New workstation........(help).........

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

I got 1 question. Do you plan to overclock ?

[GLASS-CANVAS]

If you buy a Quadro GPU you may as well open the window to your office and throw your money out, they are that much of a rip off. The new price/performance sweet-spot king is the Nvidia GTX 460, and you can even get a VRay RT friendly 2GB card for when it goes GPU-based.

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/2GB-G...DVI-D-Sub-HDMI

This card is basically the 'new 8800GT', a former legendary GPU for Max. 3DSMax is all about DirectX, and the GeForce cards utterly destroy the Quadros for a quarter of the price.

[Saulman]

I got 1 question. Do you plan to overclock ?

errrrr. I hadn't planned to, but I don't know too much about overclocking tbh. Don't you run the risk of buggering up your system if you don't know what you're doing?



Glass-Canvas, thanks for the heads up on the graphics card. You sound very sure, but why the massive difference in price with the Quadro if the card isn't as good? Does you know what the Quadro offers that warrants the extra cost?

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Quatro is for hi tech CGI. Milions of poly bilions of wireframe and so on. U as personal usser wont never fell any difference between gtx and quatro. Im working in CGI from many years and to be honest only 1 time my GTX failed(made it hard for me) and it was when I had entire market place to work on with few thousand objects and so on...

Just get GTX, or w8 for Vray GPU release and get right card for it.

Overclocking is easy. With the rig I wrote u on 1st page u would have one of fastest pc on market if it let u overclock the xeons as high as 3.5/4 ghz... only faster would be 2x6core rig...

[tarontis]

Robdeja and Dadal both mention using Scan.co.uk

I would second this as they are based quite near you and are very good for buying both parts to assemble your own rig, or if you ring them and tell them what you do and what you need, they will spec you a system for pretty damn cheap. So can also haggle, for example you don't need that good a graphics card really so ask them to spec you a lower one and cut out a few hundred quid.

Getting certain i7's are faster for some things and also cheaper than a dual xeon build.

Drop Scan a line and get a quote, I reckon they could do you a faster set up than HP for less than £2k and you still have the year guarantee and can ring them any time for more advice.

I've heard good things about Boxx but they do seem ridiculously over-priced again

and yea HP just suck

[Saulman]

Quatro is for hi tech CGI. Milions of poly bilions of wireframe and so on. U as personal usser wont never fell any difference between gtx and quatro. Im working in CGI from many years and to be honest only 1 time my GTX failed(made it hard for me) and it was when I had entire market place to work on with few thousand objects and so on...

Just get GTX, or w8 for Vray GPU release and get right card for it.

Overclocking is easy. With the rig I wrote u on 1st page u would have one of fastest pc on market if it let u overclock the xeons as high as 3.5/4 ghz... only faster would be 2x6core rig...

Thanks DADAL,

I'm just looking at the overclocking benchmarks http://www.cpubenchmark.net/overclocked_cpus.html and the Xeon does come out on top.

I may yet run with that spec. I've got someone who can build it for me and offer support if things go wrong, I think. That particualr chip is not on the table, does that mean it can't be overclocked....or am I missing something?

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Xeons were NEVER overclocked in dual set up. There was simply no motherboard for it. Only Boxxx support it from not so long anyway. It is just now that EVGA made that GOLD DIAMOND motherboard that can OC. Once Vray GPU is released and I get to test it out, I will kick out my Asus Z8PE-D18 and throw that EVGA in its place... I hope that my e5530 will reach atleast 3.5 ghz

And yea scan is pretty good with customers... their SPECIAL waranty allow you to buy they stuff... Smack it with hamer at home, send it back and they will send u a new one LOL

Little cookie about mobo
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/mot...-sr-2-review/4
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/mot...sr-2-review/15

Scan is pretty sick lately about OC o.o

[Saulman]

I'm so glad I started this thread. I've just been speaking to SCAN and they're sending me a spec through. I'll post it up for you guys to pull apart for me.

Thanks once again.

[ior=0]

I've built my last 3 workstations using scan - they are brilliant - excellent customer service. If you are worried about putting it together scan to a insurance to cover installation f-ups.
Go i7, in fact buy 2 for the price of a xeon 4/6 deck - you then have redundancy and another rendering station RT node. Forget about the quadra's absolute waste of money for Max (if your using Maya or high-end CAD thinks are different) i bought one when I first went pro - after 6months replace it with a Geforce and not looked back.
If you looking for a very superb and quiet case with lots of cooling try the Fractal Design Define R2 (absolutely the dogs). If you've ever played with lego then you can pretty much put together a PC, it really is pretty simple.
The hardest bit I find is putting the thermal grease on the CPU properly Should take you half a day or a very relaxed day. Take your time have plenty of space and enjoy it. Awesome feeling when you boot it for the first time
If you are interested in the exact spec I can post a basic list.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

The hardest bit I find is putting the thermal grease on the CPU properly Should take you half a day or a very relaxed day. Take your time have plenty of space and enjoy it. Awesome feeling when you boot it for the first time
If you are interested in the exact spec I can post a basic list.

Indead... After a 5h of battle with components and screw drive 1st boot my dual quad xeon.... Click.... shhh shh shh BIP BIP BIP ... AAAAAAAAAAAAAA !!!! Woops lesson learn ! If u got dual quad u need ram in both slots for both cpus ! Cant bot with only one cpu stocked in ram hahaha ^^

[Saulman]

I just got this spec emailed back from Scan for £1825 (inc VAT)..........

Motherboard - Asus P6X58D-E Intel X58 1366 Motherboard
CPU - Intel CPU i7 930 Quad Core Processor
RAM - 12GB (3x4GB) Corsair Dominator, DDR3
GPU - 1GB EVGA GTX 460 SC, 3800MHz GDDR5
HD1 - 80GB Corsair Force Series, 2.5" SSD
HD2 - 1TB Samsung HD103SJ Spinpoint F3, SATA 3Gb/s
Windows 7 (home edition)
Few extra bits, soundcard, etc....

***Your choice of an Intel i7 professionally overclocked by our 3XS engineers to 4Ghz***


Any comments would be greatly appreciated. Should I go with the later six core i7 for instance?

EDIT:

ps. check out the Intel i7 970 6-core @ 3.2ghz. Scan now offer this as an option in their custom builds.

Thanks robdeja, I just got a quote for the upgrade to this chip and that comes to £2280 (inc VAT)

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

GPU - 1GB EVGA GTX 460 SC, 3800MHz GDDR5 = Get 2 GB GPU !!!!! Or better check out the new Vray GPU beta see if u can get it u might need more cuda cores or something else to make it stick....

From other side quite expensive.... I still vote for dual quad

[kein_plan]

the price of the i7 950 is down since last week. its only half of the price of the 960... for the gpu i would like to know what´s better, too. 2 x 460 2gb or 480 1,5 gb?

[tarontis]

Unless you plan on Using Vray RT a great deal then a better graphics card is not needed and would push the price up by a LOT

If your interested in RT then yea get it by all means, if not then that set up sounds pretty sweet already, could probly even lower the graphics card if you wanted to save the pennies...

[tarontis]

Oh and I'm not sure about the new 6 core i7's really, if you find out more info and how you get on if you go for one let us know because I would be interested in that as well