Gamer, Graphic Designer and Editor..

TheNoobMerchant

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Hi guys, this will be my first post so please be patient with me if I'm missing any of the usual information.

The question I need answering is:

Should I go for a GTX 690 or a GTX Titan, or should I buy one for gaming and one for editing and switch between the 2 as I'm working?

As a gamer, graphic designer and editor, this build is going to have to be a bit... special.

My requirements:

I will be using two monitors, one will be 3D, and both will run at 1080p.

I will most likely be recording my gameplay which should be taken into consideration, and I also work with PSD files that can go up to 2gb.

I've never run GPU's in SLI so I'm unsure of how much I should worry about reported micro stuttering that this causes.

The ram is admittedly overkill, however I will be utilizing some as scratchdisks and I also tend to build temporary ram previews in vegas quite frequently.

Lastly, I have no budget; that said, I will not be going for a Xeon because it's just too pricey.

Here is my build:

CPU: Intel Core i7-4820K 3.7GHz Quad-Core Processor
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-U12S 55.0 CFM CPU Cooler
Motherboard: Asus P9X79 LE ATX LGA2011 Motherboard
Memory: Corsair Vengeance Pro 64GB (8 x 8GB) DDR3-2133 Memory
Storage: Samsung 840 Pro Series 256GB 2.5" Solid State Disk
Storage: Seagate Barracuda 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive
Case: NZXT Phantom 410 (White) ATX Mid Tower Case
Power Supply: Corsair CX 750W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply

any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
NoobMerchant
 
Solution
Okay, this one has a lot to it. To start, any high-end workstation with a good video card will crush games, so build with that in mind. Prioritize the workstation aspect and then throw in a video card. That's about it for the general comments, though. Let's get down to the parts:

Monitor - Your monitor will determine whether you can use a gaming card (e.g. Geforce) or need a professional card (e.g. Quadro). Will either of your monitors have 10-bit color? If you have that and need to use it, then you'll need a Quadro card. If not, then the question is which design apps do you use? If you stay within the Adobe suite, then you'll be good to go with a Geforce card. Certain design programs need professional cards, and there...

TheNoobMerchant

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Thanks for the reply! :wahoo:

is that to say I should go for the 690? I work in Cinema 4D for logos, so 3D work isn't exactly exempt from the work I'd be doing day to day.
 

jshoop

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i would go with the titan. it provides the same gaming performance as about a 780ti, with 6gb of vram. Also, it performs workstation like tasks, as in video editing, picture editing, 3d animation, 3d design, etc, much faster than gaming cards, like a 690. Also, the titan will run cooler than a 690, since there arent 2 gpus on one card. You can sli titans in the future too

EDIT: also, recording gameplay is more cpu dependent, and your cpu is high end. and with nvidia cards you get shadowplay, which helps you record without losing fps

EDIT #2: you would get the titan black, right? if you are, and you like the look of gaming cards more, manufacturers sell their coolers with the stock titan black, youd just have to change the cooler yourself. nvidia banned other companies from making custom coolers on the titan black.
 

TheNoobMerchant

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Thanks a lot for your informative reply, that was exactly the kind of answer I needed!

Wrapping up, do you have any experience with SLI and how bad micro stuttering could get? It's just I've been reminded time and time again in regards to issues with SLI, and I don't want to spend around 16k on just my GPU if it might create new problems that outweigh the benefits.

Thanks,
NoobMerchant
 

jshoop

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i personally dont have any experience with sli, or crossfire. from what i've read, nvidia has pretty much fixed the sli problems, crossfire still has a few issues but sli is worked out. But you wont need to sli for a long time. The titan black will be playing on ultra with atleast 30fps easily, maybe even 60 on a single 1080p monitor, im not sure. i'll get a benckmark in a second, but you wouldnt need to sli for a few years in my opinion. You might have to turn ultra down to high-ultra, but other than that you should be fine
 

Eggz

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Okay, this one has a lot to it. To start, any high-end workstation with a good video card will crush games, so build with that in mind. Prioritize the workstation aspect and then throw in a video card. That's about it for the general comments, though. Let's get down to the parts:

Monitor - Your monitor will determine whether you can use a gaming card (e.g. Geforce) or need a professional card (e.g. Quadro). Will either of your monitors have 10-bit color? If you have that and need to use it, then you'll need a Quadro card. If not, then the question is which design apps do you use? If you stay within the Adobe suite, then you'll be good to go with a Geforce card. Certain design programs need professional cards, and there is no way around it. Even though some Adobe programs officially support only professional cards, all you have to do is type the name of your Geforce card into a text file - boom, working! If you fall in between, you can get a powerful gaming card for games and workloads, and then also get a Quadro card for meeting professional application and color requirements. Hopefully, you can just get a Geforce card.

