Thinking about Quadro k2000 in my build now

A K2000 would be pretty woeful for AE RayTrace3D processing. With AE, you gain
nothing from using a Quadro.

Fit a GTX 780Ti instead, it will be enormously faster for AE. Alternatively, fit a
better PSU and get two used GTX 580 3GB cards, which will cost less and give the
CUDA power of a Titan. To give you some idea, a 780Ti does the Creativecow
AE/CUDA test in less then 3 minutes, whereas even a Quadro K4000 takes more
than 14 minutes. See (lots of my info posts here):

http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/1019120


Traditionally, people use Quadro cards to achieve faster viewport performance, but
AE only uses old OpenGL stuff (if at all) to handle the viewport side of things,
and that kind of OGL code is processed more than sufficiently by any modern gamer
card (but the nod of course goes to NVIDIA because of CUDA acceleration in AE for
various tasks).

Also, forget the XEON, that's a total waste of money. You've not picked ECC RAM
and the board doesn't support it anyway. Buy a 4790K instead. Spash out on a
better cooler, Corsair H80i, give yourself a decent CPU oc which the XEON cannot
provide. For noise, replace the Corsair fans with Nanoxia Deep Silence, works
extremely well. If you don't care about noise (eg. system in a different room),
then put in a couple of Yate Loons for maximum insane airflow and best CPU oc.
Goes without saying that an H100i cooler would be better, but I don't know if
that case would take it. Note that I've used H80is to build multiple 5GHz 2700K
systems, they work very well.

Actually for AE, a 6-core system with a lot more RAM makes far more sense, but I'm
assuming you don't have the budget for that.

I've posted a lot on toms this past year about AE builds. Just Google for,
"tomshardware mapesdhs CUDA".

Indeed, today I'm building another AE system for someone - in no particular order,
it has a 3930K @ 4.7, 64GB RAM @ 2133 (GSkill TridentX 8x8GB 2400), Samung 840
250GB, OCZ Vector 512GB (AE cache), Quadro 4000 + GTX 580 3GB for CUDA (I
recommended two 580s instead, but the guy insisted), Hitachi 2TB Enterprise SATA,
ASUS P9X79 WS, Corsair H100i, Cooler Master HAF 932 case with Bitfenix Spectre Pro
Black 23cm front fan (all other 120/140mm fans replaced with Nanoxia Deep
Silence), Sandisk Extreme II 128GB for Windows paging file, bluray writer,
Thermaltake Toughpower 1200W Modular, Startech 4-bay SAS425 4x2.5" device
holder... think that's the lot.

My own AE system is a similar spec, but it has 4 x GTX 580 3GB - faster than two
Titan Blacks. Pics/links available on request.

Last month I built a combined photoprocessing/AE system for someone with an almost
identical spec, except in that instance the guy was doing a lot of photo stuff
which would benefit from modern accelerated OpenGL performance (he uses other apps
aswell as AE and Photoshop). Thus, we went with a Quadro K5000 4GB and two GTX
580s; the K5000 is high enough up the Quadro scale to be useful for CUDA in AE,
while at the same time very good for his imaging work - one example test took 4
minutes on his existing dual-XEON X58 Mac pro, vs. less than 10 seconds on the PC
I made. The K5000 though is expensive (I managed to get a used card for 690
UKP), so unless you're doing something specialised beyond just AE, you're much
better off with a 780Ti or multiple GTX 580s, though the latter option would
require a better PSU (I just keep buying new or barely used ThermalTake Toughpower
1475W units via normal auction, saved almost a thousand so far).

Ian.