I have been trolling around here and some other similar forums for months now in search of the optImal build for my unique situation. I haven't seen many builds addressing needs similar to mine, so I'll see if anyone here can help me.
I work for a small data analytics startup company and wear many hats requiring me to regularly use many programs like Adobe CS6, Autodesk, MS office, Minitab, as well as have 20+ simultaneous tabs of Firefox and Google Chrome running with several plugins at the same time. While all this is going on, I may be running several threads of automated Internet programs like ScrapeBox at the same time.
Currently, I am using an (ancient) HP Pavilion Elite with a quad core 2 Q9300 Extreme @ 2.5 Ghz with 8g RAM.
Needless to say, the computer is way too slow and freezes up on me quite a bit. The problem is that I have to rapidly switch tasks throughout the day and often need several browser tabs pulled up for reference for a conference call and can't close down Photoshop or After Affects down just for a 15-20 minute meeting.
The result is that I end up pushing many tasks to a little Dell laptop I got (forget the stats on this <$1,000 model that is only usable for word processing and internet browsing) as well as my iPad Air and iPhone 5s.
To complicate matters more, I now need to come into the office 3 days per week (used to be one) instead of mainly working from home. Now I need to be more portable with my work.
I realize that I can't have "everything" I want for my desired price point, but I would at least like it if my world didn't completely shut down if I was running photoshop, Autodesk Inventor and Google Chrome at the same time. I don't spend too much time actually rendering and can push those tasks until the end of the day, but I may end up editing videos throughout the day between meetings.
My plan is to have a home-based workstation that I will access through RDP. I have pretty solid broadband at home and work, and my provider hasn't (yet) throttled me when I have gone over 500 gigs of monthly bandwidth.
As you might imagine, my computing habits suck up RAM quite rapidly. I have never (I mean never) felt like my computer has enough RAM.
I am willing to go out of my way to build the best solution possible to meet my needs. I am leaning towards solutions with Dual Xeons, preferably v2 with up to 8 cores each, SSD drives (RAID setup?) and 32-64GB DDR3 memory. I am clueless about video cards.
I keep running across (what appears to be) really good deals on EBay and other places for used Xeons (sellers with great feedback), and figure I can build a much better system for my money with used/refurbished parts. Please correct me if I am off base, but it seems that it's much harder for someone to "beat up" a Xeon since you can't OC them.
Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated!
~AJ
I work for a small data analytics startup company and wear many hats requiring me to regularly use many programs like Adobe CS6, Autodesk, MS office, Minitab, as well as have 20+ simultaneous tabs of Firefox and Google Chrome running with several plugins at the same time. While all this is going on, I may be running several threads of automated Internet programs like ScrapeBox at the same time.
Currently, I am using an (ancient) HP Pavilion Elite with a quad core 2 Q9300 Extreme @ 2.5 Ghz with 8g RAM.
Needless to say, the computer is way too slow and freezes up on me quite a bit. The problem is that I have to rapidly switch tasks throughout the day and often need several browser tabs pulled up for reference for a conference call and can't close down Photoshop or After Affects down just for a 15-20 minute meeting.
The result is that I end up pushing many tasks to a little Dell laptop I got (forget the stats on this <$1,000 model that is only usable for word processing and internet browsing) as well as my iPad Air and iPhone 5s.
To complicate matters more, I now need to come into the office 3 days per week (used to be one) instead of mainly working from home. Now I need to be more portable with my work.
I realize that I can't have "everything" I want for my desired price point, but I would at least like it if my world didn't completely shut down if I was running photoshop, Autodesk Inventor and Google Chrome at the same time. I don't spend too much time actually rendering and can push those tasks until the end of the day, but I may end up editing videos throughout the day between meetings.
My plan is to have a home-based workstation that I will access through RDP. I have pretty solid broadband at home and work, and my provider hasn't (yet) throttled me when I have gone over 500 gigs of monthly bandwidth.
As you might imagine, my computing habits suck up RAM quite rapidly. I have never (I mean never) felt like my computer has enough RAM.
I am willing to go out of my way to build the best solution possible to meet my needs. I am leaning towards solutions with Dual Xeons, preferably v2 with up to 8 cores each, SSD drives (RAID setup?) and 32-64GB DDR3 memory. I am clueless about video cards.
I keep running across (what appears to be) really good deals on EBay and other places for used Xeons (sellers with great feedback), and figure I can build a much better system for my money with used/refurbished parts. Please correct me if I am off base, but it seems that it's much harder for someone to "beat up" a Xeon since you can't OC them.
Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated!
~AJ
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