First-Time Builder Seeks Advice For 3D Workstation

[kendoubleu]

Hello,

I'm planning on building a workstation computer. I have never built a computer before but have been researching a lot about what components will be best. Would be great to hear your comments and suggestions!

The main software being used will be After Effects CS4 and 3DSMax 2011. The main goal is to reduce rendering time and scene manipulation time in 3DSMax although will also be performing some occasional editing in Premiere.

Will be buying parts from within the USA and prefer not to spend much more than $3,500. Although I have read that in some cases it makes more sense to build cheaper computers more often, I'm hoping this computer will last as long as possible. I currently have an Alienware that has been running solid for the last 7 years. No parts have ever failed and it's still working great but obviously a bit slow.

Not super interested in overclocking and the motherboard I am thinking about doesn't support it anyway. Here is what I have come up with:

Intel Xeon X5670 Westmere 2.93GHz LGA 1366 95W Six-Core Server Processor BX80614X5670
(Planning on starting with 1 processor and adding another as prices drop in a year or whenever they might do that?)

SUPERMICRO MBD-X8DAL-i-O Dual LGA 1366 Intel 5500 ATX Dual Intel Xeon 5500 and 5600 Series Server Motherboard

Kingston 12GB (3 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) ECC Registered Server Memory Model KVR1333D3D4R9SK3/12G
(Is it okay that this brand has not been tested with the motherboard according to Supermicro's website?)

CORSAIR Professional Series AX750 750W ATX12V v2.31 / EPS12V v2.92 80 PLUS GOLD Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply (Pretty sure this supports the two 8 pin connectors needed for the motherboard.)

PNY VCQ2000-PB Quadro 2000 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 Workstation Video Card

(1) Western Digital VelociRaptor WDBACN3000ENC-NRSN 300GB 10000 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive


(2) Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
(Considered RAID 0 but now leaning against it.)

COOLER MASTER HAF X RC-942-KKN1 Black Steel/ Plastic ATX Full Tower Computer Case
XIGMATEK Intel Core i7 compatible Dark Knight-S1283V REV.W with ACK-I5361 120mm Long Life Bearing CPU Cooler I7 i5 775 1155 ...
(Will this fit? Is it overkill?)

Nippon Labs Delux 3.5" Internal All In One Card Reader/Writer with USB2.0 & eSATA Ports Model ICR-BB

Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit 1-Pack for System Builders - OEM

Can anyone please also suggest a firewire 800 card?

Thanks in advance for taking the time to sort through this. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

 

[DominionSeraph]

What research have you done into GPU acceleration? You very well may be FAR better off throwing more GPU at your problem than CPU.

Also, Velociraptor is almost never the right answer. If you need speedy I/O, go SSD.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Also, what about render farming? I really don't know anything about it, but I've heard of it spoken of in relation to these things. When a single 6-core Phenom rig can be put together for $350, perhaps a more modest main rig with a shelf of Phenoms might give you the most processing for your dollar?

 

[DominionSeraph]

Also, as this is bound to come up:
As this is apparently your livelihood, can you afford downtime? Others will undoubtedly steer you away from a homebuilt and towards something that provides NBD onsite support.
As this looks pretty heavy, that may not be a bad idea.

 

[DominionSeraph]

I think I'm done with my initial thoughts on this matter. XD

 

[aviat72]

I suggest you check out the Dell outlet for Dell Precision Systems. You get up to 5 years of NBD warranties and often get very high end CPUs at throw away price. Every thing else (hard disk, ram, Video Cards) are commodity items which you can plug and play with, without voiding your core warranty.

Also though SSDs are great, when it comes to long term reliability and predictability of operation times, the old hard disks still have a place. In fact some non Sandforce based SSDs do worse than the VRs in certain tests (random Writes I think)! SSDs are great when it comes to large sequential access.

 

[DominionSeraph]

SSDs are great when it comes to large sequential access.

Large sequential can be handled by spindle drives just fine. Spinpoint F3 is over 130MB/s in outer sectors and averages over 110MB/s. It's in random where spindle suffers and can dip to well under 1MB/s. That's why I said SSD.

And I don't think anyone was going to suggest Toshiba- or Indilinx-controller SSD.

 

[OVerLoRDI]

Also the power supply is not a server power supply so i doubt it has built in support for dual 8 pin processor plugs. 8 pin pci-e != 8 pin cpu plug.

 

[mfenn]

I suggest you check out the Dell outlet for Dell Precision Systems. You get up to 5 years of NBD warranties and often get very high end CPUs at throw away price. Every thing else (hard disk, ram, Video Cards) are commodity items which you can plug and play with, without voiding your core warranty.

Agree

Also though SSDs are great, when it comes to long term reliability and predictability of operation times, the old hard disks still have a place. In fact some non Sandforce based SSDs do worse than the VRs in certain tests (random Writes I think)! SSDs are great when it comes to large sequential access.

This is actually completely backwards. HDDs are perfectly fine when it comes to sequential access, but are really bad at random access. SSDs are blazing fast in both. I agree with DominionSeraph that the OP should go with an SSD.

Also the power supply is not a server power supply so i doubt it has built in support for dual 8 pin processor plugs. 8 pin pci-e != 8 pin cpu plug.

This is very true in the general case. However, the AX750 does actually have two 4+4 pin EPS12V connectors.

OP, what you have looks good except that you should put a Raptor in place of the SSD. I want to restate that if this is something that you or your business depends on: get a prebuilt system with a warranty!

 

[aviat72]

Agree

This is actually completely backwards. HDDs are perfectly fine when it comes to sequential access, but are really bad at random access. SSDs are blazing fast in both. I agree with DominionSeraph that the OP should go with an SSD.

My observation was based on the following tests
http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.p...sk=view&id=278&Itemid=60&limit=1&limitstart=7

Notice how some of the SSDs have very poor random write performance, comprehensively beaten by the VR, and other HDDs. This might be mitigated with the newer controllers (those tests are old) but there is always a chance that random writes throw your SSD in to a state it is not able to recover too well from.

What all this means is that under certain usage patterns SSD performance can degrade significantly; something which you need to keep in mind. The newer SSDs do not seem to be showing this problem in the benchmarks; only real world experience will tell though.

 

[mfenn]

My observation was based on the following tests
http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.p...sk=view&id=278&Itemid=60&limit=1&limitstart=7

Notice how some of the SSDs have very poor random write performance, comprehensively beaten by the VR, and other HDDs. This might be mitigated with the newer controllers (those tests are old) but there is always a chance that random writes throw your SSD in to a state it is not able to recover too well from.

What all this means is that under certain usage patterns SSD performance can degrade significantly; something which you need to keep in mind. The newer SSDs do not seem to be showing this problem in the benchmarks; only real world experience will tell though.

Wow, those tests are with some really old SSDs my friend. Might I suggest a little light reading? All of your concerns have been thoroughly covered on the main site.
Kingston SSDNow V+100 Review
The SSD Diaries: Crucial's RealSSD C300
2010 Value SSD (~$100) Roundup: Kingston and OCZ take on Intel
OCZ's Agility 2 Reviewed: The First SF-1200 with MP Firmware
Corsair's Force SSD Reviewed: SF-1200 is Very Good
The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD
Intel X25-M G2: Dissected and Performance Preview

Here are a few of the most telling charts:

Notice how even the slowest SSDs are much faster than the Raptor, with the fastest ones being between 10 and 100 times faster? These aren't super expensive SSD either, the C300 and Sandforce are very competitively priced.

 

[aviat72]

Some more thoughts:

1. The motherboard you suggested has an ATX form factor is and short of real-estate. Comments on NewEgg suggest that air-flow becomes a problem and things start heating up.

2. Since a single CPU is causing air-flow problems, a double CPU system will likely be even more in trouble since the second heat-sink will restrict air-flow even more.

3. Because of the lack of real-estate, it has only two PCI-ex slots. If you want to add two graphic cards, either for GPU/CUDA needs or to drive multiple monitors you will not be left with much extra (except a PCI). Overtime you may want to add other stuff like revodrives etc so the lack of expansion capability is a question mark.

 

[aviat72]

Wow, those tests are with some really old SSDs my friend.
....
Notice how even the slowest SSDs are much faster than the Raptor, with the fastest ones being between 10 and 100 times faster? These aren't super expensive SSD either, the C300 and Sandforce are very competitively priced.

mfenn:
I had noted that those tests were quite old.

Based on the little I have read about the SSDs, because of the fundamental design, the probability of those falling into a steep valley from which it is unable to recover from is measurably finite. And this probability goes up as the disk starts getting full; that is why the better ones dedicate (10-15%) for scratch space for the controller to do its magic.

There are several issues with SSD's in enterprise class applications which I read about here
http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-slc-mlc-notes.html
Interesting interview from last week showing why 80% of this company's installed base was MLC.
http://www.storagesearch.com/fusion-io-int-mlc-banks.html

 

[mfenn]

mfenn:
I had noted that those tests were quite old.

Based on the little I have read about the SSDs, because of the fundamental design, the probability of those falling into a steep valley from which it is unable to recover from is measurably finite. And this probability goes up as the disk starts getting full; that is why the better ones dedicate (10-15%) for scratch space for the controller to do its magic.

There are several issues with SSD's in enterprise class applications which I read about here
http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-slc-mlc-notes.html
Interesting interview from last week showing why 80% of this company's installed base was MLC.
http://www.storagesearch.com/fusion-io-int-mlc-banks.html

So we agree that this is a non-issue outside of enterprise applications due to reserved spare area?

 

[kendoubleu]

Thanks for all of your comments and suggestions!

Honestly, I was not expecting people to suggest buying a pre-built computer.

I understand the importance of a warranty and technical support however. It would be a shame to have wasted all of the time spent researching components for the build but I really want to do what is best.

Will be giving this some serious thought over the next few days. If anyone has any further comments, I will of course factor them in.

Thanks.

 

[DominionSeraph]

I understand the importance of a warranty and technical support however. It would be a shame to have wasted all of the time spent researching components for the build but I really want to do what is best.

Well, your CPU/GPU/RAM/storage requirements all carry over. Getting the wrong prebuilt isn't gonna do you any good.

Anyway, let us know what you find. I'm especially interested in what you find as to GPU computing, since I believe both the programs you stated can make use of it, but your budget doesn't seem to allow for the good Quadros. So I'm kinda wondering if you'll end up with GTX 570's as your best option.

 

[mfenn]

Well, your CPU/GPU/RAM/storage requirements all carry over. Getting the wrong prebuilt isn't gonna do you any good.

:thumbsup:

Anyway, let us know what you find. I'm especially interested in what you find as to GPU computing, since I believe both the programs you stated can make use of it, but your budget doesn't seem to allow for the good Quadros. So I'm kinda wondering if you'll end up with GTX 570's as your best option.

My observations on that subject is that getting a super-powerful GPU doesn't really scale all that well in real GPGPU computing applications. All of those applications still have some CPU component and still have to move data into and out of main memory. GPUs are so good at what they do that even a moderate one cause the other components to become the bottleneck. I'm still interested to see what the OP discovers though!

 

[Davidh373]

Ok, as long as you aren't paying for any other renderers or plugins, Mental Ray and CS4 don't use Graphics processing.

The things I would change in your build in order of importance

Velociraptor vs. SSD = SSD

WD Caviar Black vs. Samsung Spinpoint F3 = Samsung Spinpoint F3

http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Spinpo...2799468&sr=8-1

The rest of your build looks amazing for a 3D workstation. I do 3D work myself!

 

[Davidh373]

Anyway, let us know what you find. I'm especially interested in what you find as to GPU computing, since I believe both the programs you stated can make use of it, but your budget doesn't seem to allow for the good Quadros. So I'm kinda wondering if you'll end up with GTX 570's as your best option.

You would have to spend thousands of dollars on plugins or external renderers to make proper use of a graphics card for 3D Rendering... believe me, I've looked... 🙁

 

[wwswimming]

Thanks for all of your comments and suggestions!

Honestly, I was not expecting people to suggest buying a pre-built computer.

I understand the importance of a warranty and technical support however. It would be a shame to have wasted all of the time spent researching components for the build but I really want to do what is best.

Will be giving this some serious thought over the next few days. If anyone has any further comments, I will of course factor them in.

Thanks.

unless you are running into a wall on particles or something else that's really CPU intensive, you'd probably find the 6 core 980X to meet your needs. $1000 for the CPU, you can do the rest of the system for $1500, more if you splurge on the SSD.

you do not need a FireGL or a Quadro. if you pick your video card wisely (stable drivers for plug-ins & aps), you can get a boatload of performance from a good nVidia or AMD/ATI video card.

 

[aviat72]

Honestly, I was not expecting people to suggest buying a pre-built computer.

I understand the importance of a warranty and technical support however. It would be a shame to have wasted all of the time spent researching components for the build but I really want to do what is best.
.

You are not wasting time when researching components. You are getting a better feel of what you can do with DIY.

Once you know what your DIY rig will cost, then you can do a comparison with pre-built and see if it makes sense. In workstation class machines there is less volume so DIY rigs will often cost significantly less than pre-built. However this also means that there are excellent opportunities if you can get a surplus. The target market for pre-built values strong support and uptime, which is a great benefit.

