A little help building a workstation

[Zamudio]

Hi, I'm looking for some help building a workstation, and probably some render nodes.

I Use 3dstudio Max a lot, After effects, Photshop, A bit of premiere and illustrator, and Im looking forward to Use realflow, Fumefx or some other particle simulators

First of all, I have a budget of somewhere around $5000 USD and here's what I have come up to so far.

Case: Rosewill blackhawk ultra
Motherboard: EVGA SR-2
CPU: Xeon 5650 x 2 (need some advice here because im not sure if its worth it to spend about 2k on this processors, or about 1k on the 5645)
PSU: Corsair HX 1050
SSD: Samsung PRO 256 Gig (mainly for OS and Software installation)
SSD: Samsung PRO 512 Gig (mainly for storing textures, video, and current projects)
HDDs: Two 2 TB mechanical, Backups and Storing my files, Probably in RAID 1
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3 1600 48 Gigs in total (that's all the mobo can handle)
Custom Watercooled not going for any fancy looks, just a very efficient cooling solution since I plan to overclock those xeons

Video card.......
Not sure what will do best for me, I have seen the new titan around, but Im not sure if this is the best way to go ATM, I have never used a Quadro card before, just gaming cards, So I don't know which way to go, BUT any way I go, I will keep on adding cards in the future to stack it to the GPU processing

OK, that's my idea of a decent workstation, Will pair it with some Dell ultrasharp monitors (I have a 2 monitor config atm, does it worth it to have 3 monitors?)

As for the nodes. they are more simple, here it goes

Case: Thermaltake Armor A30
Mobo: ASUS Rampage IV LGA 2011
Video card: Evga GX 650 (cheap card since no one will be working on this computers)
PSU: Corsair bronze 430W Modular
CPU: Intel 3930K (I do plan to overclock them too)
SSD HD: Samsung PRO 128 Gigs
Memory: Ripjaws DDR3 16 gigs (4x4gb)
CPU Cooler: Corsair Hydro H80i

So, mostly my concerns are:

Workstation
Do I need to water cool also the chipset if I plan to overclock the board? I do live in a place where we are usually at 30 to 40 c°
Do I need to water cool the video cards as well?
Do I need a larger PSU? And if so, why?
What Video card way should I go? I do understand that the industry is moving towards the GPU processing, but its not there, and probably it will take one or two years to get there, IMO, that being said, I do use VRAY RT a lot, mostly to check on my materials, reflections, and creating context in my images, PLEASE keep in mind the other software I mentioned, since some of them do use GPU for their renderings.
I havent done any watercooled station yet, but I've seen a lot of how to's, tutorials and whatnot, but if someone has something to add, please do so

Node
Any other suggestions for the MOBO? I'm not particulary fond of ASUS, or Gigabyte.
Do I need a better video card? I understand that GPU can be used over a network, but I'm not sure if this is viable because of the large amounts of data that must be shared over a network, any comments here will help
Do I need more memory?
How far could you think I could overclock this CPU with the corsair H80i?
Would you think another configuration will be more efficient than this one?

Well, I'm really looking forward to see what you guys think, hopefully Vlado could add some pointers too.
Thanks

[Zamudio]

Dead thread.

[Morbid Angel]

If you are looking for a workstation to last, then xeon/supermicro unoverclocked is the way to go. It will be stable, cool, fast etc...and rock solid. I've built a server like that few years ago and its still as solid and as fast as it was then.
If you are looking for performance then save your self some money, don't buy xeons, instead get i7, fastest you can afford. I just built two stations with single i7 3930k and overclocked it to 4.7 GHZ stable, and the single 6 core cpu performs faster then my dual 6 core xeon (12 cores in total), while costs half.

Also Im not sure and maybe its new but it used to not be possible to seat two xeons or xeons in general on a non server mother board (maybe its changed) but that was the issue for me when I went to build my server.

[Zamudio]

Thank you Dmitry, I don't have any experience working with xeons, but from all the research I have done lately, all the workstations use them, that is the XEONS with the socket LGA 2011, as opposed of what I mentioned on my build that uses the socket 1366, and, the SR2 motherboard is supposedly to be able to overclock them pretty well, and, as far as I understand, that particular family of xeons are the only ones that can be overclocked, since the rest of them come at a fixed speed.
But the E5 family come with turbo as well, something like a factory overclock per say, but I'm not sure, apparently if you place 2 xeons in the same mobo, the turbo feature is cut back in half.

Well, I sincerely hope that someone else can jump in the thread and share his/her experiences.
Thanks

[Morbid Angel]

Yeah keep in mind that generally overclocking will create some instability, for example no matter how well I overclocked my i7 3930k, every now and then it likes to do crazy stuff. Its ok because I used them for rendering only, but if I was working on them this could create some problems. Generally I found that you can have more or less stable overclocks but not at very high clocks.

[Donald2B]

Also keep in mind that the only major benefit from the Xeons are the multi threading capabilities. Most software doesn't utilize this feature so you may have a LOT of cores, but only one or two are working hard. I love my dual Xeon workstation at the office since I tend to do lots of DR rendering with it, so it is a huge benefit. If I need to do any type of simulation with Phoenix FD, my iCore7 machine with a higher clock speed is noticeably faster in those situations.

As for overclocking, it's great to squeeze the most out of your machine, but it can come with some severe stability issues. That little additional performance is not really worth it to me. I much prefer maximum stability especially when I am working with extremely heavy sims and memory intensive scenes.

[Franx]

...
As for overclocking, it's great to squeeze the most out of your machine, but it can come with some severe stability issues. That little additional performance is not really worth it to me. I much prefer maximum stability especially when I am working with extremely heavy sims and memory intensive scenes.

Going by numerous accounts, an overclocked 3930k with adequate cooling, up to 4.3 - 4.5 ghz, is as stable as can be. Been running mine for over a year with zero issues. A 4.5 ghz overclock represents roughly a 30% increase in clock speed, which is a pretty noticeable performance boost.

[Zamudio]

OK, so, in general, would you guys think that its a better investment to have a single 3930k and a few nodes to work with? instead of having a single dual xeon for work and production?

[joconnell]

Yep. If you've got one awesome workstation, your work pretty much stops as you hit render. If you can lay off a render to another machine and keep going, you've got more interactive hours to make changes. If your main workstation dies, having a node means a modicum of backup too. There's also a lot of parts of max that aren't multithreaded well so you get less benefit for having more, but slower cores. what'd be awesome is a single core, 20ghz machine

[Zamudio]

ah! I see!! OK, I'll give it a shot tonight at a new setup and see what you think about it!

edit: Thinking about this, it's also a better idea to have a node with xeons? so when I'm finally rendering the scene or sequence it will fully use all the cores available to them?

[Donald2B]

For nodes it always comes down to time. If you have very tight timelines and need as much production time as possible, then spend more money for the Xeons. But if you can keep your render times down, maybe DR over backburner with several nodes, many can do just fine with the i7.

It's the time vs money argument.

[Zamudio]

Couldn't be more clear to me now, thanks for that last imput Troy!