Glad the ES mode worked out for you, nothing worse than a noisy machine distracting you from your work.

You can set the case fan speed in the motherboard's BIOS. There should be four Fan Speed Control Modes according to the manual: Full Speed/FS, Performance/PF, Balanced/BL, and Energy Saving/ES. I would use either BL or ES for your system config, the faster settings are only needed if you have all the hard drive bays populated with active drives.

Better workstation equals better wallpapers, faster! :P

Ryan,



Save money on them Solid States and go with OCZ Agility or Vertex 3 max IOPS. Far better than old generation of Crucial or even the newer ones from Intel.



Get two small SSD's for OS and apps perhaps like 120GB's and put them in RAID 0 and you good to go. with 1GB/s Transfer speeds on new SATA6 controllers.



Also forget about the Western Digital Black 2TB drive.

Get yourself the real deal from Seagate. Seagate XT 3TB's

Better performance and more storage on single drive, also well priced.



Just the above should shave you about $800.00 from the total you need.



Cheers,



Peter

MMMmmmmm good game. Enjoy that when you have the time.

It's a good thing RAM these days doesn't cost the same as it did at the start of the '80 else that amount would have cost around 250 million dollars US (at a rough estimate); something like a billion chips (almost certainly the entire worlds supply and for several years most likely!)

Isn't it the worst having *most* of the bits for the new computer?



Regarding the additional montiors, if I remember right the width of a non-Widescreen 20" monitor is almost exactly the same as the height on a 30" monitor. So maybe grabbing a couple of those in portrait mode may be a cheap way to get triple monitors.



Or depending on how much you could sell the existing 30" for, going with triple 27" screens. Based on what Dell's selling them for, you could get 3x UltraSharp 27" monitors for about the same price of 2x30" (actually a bit less ATM), less whatever you get for the existing screen. Although their 27" monitors are 16:9 instead of 16:10, so they'd probably be just as wide, but not quite as tall.

Lol at the tower of ram. :P

After getting us all excited about the new beast, you'd better take a few snaps of the machine as you put it together. And what happened to the multi monitor display, or is it just on the backburner for the moment?

I agree with Dave, it is a big event the construction and the first start up. Take your time and do the assemblage right,as they say cross every T and dot every I.

I hope to have a photo journal. The arrival, the opening, the construction process, the whole thing. It's a big event!

WOW! It sounds like fun, hope it's delivered to you soon.

Sounds awesome, Ryan!

Just curious... have you looked in to the technology they use for the CGI render farms at places like Pixar?

Assassin's Creed was free with something else he ordered.



I'm really looking forward to speed ups in your render time! Keep up the amazing work.

I don't know a great deal about hardware, well none actually, but it looks impressive for the price :)

Assassin's Creed? I don't know how that will help with the workstation but I like your style!

Yep, Win7 64-bit is right in the little order list. ;D

that is some serious power, what OS you running Win 7 64?

According to some of the feedback given on the CPU Cooler you have selected, the brackets are not included and have to be ordered separately. I would double check this as it would be very frustrating and disappointing to get half way through the build and then discover that you're missing a part.

You could probably save a chunk of change going with the new Sandy Bridge quad cores especially if you get the 2600K and overclock them mildly (4.2 Ghz with most capable of 4.7 Ghz). I have read that they can keep up with the Westmere Hex core CPU's when overclocked. Intel is planning on releasing newer sockets and CPU's later this year and early next year. You might try asking around the Hardforum.com and look in the largest section called "[H]ard|Ware" and look for "General Hardware" (http://hardforum.com/forumdisplay.php?f=40) for some help in putting together a rig that will meet your needs and won't cost you an arm and a leg. An unbalanced computer can cost more than it needs to. Good luck with your new workstation!

Well, I guess that's to say not all Lian Li cases are bad these days. As I said, I stand by my statement.



Beyond that I agree with what everyone else said. Two 80mm fans MAY be enough to keep the sucker cool, but I'd definitely want more than that, the noise of two 80mms running flat out all the time would take my head off in no time. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about, I've had a rackmount case on my desk plenty of time.



