BestConfigs Poll Results: Your Winning Builds

I am visiting tom's daily (like every morning with my coffee) and I never saw the pools and when they accepted them. I only see the winners announced. Because yet again, the high-end workstation is rather disappointing. I give all kudos to the people that spend time to put them together and I do completely respect their work. but I do guess they do not use productivity software on a daily basis or rather not a large number of them.

A lot of people are overestimating the usage of GPUs in today's software. GPU acceleration is rather small and does not always use even half of the GPUs potential. Going over a K2000 or K4000 or a GTX660/760 does almost nothing in Premier, Photoshop or 2D vector packages. AE does exhibit small benefits, but nothing as major as sinking that money in a CPU. On Autodesk's front - you need the video card just for the display in Maya/Max/Autocad/etc. And at the current project I am in, the 2 million poly rigged character moves as smooth on my office K4000 as on my home 650TI plus all the particles and fluids. Rendering is all CPU based. There are few GPU renderers, but the quality is nowhere near that of a good old CPU based software renderer. 99% of the professionaly used renderers are CPU based. Vray, Arnold, Maxwell, PRM, MentalRay, etc. I-ray is yet to make a splash in the production world and up until now acts as a nice tech-demo or used in arhi previz. The Foundry's software is the same deal. NUKE and NUKEX are still (even though they say it does) very limited to what extend it uses CUDA. Tracking software, like 3D Equalizer - CPU does the work, GPU accelerated the image processing and loading. Some might argue about MentalRay and VRay IPR, but those are in their major usage - a preview renderer, before you batch render on the CPU. As it stands today - end of 2014 and beginning of 2015, spending more money on a GPU than a CPU for a workstation is a complete waste in 95% of the time. Unless you are going real-time interactive of real-time preview work - GPU is rather unused. And this covers the majority of Adobe, Autodesk, The Foundry and software used for visuals I use regularly.

I can not say anything about audio, because I am not in the audio and sound design sphere, so somebody with some real experience might want to cover that.

Cheers

Typo in the article: AMD Radeon’s Low Power Space Saving NAS
And further on re: Nas - I think besides the T series CPU it's completely wrong. Case which supports only 3 hd's and none-hotplug. DVD drive which is near useless (or 100% useless after the OS install) Too expensive mobo, too powerful PSU.

8gb is decent ram for NAS, but with cheap RAM which most systems could use for cache it would crime not to add more.

I also agree with Shneiky - I don't know how many people voted for this workstation build - but besides GPU (I won't know much about it) workstation is about typically multiple CPUs, server grade reliability supported by server grade hardware. Yes it's much more expensive, but guess what - it's worth it if you consider value of downtime for high paying professional.

I haven't seen one of these "poll" builds for months and now there are winners. No one knew which explains why I see some bad build "winners". In the future it would be nice to vote.

Where did this come from? I have never heard of this best configs thing before, it would be nice to know so I can vote next time.