a lot into this issue and I initially thought that the workstation cards would be the way to go since they could be SLI and decent for gaming. But after digging and delving I found out that for many applications (including the ones I use) the workstation cards (Quadro etc) either didnt dominate or actually performed worse than a few of the top gaming cards. Using Blender again as an example a gtx980 was pulling faster renders than some of the Quadros........and then there is the price difference which is huge.

Also I would like to give tri SLI a shot after seeing a number of performance benchmarks. Diminishing returns are present of course but I think the gains of the third card are worth it.

The power supply stays at 2000W Ego thing.....:D

The case: I went with the coolermaster simply because it looks to be one of the biggest :eek: .....if its not viable for the cooling solution then yeah I will go with another...anyone else have any thoughts pro/against the selected case?

Sound card is essential? If it makes all the difference and wont impact too much regarding space then sure.

As for the hard drives: I currently run with an SSD for the OS...1 TB internal and another 3 TB external. Im also networked to two "on location" cloud drives. Will it be a better setup to run 5 or so internals while factoring in space/heat inside the case?
 
One of those PCI-E SSD would be nice with this sort of budget.

That WS dual CPU board has so many slots that if you cant get one in and three way SLI then you are doing something wrong. Plus once water cooled the cards effectively become single slot wide.

If you did go for the dual CPU board then due to its size there are very few cases that will fit its EEB form factor, but again the Phnateks says it does.
 
stulid said:
Plus once water cooled the cards effectively become single slot wide.
Click to expand...

True

Just checked on the cosmo 2 case for the EEB form factor....says it can deal with it too apparently and a guy on another forum says he got a double CPU board in one no problem. The Phantek case looks cool though as well and is cheaper :p The main thing is the concern over where to stick the rads.....if they fit.
 
SlickTrick said:
True

Just checked on the cosmo 2 case for the EEB form factor....says it can deal with it too apparently and a guy on another forum says he got a double CPU board in one no problem. The Phantek case looks cool though as well and is cheaper :p The main thing is the concern over where to stick the rads.....if they fit.
Click to expand...

The Phantek Primo can fit 2, 480 rads in it. One of them could be a Monsta rad as well.

The case is basically made for Watercooling. There's a really good thread on Overclock forums (don't know if I'm allowed to link), with loads of info about what radiators you can fit and mods you can do to it.
 
yeah just seen on the youtube link about the double 480 rads..one bottom one top in the case.

Phantek has knocked out the coolermaster after reading a few other reviews. Some are saying you can get a thin 480 in the top if you are prepared to mod/cut sections out to get it in. Its too much hassle for somthing that price when cheaper cases do a better job for full water cooling setups.

So unless someone can come up with a better suggestion I will roll with the Phantek one you mentioned.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom