First Time Build - Gaming/Workstation

Intel 4760k and a z87 mb and a 760 or 770 mb with a Samsung evo 128g drive and a two tb hard drive and 16g of ddr3 1866 or 2100 ram should be a killer rig and fall under the 1500 build price. If you have a Local micro center they have CPU and mb combos. A good plain case would be the cosair r400.

WhyLucky,

A workstation system, especially that involves imaging and requiring high precision calculation has different priorities than a gaming system. For the applications you will be using I recommend a Xeon CPU > ECC RAM > Quadro grpahics card configuration. The Xeons are optimized for integer and floating point calculations and often have more cache, the ECC RAM in combination with the Xeon offers increased single and double precision that assists everything from accurate waveform smoothing to rendering particles in simulation, and the Quadro has special drivers that offer viewports and very high anti-aliasing. Gaming cards are meant to make high frame rates, while workstation cards are meant to fully finish each frame for quality. If you are using Solidworks, a workstation graphics card is essential so that the viewports work properly. Gaming cards (GeForce GTX and Radeon HD) can be a disaster in some workstation applications and Solidworks is a specific example.

The following is an idea for a system with very good cost / performance components. I recommend an LGA 2011 (that's the socket designation) CPU as the CPUs have double the memory bandwidth of LGA 1150 or LGA 1155. Also, with an LGA 2011, the CPU may be upgraded to six, eight, and soon, even twelve core CPU's. As the number of cores is important to rendering and can be utilized in calculation / simulation programs such as MATLAB, this is an important consideration. The Xeon E5-1620 has very good performance for the price. For RAM, there is 16GB to allow running several applications at once, and is specified as 2 X 8GB to allow future expansion without replacing the modules.

For the reason mentioned above, this is quite workstation oriented and will be competent but not in the top tier for gaming.

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1. Intel Xeon Quad-Core Processor E5-1620 3.6GHz 5.0GT/s 10MB LGA 2011 CPU, OEM > $294 (Superbiz) (Passmark CPU score= 9199, rank = No. 38)

2. Motherboard: ASRock X79 Extreme3 LGA 2011 Intel X79 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard $199.99

3. 16GB (2X 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 ECC Unbuffered Server Memory >about $150. (Check ASRock motherboard compatibility list)

4. NVIDIA Quadro K2000 VCQK2000-PB 2GB GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 Workstation Video Card $420.

5. Western Digital WD Black WD2002FAEX 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - OEM) > $160

6. SeaSonic X Series X650 Gold ((SS-650KM Active PFC F3)) 650W ATX12V V2.3/EPS 12V V2.91 SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS GOLD Certified Full Modular Active PFC Power Supply $120.

9. LIAN LI PC-7HX Black Aluminum ATX Mid Tower Computer Case $100.

10. ASUS DRW-24B1ST/BLK/B/AS Black SATA 24X DVD Burner - Bulk - OEM $17.

11. Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit (Full Version) - OEM $140

TOTAL = $1,451

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Cheers,

BambiBoom


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