New Gaming / Workstation Build

Greetings and salutations TH Experts. I have a build below that I was putting together for the above mentioned reason. To answer some of your questions before hand:

Yes, I will be doing heavy handed 3D Modeling.
Yes, Money is not an issue (As you can see).
Yes, I know nothing of Liquid cooling, so please advise!!
Yes, criticize to your hearts content. What can I improve/change? What looks stupid? What's wrong? Comment below, let me know!

CPU: Intel Core i7-3930K 3.2GHz 6-Core Processor ( @ Microcenter)
CPU Cooler: Corsair H100i 77.0 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler ( @ NCIX US)
Thermal Compound: Arctic Silver 5 High-Density Polysynthetic Silver 12g Thermal Paste ( @ Amazon)
Motherboard: Asus P9X79 ATX LGA2011 Motherboard ( @ Newegg)
Memory: Corsair Dominator Platinum 16GB (4 x 4GB) DDR3-2133 Memory ( @ Newegg)
Storage: Samsung 840 Pro Series 512GB 2.5" Solid State Disk ( @ Amazon)
Storage: Western Digital Red 3TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive ( @ NCIX US) X 3
Video Card: Asus GeForce GTX Titan 6GB Video Card (2-Way SLI) ( @ Newegg) X 2
Video Card: NVIDIA Quadro K5000 4GB (1,752.36 @ Amazon)
Sound Card: HT Omega Claro Halo XT 24-bit 192 KHz Sound Card ( @ Newegg)
Case: Corsair 900D ATX Full Tower Case ( @ Amazon)
Case Fan: Corsair Air Series SP120 Quiet Edition (2-Pack) 37.9 CFM 120mm Fans ( @ Amazon) X 2
Case Fan: Corsair Air Series AF140 Quiet Edition 67.8 CFM 140mm Fan ( @ Newegg)
Power Supply: Corsair 1200W 80 PLUS Platinum Certified ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply ( @ Microcenter)

Total:■

Here's my new build: http://pcpartpicker.com/user/Yiurp/saved/1ubH

Any suggestions on liquid cooling??? I know close to nothing about it.

v/r
Yiurp

Yiurp,

Given the very high level of performance possible with this kind of budget- and the high level and expense of wasted opportunities possible, I believe that you would have better advice on this forum if you would list the applications you use and their priority. The priority of use is especially important as a computer refined for 3M modeling, graphics, and/or rendering will not be also optimal for games and vice versa. Of course you are also free to stay with your previous decisions/ choices.

My questions arise from the rather odd combination of a CPU that is in my view not up to the aspirations of the system. The i7-3930K CPU with a GTX Titan, Quadro K5000 seems a mismatch as I feel that the CPU is integer weak and the two expensive cards would not be successfully working in parallel as video card / GPU. The GTX Titan is remarkable in it's 3D high frame rates processing power, but if you are using anything from Autodesk (3dsMAX, Revit, Inventor, Maya), Dessault (Catia , Solidworks) or Adobe CS, rendering or video editing you will benefit from using the Quadro K5000 as the graphics card using Quadro partnered drivers in combination- definitely not running GeForce drivers. This could be supported by a GPU such as Tesla C2075 or a second K5000 on SLI as coprocessor, either of which could be added later. I believe it's possible that one K5000 might work surprisingly well and be all that is necessary. Consider this list of NVIDIA GPU accelerated applications and if most of primary work is done on anything on this list, I would suggest considering a pair of K5000's in SLI>

http://www.nvidia.com/object/gpu-accelerated-applications.html

Without knowing more, I would make the Quadro K5000 the primary graphics card, so that Quadro application- tailored drivers that work their magic.

Also, this system should use a fast Xeon 6 or 8 core CPU or 2X 4- core at higher clock rates for double precision and 10-bit color. if you are using Maya or doing heavy rendering, large assemblies in Inventor or Solidworks, animations or simulations with fluids and/or gases, or video editing, you might consider the 2X 4-core Xeons which can have higher clock rates. The other advantage of dual CPU's is that they provide more PCIe X16 rails and moe RAM capacity, such that in addition to the graphics card and co-processing GPU, you can have a pair of RevoDrives in RAID O for OS and Applications, and a PCIe LSI RAID controller running some form of RAID including both striping and mirroring for the data speed and protection, these on large capacity mechanical SATA 6GB/s drives. The drives could be simply a pair of the Fusion I/O Octals, but as a 5.12TB drive costs each [ http://www.sabrepc.com/p-2521-fusion-io-fs6-802-640-cs-0001-512tb-iodrive-octal-multi-level-cell.aspx ] these are perhaps not giving the kind of benefit their cost would suggest,...and your system would cost nearly As RAID 0 is risky, there would be a pristine system image kept in an archive partition on the data drives. The motherboard should use ECC memory and depending on your applications and how many are run simultaneously, either 32 or 64GB.