If I were you, I'd opt for one of the gaming towers with four or more 120mm fans. You can then run those at 7 Volts, practically silent but still providing enough cooling to make your workstation happy. And you too for that matter

I love my PC-P80 Lian-li case. Fits my dual CPU rig just fine. The construction is very sturdy as well.

@Thomas: Good to know... been a number of years since I last used one of theirs. It was one of their early models and solid, but they could've cut some corners over time. Or maybe cases have gotten better and they haven't kept pace... I do tend to keep the case longer than the guts though so I don't keep up on which of those vendors are better at a given point of time.



The point about EATX Full towers still stands though... pretty much any company that makes cases will have some EATX offerings. And they'll beat the SuperMicro one since:



A) Cases would be their bread and butter, as opposed to SuperMicro who make cases only as a means to sell server boards and services. Its not a dig on them, the reality is companies don't buy those types of servers based on the chassis. It might be a tie breaker but a lot of factors are far more important.



B) The space limitations imposed by an optional rackmount case basically means you are putting an EATX board into a mid-tower. Doable, but not quite ideal for optimal cooling, noise control, etc.



C) They're cost less as well.

Dude, stay away from those Lian Li cases. You can bend the tin with one hand. (dunno if it goes for all of them but for those I've seen) They're definitely not worth the price they go for.

Looked at the case a little more closely... not really impressed with 2x 8cm fans for intake and 1x92mm exhaust fan for the case cooling. Its a bit limited since its meant to optionally be a rackmount, thereby restricting its height to 17.75".



On the other hand, a Full Tower case can be in the 24" range. That extra space means more drives spots, and more room for bigger (and therefore more efficient) fans.



Some example systems that should work well:

http://www.lian-li.com/v2/en/product/product04.php?cl_index=1&sc_index=25&ss_index=61



http://www.antec.com/Believe_it/product.php?id=Mjc=



Those have a lot more room and can use a lot more fans. One of the Lian-Li's that looked appealing to me (PC-A70F) had dual 140mm front and dual 120mm back.



There are obviously others from other vendors, just make sure they are EATX and you should be fine.



Incidentally, the motherboard in the barebones system you (SuperMicro X8DA6) seems to go for around $500. Those chassis different chassis seem to be in the $200-250 range. So it'd also be a few hundred bucks cheaper, and you get a better case with superior cooling.



I think the heatsinks you got will be fine as long as your ambient temps are sane. So water cooling would be overkill IMO, however if you did go that route the extra space from a full tower would be handy.

I meant to say do a youtube search for claytonjones006. You'll find my account there.

If you run your machine flat out for a long time, are you sure you're going to get happy with those dinky little cpu coolers? For a powerful rendering workstation, I'd recommend a liquid cooling system any time. From what I can figure out about you, You probably do not live anywhere near germany, or I'd be happy to come over and give you a head start. Still, if you're interested, drop me a line and I'll point you in the right direction.

Do a search for claytonjones006. Look at my latest video of my updated workstation. I've added 48GB of ram and a larger overclock. I would have went with the OCZ SSD and/or the Intel in tandem. Either way sounds like you've got a nice system. What motherboard did you end up going with? I did the EVGA SR-2.

Here is a site with a curernt (4/2011) rundown of the best SSDs in each bracket as well as some additional info regarding their individual performance and their RAID compatibility (look for garbage collection - top notch)



http://www.hardware-revolution.com/best-ssd-hdd-april-2011/

Love the corsair series!

I have to agree with @Daniel B on RAID-6 - having 2 drives for recovery is highly recommended.



Although nowhere as fast as an external eSATA array, have you looked at a NAS for backups? I have several HDDs on-board (I can't justify SSD just yet, same as @CK), and backup everything in the house to the NAS regularly. Since I'm using Windows 7, I just configured its backup tool to backup the system image every week.



Most people forget that doing a backup isn't the end of it - the restore is the important bit. I've had to rebuild my machine from backups several times after OS drive failures, so I'd encourage everyone to walk through a restore - swap out your working OS drive for a spare and start from there :-).