A busted part on a DIY and the RMA can take many days to process with all the hassles of shipping the part, waiting for replacement, time wasted talking to tech support etc. In a pre-built all it takes is a phone call and a guy shows up to fix your computer next day. A DIY can easily be down for a week or two; a pre-built will not be down for more than 2 business days.

I have a thread open here where I thought about what I will do with my next rig but was able to score those Precisions at below part costs, so it made it a no-brainer.

 

[Davidh373]

A busted part on a DIY and the RMA can take many days to process with all the hassles of shipping the part, waiting for replacement, time wasted talking to tech support etc. In a pre-built all it takes is a phone call and a guy shows up to fix your computer next day. A DIY can easily be down for a week or two; a pre-built will not be down for more than 2 business days.

My friend's graphics card went bad and he had to delay all his projects for a month. You could always get a $40 card for emergencies though. Most of the parts that go bad are normally cheap to temporarily replace. For example, you don't NEED 12GB for a computer to run, so you could easily pop $50 on newegg for 4GB DDR3. If your $500 GPU goes bad and has an RMA, you can pop $40 on newegg for a poopy one. Assuming you aren't 100% dependant on your rig being at max potential 24/7 anyway. Usually you could buy those in advance for a safety net if you really feel the need, or it will take newegg 2-3 days to ship. It's better than waiting a month to use the computer anyway.

On the other hand, Dell will give you local, day of call support, which is wonderful. My instructor at school actually recommends BOXX computers, because they have 3 year on site support. They also have some really neat desktop replacements with i7 950s, 970s, and 980xs. Dell also often offers refurb stuff for cheap and you still have warranty day of call service.

 

[aviat72]

My friend's graphics card went bad and he had to delay all his projects for a month. You could always get a $40 card for emergencies though. Most of the parts that go bad are normally cheap to temporarily replace. For example, you don't NEED 12GB for a computer to run, so you could easily pop $50 on newegg for 4GB DDR3. If your $500 GPU goes bad and has an RMA, you can pop $40 on newegg for a poopy one. Assuming you aren't 100% dependant on your rig being at max potential 24/7 anyway. Usually you could buy those in advance for a safety net if you really feel the need, or it will take newegg 2-3 days to ship. It's better than waiting a month to use the computer anyway.

That is the problem; the costs start creeping up. And if you factor in time they REALLY creep up. Not only is the RMA etc. an issue, but also the diagnosis. And if out of warranty (many have only one year) you are out of luck.

On the other hand, Dell will give you local, day of call support, which is wonderful. My instructor at school actually recommends BOXX computers, because they have 3 year on site support. They also have some really neat desktop replacements with i7 950s, 970s, and 980xs. Dell also often offers refurb stuff for cheap and you still have warranty day of call service.

Dell is unique among the big ones that they offer exactly the same warranty and support as their brand new systems on their refurbs. And the refurbs have likely gone through additional testing so burn-in risks are lower.

 

[mfenn]

unless you are running into a wall on particles or something else that's really CPU intensive, you'd probably find the 6 core 980X to meet your needs. $1000 for the CPU, you can do the rest of the system for $1500, more if you splurge on the SSD.

you do not need a FireGL or a Quadro. if you pick your video card wisely (stable drivers for plug-ins & aps), you can get a boatload of performance from a good nVidia or AMD/ATI video card.

No, actually the X5670 is exactly want the OP wants (prebuilt or DIY). It's the fastest 95W 6-core Westmere. Of course, he will want to buy through Dell or HP because they don't pay $1.5k per CPU.

 

[kendoubleu]

Again, all great and valid comments.

I spoke with a representative from HP that stated it was not a good idea to get a system with one processor with the intention of adding a second processor later. He claimed that because the processors aren't made at the same time, there could be issues. Is this true?

Here are todays reoccurring thoughts that slosh around in my head just in case anyone is interested:

If I decide to build it myself, in the event that something goes wrong down the road, I do have my current (although slow) computer to fall back on. Also have a friend that I work with sometimes that could potentially bail me out mid-project. I maintain backups pretty well.

Seems that when I try to price out a similiar system to the one I would want to build, they all seem to be at least $1500 more. Boxx, HP, and Dell.

The Dell outlet deals are very tempting although none of the currently listed ones come configured exactly as I want. So there would inevitably more work to do.

Seems like there is a great online community of people that are willing to help others out of a jam when stuff does go wrong.

Again, thanks for all the help. Finding it increasingly difficult to make a decision.