Motherboard - I think you made a good choice by going with an X79 chipset, and I am assuming you want to go with an ATX size based on your selected motherboard. You are going to want the board with the most compatibility possible for all the random crap you're going to need to run with it as a designer. Also, the more stuff the board has onboard, the better. Having more on board will free up expansion for other things. The only ATX motherboard with onboard WiFi and bluetooh is the Asus X79 DELUXE. NewEgg has them open box right now for only $15 more than the board you selected, and it is a much better board all around. The DELUXE will serve you needs much more smoothly, from the PCI-e layout to the extra features it has. Also, the board you selected has an old-school PCI slot, which almost nothing uses any more, so that's wasted space unless you have peripherals from the 90s still kicking around.

CPU - There are two main things that will push someone over the edge from the Z87 chipset to the X79 chipset: (1) the available CPUs, and (2) the expandability. The Z87 has the fastest per-core performance on a quad-core chip (i.e. the 4770k). The 4820k is a quad core that is not as fast as the 4770k. So in terms of CPU, you'll definately want to take advantage of the six-core options available on the X79 platform; otherwise, go you will want to consider your expansion needs with an eye toward potentially selecting the Z87 chipset. As for expandability, the X79 shipset really shines here because it has 40 PCI-e lanes. When you see PCI-e 4x or PCI-e 16x, that indicates how many lanes the card can use if there are available PCI-e lanes, not necessarily how many the card will use. The Z87 chipset with a 4770k allows up to 16 PCI-e lanes. That can go all to one 16x card, it can split between two 16x cards using 8 lanes each, or one 8x card and two 4x cards. You get considerably more options with X79's 40 PCI-e lanes. It will let you fully use two 16x cards at the same time (32 lanes) and still have 8 left over for whatever you want. Point is, X79 gives you the most exandability. If having more than only 16 PCI-e lanes matters to you, then go with X79. All that said, my CPU recommendation is the 4930k. It's super fast, allows super fast memory, allows super fast expansion, and you can overclock it to make it even more super fast. It's also 95% the CPU that the 3960x is for half the price. Yay for affordable speed!

Cooler - The one you chose is good. I wold also take a look a all-in-one coolers like the H100i. They will cool only marginally better, unless you're overclocking (in which case the margin will increase), but they look nice and serve great as extra exhaust fans.

Memory - Good choice. Max out for rendering.

Storage - Storage is tricky for builds like yours. The one you chose is a good drive-type, but it's way too small to use as your only SSD. That case you chose allows up to six drives. The best setup will be to have five drives: one SSD for the OS, one SSD for scratch, one SSD for programs, and two HDDs in RAID1 for media.

OS SSD - Use the Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB. It will need a lot of writing, and the Pro is resilient to that.

Scratch SSD - Either use the Kingston SSDNow V300 60 GB or the Samsung Pro 840 128GB. I personally think the Samsung is best suited to the task because it has MLC flash, but 128 GB is way overkill for a scratch disk. The Kingston has similar IOPS and is cheap for how good it is.

Programs SSD - Hands down, get the Samsung EVO 1TB. It's actually faster than the 840 Pro. The main downside of having TLC flash, which is less write-resistant than the Pro's MLC flash, doesn't matter for program-only use. You'll just be installing and then reading from there on out. For that, you'll want a lot of fast storage, and the 1TB EVO is the best there is for that use.

Media HDDs - For your media, speed doesn't matter nearly as much as reliability coupled with huge storage. Segate's 4TB drives kicks ass for that. I'll recommend getting two of the Seagate Desktop HDD.15 ST4000DM000 4TB with 64MB Cache. Run them in RAID1, and even if one dies, you can just replace it without any data loss.

Power supply - The one you chose is pretty good. I recently got the AX 860i, and it's great. That 750 is pretty solid, though. You should be fine, but bumping up to a Platinum 80+ certification might save you a little on the efficiency department and protect all those expensive parts with a little more assurance. I personally don't think it will make that big of a difference - if any.

GPU - This will depend on your monitor, as mentioned above. Assuming you won't need 10-bit color, and you use only the Adobe suite, however, I'll recommend the GTX 780 ti. It's faster than the Titan, and it will do everything you need it to do under the assumptions I mentioned. Plus it will destroy games as much as they can be destroyed on a single card at the present time.

Good luck!
 
Solution

doron

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For true 3D you'll need a certified Quadro gpu for your computer.
You'll also need a certified 3D monitor by Nvidia with active shutter glasses.

Source (Maxon):
http://www.maxon.net/products/general-information/general-information/system-requirements.html

Certified graphics cards for 3D modeling (Nvidia):
http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro_pro_graphics_boards.html

If you don't need this capability, then according to Cinebench the GTX 780, 780Ti and Titan all have roughly the same performance, so the GTX 780 is probably the smartest buy.

Cinebench benchmarks: http://www.c4dcafe.com/ipb/Benchmarks/cinebench.html
C4D community: http://www.c4dcafe.com/ipb/index

EDIT: According to the benchmarks, 6 core cpu should provide a larger performance boost than a better gpu.
 

jshoop

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@op, listen to eggz, his stuff is spot on. however, i would still stick with the titan, its pretty much a 780ti with more vram and better precision. If you wait for the 6gb 780ti, that will be really good. The titan is a semi professional card, allowing for quadro like performance (sorta, really low end quadro) for alot less, and still performs gaming wise
 

TheNoobMerchant

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That answer was amazing in every sense, so here's my build v2 with comments.