The NAS I use (QNAP TS-809Pro) has 8 bays loaded with 2TB WD Caviar Black HDDs configured for RAID-6 - I use the same drives on the PC. And if you are looking at WD, don't use the Green series - the "green" power management behaviour reduces performance. The NAS is reasonably quiet too, no louder than the fans on my PC.



Extremely unlikely to have a complete failure with this scenario. A NAS box might cost more initially but an off-machine backup will save your a** eventually.



And if possible locate your NAS box at the other end of the house - if there is localized fire/water damage in your PC area then there's less chance that your backups have been affected.



HTH.

If you go with an external array like Astra suggests, stick with RAID-6 or RAID-10. We've seen this sequence and read enough data on this that we prohibit RAID-5 above a certain number of spindles...



1) Drive fails in a large RAID-5.

2) Replace the drive, rebuild begins from parity.

3) Because each spot on each drive gets touched during a rebuild, the chance on a second failure coming up/being discovered right then goes up... So a second drive fails (sometimes).

4) RAID-5 can only run with 1 failed drive, so its time to look for backups.



In the end, RAID is a great tool, but it is no subsitute for a good backup policy.



One other thing, an array like Astra suggests are meant for a datacenter and will be quite loud compared to gear meant to be in an office. Depending on how much noise you like when you work anything that is in a rack mount form factor may not be the best choice, particularly if the system is too small physically to support 12cm fans.

I've compared the specs on the Quadro vs. the GTX GeForce line -- and I see no benefit to the Quadro in terms of performance, quality or price.



The only benefit of the quadro line is that it is certified with various professional CAD programs that, at one point in time, checked to see if you were running a quadro card in order to enable certain high-end features.



Hacks to get around this check became common as the GeForce cards usually had 2-3x the performance for a fraction of the price.



Usually the top end GeForce card will be 2-3x the speed as the top end Quadro card at about 1/4th to 1/5th the price.



So unless you have some specific need for a Quadro that powers some app that is hard-coded to only work with them, I'd re-evaluate your choice in cards. Even if you have an app that requires it, I'd inquire if they have a workaround to work with the equiv or better GeForce card.



I started with a Quadro, on my first 3D workstation, but when I went to use it with games, it didn't perform well. I then checked into the specs. It was only 1/3rd the performance of the upper-middle end of the GeForce line, and about 1/4th the power of the top GeForce card. The top Geforce card was about $500 at the time, while the top Quadro, at the same memory was over 2K!. They had more expensive Quadro cards that had more memory, but not any that were faster.



With Adobe Photoshop's CS3, it 'warned' you if you didn't run a certified card (Quadro) as it being unsupported.



It was either in CS4 or CS5, that the warning was ditched.



Apparently, in some versions before CS3 Adobe tied it to the Quadro hardware, but I guess there were enough hacks available on the net and enough complaints from customers to make removing the checks an advisable move.



The only other thing I'd think about -- if you are going to go raid, get a good HW RAID controller like the LSI 8285-8e (all external drives - others have mixes for internal+external, but if your mother board can handle the boot drives, you can put the rest externally).



A very good external drive bay is the LS 630J (comes in 3.5 & 2.5" models with capacities of 12 or 24 drives respectively). That controller (as well as any *good* SAS* controller will allow you to intermix SATA and SAS drives and often provide better performance for SATA drives than comparable SATA controllers).



The controller you can see @

http://www.lsi.com/channel/products/raid_controllers/megaraid_9285-8e/index.html



The drive bay @

http://www.lsi.com/channel/products/jbods/sata_sas_jbods/630j/index.html



You can start out with a mostly empty drive bay if you want to start slow, but with today's capacity, you are looking at 36T max space!



If you put them all in a RAID 50 config, you can get ~1GB/s reads and 800MB/s writes (& totcapacity 30T) or go extra safe with a RAID60, and get ~800MB reads & 500MB/s writes (& totcapacity 24T).





You might not be ready for that, but many people end up with lots of little external disks that give poopy performance and questionable reliability.



