Considerations for a little workstation

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1

Hi to all, I here because I’m going to build my own pc. My doubts come by the fact that I’m building a little workstation to work with Unreal engine, unity and blender. I’m not interested in gaming: I need a pc that can stay days to work, not a pc with very big performances.

Well, I received as a present a P9X79 WS mobo,and a xeon e5 2609-v2, so now I have to complete the setup.

First of all I was looking for the thermal paste. In fist place I was going for the Artic Silver 5, but on the official page they say that it can have problems with xeon processors. So I found the Artic MX-4. It’s a good paste used with a xeon processor?

Now the case. I’ve 3 choices: Corsair Obsidian Series 750D Airflow Edition, SilverStone RV03B-W, In Win E-ATX GRone.

They all supports SSI-CEB mobo.
-The first one is a modular one. Not a great deal but it could be convenient
-The second one mount the mobo at 90 degree, and mount the power supply in the corner far from the mobo.
-The third one seem to have the better cooling ratio, thanks to 10 140mm fans.

Just about the power supply, I’m going to buy a evga Supernova 850 g2 or a Seasonic M12II-850 Evo.

Ram: starting with 2x8gb DDR3, 2400 MHz Vegeance Pro

Now the big deal: AMD Radeon R9 Fury x Vs nVidia gtx 980ti vs AMD rx 480

It’s big deal cause the first one work better with Unreal and Game engine software. In render times it can reach the gtx, but it’s not so much far away (10-30% more render time).

Pros and cons:
AMD Radeon R9 Fury
Its liquid cooling system make me confident about the fact that I can let the pc work days and nights, buy a cooling system for the nVidia card, not only have a cost, but it’s so big it consume me 3 slots.

Crossfire technology allows me to use different graphic cards, SLI allow you to use only cards of the same family. The 980ti has got a “outdated” technology due to the advent of the 1xxx series.
I’m planning a long therm investment on this pc, so with AMD I know I will use the card until his death or until I’ll finish my slots. 2 years? nVidia force me to change them all.

nVidia gtx 980ti
It costs less and with the release of the gtx 1800ti the cost will decrease : at the cost of 3 AMD I can have four of them (I’m looking for used ones.

It has 6 Gb of vram vs the 4 of the AMD card (N.B.: when rendering all textures and BVH are loadend on vRam. neither SLI or Crossfire increase the amount of ram, but it will use always the minor memory card slot)

SLI is better performing (approximately 160-190% vs 130-160%) but have more issues

About the rx 480: it come with 8gb of ram, its processors have the same clock frequence of the r9 fury x. With only half his cores it come for a very low price, and it come with full support for vr development. My last idea about it is to use both a rx 480 and a gtx 980ti, the first for unreal and other software, the second only for render time.

I think it’s all.

Now I’d like to know your opinions and your advice. I’ve looked for this setup because I’ve got a starting badget of about 700€ (for the interested ones the price of this setup is 659,11-722,83 euros), but I’m going to improve it with the time with a better processor, new graphic card, ram, power supply and battery backup.

2

If you have a Octane license I would definitely recommend you spend some time looking at the threads in the General Discussion forum that talk about computer builds. There are a lot of people who are doing builds from 3 cards to 8 cards plus. In the threads there have been people who have successfully ran 4 cards on air with out problems, but I think that they didn’t overclock them. I think the major key here is that they are using very roomy cases with a lot of air flow. At home I have a very large case for my computer (http://www.coolermaster.com/case/lan-box-haf-series/haf-xb-evo/) and my cards have never gotten above 80C even under 100% usage (the GTX980 runs cooler than my GTX460 and never gets above 74C). Even my CPU, that is overclocked at 3.8Ghz, never gets above 68C.

Most people are still recommending Nvidia cards over AMD as there is still some issues with drivers and support for OpenCL. But things are getting better, it all depends on how patient you are. :slight_smile:

3

that motherboard is a SSI-CEB, I need a e-atx case.

About the time I’ve not in a hurry. I plan to buy the graphic card in February and the second one in June.

The amd vs nVidia issue born due the fact that software like unreal engine doesn’t work with sli or crossfire, so maybe, considering that i’ve 4 16pin slots I can easily spend a little amount (120/150 euros) on an used rx 480 to make that software run faster, that is my priority: I will not have problem rendering for days with that pc. Due that fact I’d like to have a well cooled, stable pc over a fast one. With a second card and with a powerfull processor I will be able to still use it.

I seem crazy?there are better solutions?

4

E-atx motherboards do fit in the HAF XB EVO case (http://www.overclock.net/t/1329750/official-cooler-master-haf-xb-club/10), but I only brought it up as a large and roomy example that also doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. Sounds like you have a good plan. I can’t comment on the unreal engine, as I don’t game. But for Cycles, at least right now, Nvidia is better. Cycles doesn’t care about SLI or Crossfire, but the more GPUs you have the happier you will be (also more VRAM is better).

5

In my experience…every time I was having a good plan…I was fail a lot. I’ve read on blender stackexchange that if you have multiple gpu blender let you decide if you want to render as one gpu, or with all of them giving different tiles to any gpu. Now I don’t know if I can link that discussion but it was an answer of the 2013 edited in February 2016

6

Yes this is still the case, you can decide which GPU you want to render on. In my case I use my 460 to drive my displays and use the 980 to render on. But I can include the 460 if I want to, but that would limit my available vram (to 2 GB or less) and my 460 is so old now it doesn’t add much to the mix. I have room on my motherboard for three GPUs, which gives me some upgrade room. One of these years I would like to get a pair of 1070s or 1080s and use the 980 for the displays. Maybe when they are cheaper. :slight_smile:

7

Have you see the last benchmark about gpu for blender?it seem that 980ti can render faster than 1080, maybe it will change with the 1080ti, but I think that for the moment it will more affordable then one 1080ti. Let see if it will be true in February when the 1080ti will come out

8

That is probably caused by Cycles not being upgraded to support the Pascal chips yet. It will affect the 1080ti as well, but devs are good at updating Cycles for new chip sets, so it should work better soon I would think.