CPU: Intel Core i7-4930K 3.4GHz 6-Core Processor
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-U12S 55.0 CFM CPU Cooler
Motherboard: Asus X79 Deluxe ATX LGA2011 Motherboard
Memory: Corsair Vengeance Pro 64GB (8 x 8GB) DDR3-2133 Memory
Storage: Samsung 840 EVO 120GB 2.5" Solid State Disk - This will be my OS SSD. OS' only take up to around 30GB of space, however I'd like some breathing room on it, so I decided to decrease the size to 120gb.
Storage: Samsung 840 EVO 1TB 2.5" Solid State Disk - You weren't wrong about having a program SSD
Storage: Seagate Barracuda 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive - I don't keep a hold of that much data. I tend to delete things when I've finished those projects and keeping those files on cloud storage.

I didn't add a scratchdisk SSD simply because I think my processing and ram power will be enough for the kind of editing I do. I have used drive scratchdisks before and I just prefer creating ram scratchdisks.

Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Ti 3GB Video Card (2-Way SLI) - I will SLI a 780 because it's cheap and they're good cards.
Case: NZXT Phantom 410 (White) ATX Mid Tower Case
Optical Drive: Asus BW-16D1HT Blu-Ray/DVD/CD Writer
Sound Card: Asus Xonar Essence STX 24-bit 192 KHz Sound Card - I produce on the side, and also have a 7.1 surround sound set up.
Wired Network Adapter: Intel EXPI9301CTBLK 10/100/1000 Mbps PCI-Express x1 Network Adapter
Wireless Network Adapter: TP-Link TL-WDN3800 802.11a/b/g/n PCI-Express x1 Wi-Fi Adapter
Keyboard: Cooler Master Storm Quick Fire Pro Wired Gaming Keyboard
Mouse: Logitech G400 Wired Optical Mouse

any comments would be much appreciated, and thank you guys so much for your help - you've been awesome!
 

TheNoobMerchant

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sorry, I didn't mean 3D viewing I meant I would create the logos in 3D.

However, you did bring something to my attention that I was unaware of.

I was planning on using the 2nd monitor to play games in 3D. Would I need the quadro and the Nvidia monitor to allow this?
 

Eggz

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Sweet! You'll have a ridiculous rig!

If you are trying to really max out the graphics, I'll also recommend a cheap upgrade that will help things since you are going with Nvidia SLI - a dedicated PhysX card. People tend to hate on them without knowing much about them, but I've looked into it quite a bit, and I think they are work the $100-$150 they cost, especially when you are spending as much as you will be.

Here are two articles you'll find useful about the latest information on dedicated PhysX cards (if you haven't already read them). The first one is called "How much difference does a dedicated PhysX card make?" It shows that, in PhysX titles, a gtx 650 handles PhysX as a dedicated card better than two Titans in SLI.

The second article is called "Using Maxwell's GTX 750 Ti as a dedicated PhysX card." It shows that the 750 ti is actually a little bit better than the 650 and 650 ti were. As a PhysX card, a 750 ti will last you MUCH longer than it would as a primary card, though it's not the worst primary card. It's also very small and highly power efficient.

As a disclosure, keep in mind that not everything uses Nvidia's proprietary PhysX, but for things that do, having a dedicated card is really nice. A 750 ti currently offloads PhysX for my 780 ti, and it really makes a big difference in PhysX titles. Here is a link to my personal benchmark results using Nvidia's PhysX benchmark.

780 ti only - 79.3 (average) 104.6 (max)
W/ 750 ti - 122.1 (average) 218.5 (max)

To be fair, that bench was the biggest improvement, and games weren't as much of a jump, but they still showed improvement. The best thing is that it prevents little hickups and major frame drops. :D



As for this, the EVO is a fast drive only in the higher capacities (i.e. 500gb, 750gb, and 1tb). If you are going with a low capacity drive, I highly recommend the 840 Pro. It's as fast as the high capacity EVOs even at 128 GB. Plus the write resilience on the Pro drives is much better suited to OS usage, since the OS is constantly writing crap to the main drive. You'll be happier if you choose a Pro specifically for OS. For other things, it really won't matter, but here I think it will. The Pro's IOPS and 4k read/write - which is the lifeline of an OS - is really amazing, and you can't get that on an EVO without buying a very large capacity drive.
 

jshoop

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thats a great idea, sli 780tis. That will be a beast. and a physxs card sounds interesting, ive always wondered but havent had the time to research them very much.

also, if you mean 3d games, you wont need a quadro. If you want to play in 3d like at a 3d movie, im not sure, but i think the gaming cards will be fine because theyre games, not massive proffesional projects

EDIT: if your talking about the second possibility from above, you will need a special 3d monitor to play in 3d i bet though, and those can get expensive