Another 'down' side of going with a good card like the LSI -- unlike some competitors, is that it will measure the quality of the disks that you hook up to them -- meaning about 60-90% of the consumer grade disks won't work (depends on brand) due to the fact that most desktop drives are 'rebranded' enterprise-grade disks that don't meet the more stringent QA.



My own experience, with Hitachi's Deskstars vs. Ultrastars:



Deskstars had a 10 out of 12 be unsuitable (not dead) on arrival, ultrastars: 0 out of 24 unsuitable.

The reason why most desktop drives are unsuitable:

they don't really spin at 7200 RPM. The speed varied by as much as 15-20% between different drives -- making them unsuitable for RAID purposes (but fine as single desktop drives).



I've heard of bad results from Western Digital's Corporate drives (similar failure rates to Hitichi's Desktop line), which doesn't bode well for the future, given that they are in the process of purchasing Hitachi. That would leave Seagate as the only other major competitor, and their quality is uneven from product to product.





Conceivable, depending on what Graphics card you were thinking of, you might save enough on that to pay for the RAID HW... ;-)

With respect to reliability, nearly any drive you'd look at has a 3 year warranty so while the RAID10 array may be degraded while you wait for a free replacement, data won't be lost, which is of course the point of RAID. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks after all. If the performance is there on a drive and it has a 3-5yr warranty, put it in your RAID10 array and utilize the full benefits of it.

Excellent decision to go with the SSD boot / SATA RAID hybrid, I think you'll be very pleased. The brands mentioned already won't steer you wrong so go with price within Intel / Crucial / OCZ. The newer Intels are lightning quick. So long as you don't store actual data on your boot SSD drives, put them in a RAID 0 for real speed. Be advised, this is not hardware redundant - this is for speed, so don't put anything other than OS and program installs there. They can be re-installed with only a loss of time, not crucial data (keep that on SATA RAID10 of course) and the performance will be amazing.

You can raid anything that has a SATA or SAS interface. Technically you can do more on other OS's but thats a seperate issue. Do you have a source for the no-RAID on Vertex drives? It should work... but note that the Revo Drives are completely different PCIe solution which effective ARE a RAID-0 on a PCI express card. Course even those could be RAIDed if the OS supported it on arbitrary block devices (*nix systems, for example).



The one gotcha though is TRIM support is lost when you use RAID since the RAID controller won't pass that command to the underlying drive.



You'll also want to make sure the system doesn't try to defrag the drive. Since it'd look like a RAID array, it wouldn't know the underlying drives were SS and not spindles. Some drives (the Micron/Cruicials in particular) hurt on writes when you lose TRIM. However for an OS drive that may not be an issue.



The Vertex 3 drives are generally faster than Intel's, but Intel has put their focus on reliability. Both are extremely fast, but keep in mind the real benefit of an SSD (over spindles) is the order of magnitude differences in latency, which all SSD's improve radically.



And the other Ryan is right: AnandTech is a great source for SSD reviews.

i already talked to a friend about ssd's!



mainly crucial (micro) intel & OCZ ones!



i sent you a email with details!



hope you read it as soon as possible!





cheers!

ops Ryan i forgot to mention to my pals about the ssd you want!

so in my email i sent you there is nothing on that matter BUT

ill ask them tonight if they available =)



if you can specify what you truly desire i can pass your message and see what they do recommend!



although they already recommended not to go beyond 250Gb in SSD due to really high prices..unless it is vital for your new system!







thanks!

If that is an issue then the solution would be to connect the OCX Vertex3 SSD to your onboard SATA controller and buy a PCIe RAID card to create your RAID10 array of regular disks. I'd recommend using a 3ware RAID card.



The OCX Vertex3 is a bit faster in most Read operations but the Intel 510 is a bit faster in most Write operations plus the availability and reliability of the Intel 510 makes it the choice for me.

The OCZ: Vertex 3 beats the Intel 510 in most synthetic benchmarks. It's just a bit tough to get your hands on one at the moment.



Anandtech has thorough reviews of both the 510 and the Vertex 3.



http://www.anandtech.com/tag/storage

I've been using Intel SSDs for over a year now and would recommend the latest generation Intel 510 series.

They are getting positive reviews everywhere and Intel SSDs have always been reliable.