I would also encourage you to consider carefully the perfect monitor(s) as integral to this system- as a visual content workstation the monitor is of the utmost importance.

Again, if you can be as specific as possible as to your use priorities, applications, files sizes, and of course budget (I would estimate the kind of machine I've described above at close to -9,000). Still, I'm sure the many prolific pundits of 'putin' power around here can work out something of high performance, high reliability, and usable well into the future.

Cheers,

BambiBoom

[Dell Precision T5400 > 2X Xeon X5460 4-core @ 3.16GHz, Quadro FX 4800, 16GB DDR2-667 ECC, WD RE4/Segt 500GB / Win 7 Ult 64 > AutoCad, Revit, Sketchup, Solidworks, Adobe CS4, Corel Technical Designer, WP, Office, MS Office > HP 2711X monitor, 27", 1920 X 1080]

Nikolay Savov,

I like very much your ambitious system for our friend Yiurp >

"" ASUS Z9PE-D8 WS - Dual Intel® Socket LGA 2011/C602 chipset https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Z9PED8_WS/#overview
2x Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2690 - http://ark.intel.com/products/64596/
2x Corsair Vengeance 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR3-2133 Memory - per CPU - 64Gb total
2 x NVIDIA Titan SLI for GAMING and
2 x NVIDIA Quadro SLI for 3D Modeling , CAD etc. and
2 x REVO DRIVE 3 X2 in RAID 0 ( if can be add in 16x or 8x PCIe - assume yes for now )

Edit: I see few TH treats that 1xPCIe card will work on 16x and 8x PCIe slot - as i think it will ""

> The ASUS Z9PE-D8 WS motherboard is one I hadn't seen before. There are several 7X PCIe x16 slot motherboards, thanks to the dual CPU's. 1.> The slots of the Z9PE-D8 are wired > 4 x PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16 (dual x16 or quad x8) / 2 x PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16 / 1 x PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16 (x8 mode) , which if I'm reading it correctly means that there are 4X- x16 slots and 3X -x8. As the Revodrive uses PCIe x4, and you can plug any PCIe into any x16 slot, that should work. However, 2.> However, as the 2- Titans and 2- Quadro K5000's are all dual height cards, to me the spacing of the slots on the ASUS board appear a bit too close together (?). This may a candidate to have a separate chassis that adds PCIe slots.

The E5-2690 CPU is a good one, 8-cores @ 2.9/3.8 GHz with 20MB cache and rated No. 3 on Passmark CPU benchmarks. There is also the E5-2687W also 8 core, with a slightly higher clock speed of 3.1/3.8 and slightly higher power- 150W as compared to 135W. The E5-2687W is rated No.2. As they are both about one might consider the E5-2687W. These two Xeons remind me of the strange i7-3960X and i7-3970X relationship where the two CPU's are almost exactly the same configuration and price but one uses more power to have a very slight speed boost. I suppose it's a cheap way for Intel to have another product. In any event 2X 8 core Xeons would make an amazing fluid, smoke, thermal, structural, particle simulation or rendering machine!

The RevoDrive 3 X2 appears on many of the highest rated systems on the Passmark Performance Test - they must be amazingly fast. Whereas my Dell Precision T5400 with mechanical drives has a Passmark disk score of 924, there is a system using RevoDrive 3 X2 (unknown number or RAID) with a score of 30,051! Those are PCIe x4 and will plug into the PCIe x16 slots wired as x8.

What would you suggest for monitor(s) ?

Really, more of a "PS"- Personal Supercomputer- than PC. And just think- 32 threads and 8,448 CUDA cores! Suddenly my Precision T5400 seems weak and elderly- only 8 threads and 192 cores.

Cheers,

BambiBoom