Ah, fair enough. Then I guess a hex core CPU like the one you picked is a good choice, though I would certainly overclock it to get the most out of it.
May I ask what application you use for your animation? I ask because many of these packages are now making use of the immense parallel power of modern graphics cards.
There are a few things I would suggest changing with your spec:
- Go with a graphics card with a standard heatsink+fan cooler - the watercooling kit you went for is nice - but I wouldn't trust it cooling two 220W graphics cards and a 130W CPU. If you are going for 7970s then I would go with
this card (because gigabyte have a good warranty).
- Switch to one or two standard SATA3 SSDs like
this. As these will be more reliable and not use up precious PCIE slots.
- The ASUS Rampage 4 Extreme board is a nice one, but it is very expensive. You could save a lot of money and get a board almost as good (like
this one).
- That RAM is MAD expensive. Seriously, don't buy it. You can get a
nice 1600MHz 16GB (4x4GB) kit for £75 and as you can see
here - the real-world performance difference between a 1600MHz and a 2400MHz kit is pretty tiny (plus it is unlikely you will be able to get the CPU to actually run the kit at 2600MHz). Instead you would probably be better off buying two of those kingston kits for £150 total and that will give you 32GB of system RAM - which should be plenty no matter what you throw at it.
- You may want to consider going for a
mechanical keyboard over the G19. The G19 does have a nice screen, but mechanical boards have far superior switches which feel much nicer to work on.
Here is some more info on mechanical keyboards if you are interested.
- You will need to go with a different version of the OS for two reasons. 1) that is the upgrade edition, best going for the OEM versions - or the full retail version if you think you may change motherboards and reuse the OS. Also home premium only supports up to 16GB total memory - so 16GB of system RAM + a 3GB graphics card will take you over this limit - meaning that you can only address 13GB of your system memory. To get round this you need to go for the professional version of windows 7 64bit - as this supports up to 192GB of memory.
- The bigfoot network card looks nice, but it is nigh-on useless for improving gaming performance. Best just using the Intel Gigabit ethernet port included on any of the X79 motherboards.
- Go for the i7 3930X CPU instead of the 3960X - it is much cheaper and basically the same chip with a slightly lower initial clockspeed. However, this makes no difference if you plan to overclock and these chips both clock the same.
Hope some of that info is of use.