You just have to make sure that when you install your OS the partition is properly aligned.

This is done automatically if you do a clean install of Windows 7, I don't know about other OSes.

Hi Ryan i sent you a email With all details to help you! hope you read it before you buy anything thanks!

Intel is the only game in town for high speed SSDs.



http://www.intel.com/design/flash/nand/510series/

Ryan i have ONE question for you:

for how long you want to use your new workstation?

cause the less you spend.. the sooner you need a upgrade..again!

and rendering... can be heavy for a system as the people getting more demanding more and more on graphics level!



me personally? i prefer long term commitment ;)



MOBO: i would go with a TOP EVGA mobo!I LOVE THEIR WARRANTY POLICY!

I JUST LOVE THE EVGA SR-2 ( Pornographically expensive) but it will serve you well as a base for the rest of your system!



CPU: Intel Of course! but..

wich one?

a 6 core one would be enough!

but for rendering.. i would go 8 core latest architecture for sure..

BUT MAKE SURE THE rendering programs you use are able to benefit from such amount of cores... or you will waste a lot of money on a hyper-POWERFUL CPU that your rendering programs CANT USE... yet...

BE CAREFUL! TALK TO THE programmers of VUE, etc.. inform yourself with them about the capabilities of THEIR SOFTWARE!



RAM: AT LEAST 16GB of DDR3 memory (1800Mhz+ speed of course..the faster.. the better)



GPU: Quadros are awesome!

the NEW NVIDIA QUADRO 6000 should be more then enough!maybe overkill.. but for the sake of rendering.. i would go for it!

ok.. maybe the Quadro 5000 is enough!



remember Geforce are more gamish directed! and they are basically "crippled Quadros" at programming level!(drivers)



myself? for professional use.. i would go for QUADRO!



you ever thought going TESLA? buying a Nvidia TESLA based Workstation?

think about it: http://www.nvidia.com/docs/IO/43395/NV_DS_Tesla_C2050_C2070_jul10_lores.pdf



HDD OR SSD: ssd are very expensive but once you have one.. you wont go back.. THO for just simple plain space... a WErtern digital 2TB+ should be good!



PSU: SEASONIC is my brand of choice!

although i would definitely go for the EVGA PSU 1200W they released! again.. i love their warranty Policies!

make sure the PSU has ENOUGH AMPS PER RAIL! THE MORE AMPS in general.. the better!

and obviously make sure it has enough W for the behemoth system you want!



i dunno how much you are going to spend!

nor do i know how much is the cost of the system i just talked above!

IF it is to expensive witch is my priority? GPU AND RAM!



i hope i helped a bit! and if cash is a problem.. do it like me.. one piece at the time... :P is worked for me.. it should work for you.. leave MOBO AND GPU for LAST!

I'm sure we will help with donations etc......will let you know how the Quadro 4000 cards are, we just agreed to buy 2 for our 2 AutoCAD Inventor users, as they move up from very old FX570's. Part of an HP Z400 Workstion with has Xeon CPU, 12GB RAM and 300GB 10k rpm SATA drive -- might be worth looking at workstations that can take dual CPU, and then mod/update it to match.

I just wanted to say that when I first started following your site (back when I was in college) I'm pretty sure I remember you upgrading to a dual socket 1000 MHz Pentium III based workstation that I was in awe of at the time. This is quite a leap ;)



Also, I do happen to be a UNIX systems admin now and have to say I'd definitely go with SAS over SATA in a server build if it were me. But then I'm not involved with graphic design type workloads so it's not really my area of expertise.

There is a huge difference between enterprise and consumer grade drives. Most server manafacturers rebrand other companies' drives as their own with tweaked firmware but fundamentally they sell the same drives. For example HP Proliant servers are often (always?) sold with rebranded Seagate Savio drives these days. I haven't looked that closely at the few 3.5" SAS drives we have around though but I wouldn't be surprised to see Seagates there as well. The IBM one would be probably be a rebranded Hitachi since they sold their drive business to them a number of years ago. Thats just a guess, for all I know they could be rebranding Seagates as well.



