mfenn
Elite Member
There are items in your build that I wouldn't touch for love nor money. Seagate drives suck and are unreliable. WD Blacks all the way
Debunked above.
ASRock is still a rather new entity and have yet to prove themselves to me. I have the X79 E11 M/B and there are still quite a few glitches in it. The XMP would not let me go above 2133 even though I set it for 2400. I would save and restart and then go back into the bios and it was back to 2133. I have flashed the bios a few times already. It seems like they have a new one every two weeks. The board features are next to none but they haven't got their full act together yet. I will stick to Asus for the time being on important builds. If you put the hardware that I have on an X79 Asus board your prices would skyrocket. The same system I already priced out with and Intel X79 system and it rang in at $400.00 more. When I did some further analysis I found out that the overall performance did not equal the price increase.
Purely anecdotal. I could regale you with stories of buggy ASUS and Gigabyte boards, but that would be equally pointless.
By the way having 2 video cards make a tremendous difference in rendering. The amount of available GPU processors speed up all rendering just as the amount of cuda core does the same. Cuda cores = GPU processors. They are essentially the same thing under a different name.
First off, "CUDA cores" are Nvidia marketing-speak for shaders. I think everybody here understands that they are the same. Second, it is well known that the Adobe suite's GPU acceleration does not even scale up to the top-end single card, let alone two.
Corsair SSD drives are yesterday's news. The Neutrons are the slowest of the lot. For me now it's Samsung 840 Pro's
For Ram it's G.Skill or nothing. Many people tell me about Corsair Dominator Platinum. For dollar value G.Skill has the exact same timings for 1/2 the price. Corsair sucks in some departments. The ram is way too expensive just for having the name. Their SSD's need a makeover.
You have clearly not been paying attention to the SSD market. The Corsair Neutron series uses LAMD controllers which are highly-regarded for their performance consistency. You want consistency on a real work machine, not something built for synthetic benchmarks.
PowerColor is the lowest name in Graphics cards. Asus or Sapphire make much better products.
There is really very little variance among GPU AIB board manufacturers. They are building with the same raw materials on the same processes. You just pay more for the ASUS name.
Bought an H80i cooler. Quieter and less interference with the airflow over other components.
Quieter is debatable, and a huge weakness of AIO water coolers is that they provide no cooling of ancillary parts near the socket area. Do not try to spin that into a strength.
Not impressed with the case. I bought a Bitfenix case and put in beefier quiet running fans. Very stylish and has kid proofing lock up for the flash drive / eSata connectors so his kid can't run into a flash drive and break it off. It also locks away the on/off buttons so they can't shut down or reset the system accidentally while he's doing a large render. Nothing sticks out of the case and even the DVD drive locks away so they can't play with it as well. If I put your components in his system it would slow it down a lot.
OK, that's fine. Get whatever ~$100 case you like, but know that the R4 is a very nice case.