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?
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
Scan is pretty sick lately about OC o.o
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.
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.
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 ^^
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:
Thanks robdeja, I just got a quote for the upgrade to this chip and that comes to £2280 (inc VAT)
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
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?
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…
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
GPU is out Not u have to decide what will suit u better… It all depends from your scenes and textures… so consider that when u will go for better CPU or GPU…
just for your info I got a fast i7 860 Vostro from Dell for £450 - all their offers seemed to converge at once so I got multiple reductions -
-ok no overclock and psu is not high power but so far very solid and fast
at that price you could get three more for a farm -
though not sure how the end result in render time would be!
£450? Did that include shipping and VAT?
If so that not bad, but from what I can see on the Dell website it only ship with 3 gb of RAM, unless you upgraded? That would not be able to handle really heavy scenes very well at all
yes the 450 included shipping -may have been more like 465 - it was around January this year and I think they wanted to do some promotion on it - but it was weird how I could get three discounts at once - got it with 4Gb so that total cost was over ‘xxx’, which triggered the other discount
I dont do many heavy scenes so havent upped the ram yet
I agree its not a heavy duty monster though …
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)
I love ASUS. They’ve been pretty solid these past few years - both their graphics cards and their motherboards. I’d choose them any day over the competition (including Intel’s own motherboards.) From what I’ve been reading, it seems like a fairly solid build but I would go with DADAL’s suggestion of getting a 2GB card instead.
Also, if I recall correctly, Windows Home edition is not 64 bit.
This was true. I personally stopped overclocking manually many years ago. There’s some motherboards that ship with utilities to make it “dummy proof”, and I’ve seen some that work quite well. But to me, it hasn’t been worth “squeezing out” 2% performance increase if you’re computer is going to randomly hang, crash, worst case scenario fry, etc. Occasionally, a chip does get released that has phenomenal overclocking performance that may be worth investigating (and I don’t know what that would be right now), but I’ve always found overclocking more work than actually building a computer itself for such little performance gain.
Just to throw a Spanner in the works…for the price the ATI 5850 is kind of hard to beat..I have thrown stuff at my 1 Gig that has choked Quadros..and it’s very stable..a lot of people are having issues with the latest 480’s and so on so it’s another option to consider.
There is a lot of AT vs Nvidia stuff…but this latest ATI generation is rock solid with my config…and super fast…
I am not a fanboy..I have had Quadro’s (Dual 4600 2 gigs in my last gig) Nvidia 8800 GT and 8600 GT’s..it’s what working best for the price…
Mine ATI 5850 has been flawless so far…for less the $300 CDN…
Core i7 rocks and I have the 12 Gig Corsair…so fast…
Hi Mike
Could you please list your complete system spec? Yours sounds interesting.
There is some great advice on this thread. £2.5k is quite a lot of your own money to spend on a computer, but if that’s your budget, great. I bought my computer at home for about £1k, but the performance isn’t wildly off the £5k computer at the office which was bought less than a year earlier. The computer at the office is certainly not five times faster! £1800 from Scan sounds better, but I bet you could knock another £300 off and not notice too much difference… I’ve got tired of the dual processor (xeon) machines at work; they just seem to be having problems all the time. I don’t know if it’s the extra heat generated (one went back after melting 16GB of memory for example) or the extra level of complexity, but we are going to avoid them from now on. The i7 seems the way to go, plus there is the advantage of having a wider choice of motherboard, it’s cheaper etc… Not sure what graphics cards are doing at the moment, but £130 for a 460 sounds good to me! I doubt we’ll buy another professional card at work, I don’t think we’ve benefited in any discernable way. Let us know what you decide on!
What the hell, I wanna play too!
Here is my rule of thumb, it still holds true today. If you render a LOT, you want more CPU cores. Period. GPU stuff is great and is nice, but is still in the novelty stage (at least for my work). If you don’t do a lot of rendering than you can get away with fewer cores.
In your case, I would go with an iCore7 as mentioned in your quote, my reasoning is listed above.
I don’t think you will get any benefit out of the Quadro card like many others have stated. I still think your best bet is going to be a nVidia based 400 series (Fermi) video card with as much memory as you can afford. This will give you the flexibility to utilize the GPU rendering a little more than those of us with the 1.5GB 480. Sorry Mike_Kennedy, ATi is a waste of money right now if you plan to do anything with GPU. I can’t recommend a product that currently doesn’t properly support OpenCL and only has 1GB of RAM. Until they can show solid drivers with OpenCL, they are off my recommendation list. 
Those are the two most import factors you have to deal with right now. CPU & GPU. I wouldn’t worry about overclocking or any of that stuff unless you really want to mess around with that stuff, or you are a serious tweak head! RAM is pretty cheap, if don’t work and very large scenes I would try to stick with the 12GB mark(Triple Channel Memory). A good solid PSU unit around 800W is usually what I recommend and should handle most multiple 400 series card rigs.
Isn’t buying new hardware fun! LOL
I am currently in the process of testing/evaluating a ton of hardware configs and running cost/performance analysis. If it’s any consolation, the current recommended workstation for me is sitting around $10k US. UGH!
Funny you should mention that:
ATI Just released their new card with 4GB Ram and full OpenCL Support
Look here: ATI introduces FirePro V9800 | CG Channel