Comp upgrade advice and comments requested - Gen purpose workstation

[Mark R]

I need to upgrade an aging E6600 system, which no longer capacitates stuff like video editing, photo processing, VM experimentation and development.

I will be doing some numerical simulation, large dataset statistics, as well as mixed environment development. I intend to do some light HDV editing, and a moderate amount of photoshop/LR work, as well as the odd bit of gaming.

My intention is that this will be a temporary upgrade, to hold things over until Haswell is established, and I decide whether to go along the GPGPU development line. After the major upgrade, it is intended that this system would be repurposed for NAS/home server duty (in otherwords, I'm not building to throw away in a year - and yes, I also realise it will be major overkill for a NAS, but I'm sure there will be tasks that I can throw at it).

Location: UK
Budget: £1000 available for system upgrade, £1000 available for monitors.

Case: Existing ATX case
PSU: Existing Corsair 450W
SSD: Existing Intel G2 160 GB
HDD: 2x 3T Barracuda 7200.14 (£220)
Mobo: Asus P8B-M (£140)
CPU: E3-1225 V2 (£220)
RAM: 4x Crucial DDR3 1333 Unbuffered ECC (£120)
GPU: Existing 8800 GTX
OS: Win 7 HP (new)

Monitors: 2x Dell U2711 (£1000).

Any ideas? I want something a bit better than the normal low-end consumer stuff, hence my choice of Xeon, which doesn't come with much cost penalty.

As to why I didn't want to buy a proper server/workstation - well, I have a lot of the core kit already, and I don't need 24/7 uptime support + I want the flexibility to repurpose between workstation and server, if needed.

Any comments? Am I going about this the wrong way?

 

[Ken g6]

I want something a bit better than the normal low-end consumer stuff, hence my choice of Xeon, which doesn't come with much cost penalty.

Better in what way? Your Xeon, plus Xeon mobo and ECC RAM will ensure that there are no RAM errors, but do you really need that?

If you're not overclocking, in any case, you should probably bump up the Xeon to the E3-1230 V2, which gets you hyper-threading and avoids the onboard GPU. Otherwise you're getting a glorified i5-3470.

Next, realize that if you don't need RAM error correction, most 7x-series chipsets support the latest Xeons. So if you're not overclocking, you could go with a B75 easily. Edit: ASRock is particularly good at supporting Xeons.

If you do want to overclock, that would mean going with an i5-3570k and a Z77 or Z75 mobo.

P.S. That's a lot of TB of drives. Are you putting them in RAID-1 or something?

 

[mfenn]

There is no silicon difference between a Xeon E3 V2 and an Ivy Bridge i7. Neither is higher quality then the other, it all comes down to what features you want at a given price point.

On the topic of ECC, I tend to agree with Ken. Unless the simulations that you run go for weeks with no possibility of restart (basically, a piss-poor code) then ECC is probably overkill and you could save a lot of money by going with a B75 and non-ECC RAM.