New workstation help

[AlexP]

Looking to build a new workstation for home.
Im trying to decide between going for Intel Core i7 4930K Extreme, Ivy Bridge-E, Six Core, 3.4GHz, 3.9GHz Turbo

Or

Building a dual Xeon box with 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2690 v2, S2011, Ivy Bridge, 10 Core, 3GHz, 20MB

Obviously the price difference is significant, but if the performance is worth it then thats fine.

I have no render farm at home so I want to be able to do fast preview renders.

Looking at the graphics cards, would be nice to use VrayRT but I guess the GPU is not so good for this at the moment due to some features not working. That said, is it worth going for the Nvidia Titan 6gb etc. or should I just get something a bit smaller.

Any insight appreciated

[eyepiz]

Dual Xeons hands down!...
The performance difference between a 6-core is huge, as for the video card I would go with a 780 or something in that line. I have (4) titans and almost never use RT, to many unsupported features, unless your doing something small, simple and have no need for advanced shaders than RT may be useful. The progressive sampler with dual Xeons is bad ass!...make me wish with I spent the Titan money on dual 12 core Xeons instead.

[AlexP]

Hmm yeah that is my current thinking. I do want to get into RT a bit more, especially without the render farm. But I almost exclusively work in Arch Viz and not too sure how useful it will be for me.
Progressive sampler might be very useful though, In which case I guess its better to go with the Xeons?

[eyepiz]

Hmm yeah that is my current thinking. I do want to get into RT a bit more, especially without the render farm. But I almost exclusively work in Arch Viz and not too sure how useful it will be for me.
Progressive sampler might be very useful though, In which case I guess its better to go with the Xeons?

I do interior Arch Viz and believe me RT GPU is practically useless, many will disagree, but I have yet to see a good Arch Viz interior rendered in GPU much less an animation.

After spending over 4k on Titans and not having one single job were it was actually useful or in many cases worked. I gave up and upgraded to a dual 8-core Xeons system coming form an OC'd 4.8 (6)-Core i7....man I was blown away! could not be happier. The Progressive sampler is amazing for previews, its what's I was expecting from RT, but that never happened.

[AlexP]

Very useful info
Maybe I'll dump the titan and go for a less pricey but super gaming card.

[Nicinus]

This seems to be a common conclusion, I've been thinking along the same lines myself. There is also talk about a 6GB 780 coming in the next months.

Which motherboard did you go for?

[AlexP]

im looking at some Asus one, mainly because its one of the only choices on the website I was looking at.

Still in 2 minds about whether to build myself from scratch or save myself some hassle and order a custom build.

[eyepiz]

im looking at some Asus one, mainly because its one of the only choices on the website I was looking at.

Still in 2 minds about whether to build myself from scratch or save myself some hassle and order a custom build.

Custom build!...

Save's you some money and it fun. This is my ASUS Z9PE-D8 WS workstation.

[Morbid Angel]

I actually recently bought a few really solid machines from craigslist/ebay. Dual 6 core xeons with 2.6 ghz and quadro 4000 cards one with 24 gb one with 38 gb of ram for $1100 each I think machines like that still perform fairly well especially for how much they cost

[AlexP]

Nice, I could never build it as tidily as that