My gut though is that the IBM drive would actually be one of these (which while not on newegg, are considerably cheaper than the IBM one according to Froogle, just make sure it says SAS, FCAL is different):

http://www.hitachigst.com/internal-drives/enterprise/ultrastar/ultrastar-15k600



I saw Alex's comments below and my guess is he meant SATA drives since at that point I thought you had spec'd Raptors. However I've seen enough SAS drives from different vendors that I wouldn't say there is a particularly big difference between them as a whole. Comfort level is very important though and if you would rather skip Seagates, there is nothing wrong with that.



The reality is though that there is *always* a chance a given drive could fail, and since you are looking at boards with a real hardware raid controller the added cost of going to a proper RAID 1 setup is significantly reduced. I would always favor two drives from anyone in a Raid 1 over a single best-of-breed drive. If thats not practical then I'd recomend making sure to have a full backup including media capable of a bare metal restore -- and to get a spare drive to test it on every now and then.



However, I wasn't intending to advocate one drive brand over another in that post, just that the IBM one was seemingly priced as if it was going into one of their servers and that server vendors grossly overcharge for parts (in a way that wouldn't benefit your bottom line). Particularly since they could just be selling the same rebranded part with a different sticker and their own drive caddy.

I would likely go for the Seagate mentioned. Seagate's are generally fairly stable, have about as many defects as any other manufacturer. Also, for your specific usage the Seagate is more realistic anyhow.

The IBM that you selected is a server drive. As you are building a workstation it would be both unnecessary and inefficient. The IBM drive is designed to be part of a large system.

Whereas Seagate is somewhat of a middle-grounds between Industry grade and Consumer grade.

On another note, how soon is the new core coming out? There will always be a new 'X' on the horizon, so dont wait for one part, because that will likely turn into two...



To wrap up @David, I stated that HDD's dont max Sata 3gbs; I never said that SSD's dont max it, I have a SSD that goes well over 3gbs.

Ryan,



The Hard Drive you have selected seems very overpriced. This one looks equivalent (both 15k SAS 6Gb 600GB), except the Seagate is a couple hundred cheaper and has a much better warranty.



http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148617



The price difference is almost enough for you to buy a second drive.



I suspect IBM intended that drive to go into their servers, at least thats the only way the markup on that drive makes sense. Most of the time server vendors mark up their parts to absurd levels since its 'certified' for their particular server models. The other two 15k SAS 6G drives on Newegg are both examples of this with HP. The Seagate seems to be the only stand alone drive with that spec.

I noticed you chose a 30 in monitor. But I also noticed that you had the quantity at 2. Does that mean you might be switching over to a multimonitor system?

Can't say as I've ever heard of "newegg.com".. but you may want to give a look at a site I'll swear by any day of the week. ncix.com (no affiliation)

Ryan,



What were the plans for the old system once the new one is built? I was kind of hoping you'd use it to do some larger (triple screen) renders of older pics.

Just curious about what you think the final price for your new set up is going to be, ballpark.

Ryan,



i have always though that Asus have made pretty good mainboards. Have you looked in to them at all?



i found this on the newegg site, Asus Z8PE-D18 > http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131379&Tpk=Z8PE-D18



Maximum memory according to the asus site is 144GB registered ECC Dimms.

http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=sqbdCm0nmFxn3sS4



only a thought...

Hey there Ryan,

When you first mentioned that you were contemplating getting a new rendering PC, and that you were saving up for it, I was considering a donation, but then I remembered a couple of friends that didn't have memberships, but really liked your site, so I bought both of them a 1 year gift subscriptions. They loved the gift and I was glad to help you out! Take care and good luck with your new PC!

my point regarding memory was that based on what Ryan had selected for a new PC, he was going to get 48GB of memory consisting of 6 x 8GB memory modules.



The mainboard Ryan has chosen however, can only support 48GB of memory (taken from the EVGA website). The mainboard only has 12 slots. If Ryan was to fill all 12 slots with 4GB memory modules, he would still have 48GB of memory, maxing out what the mainboard can support and would have no need to replace them later.



the difference in price between 1 kit of 3x8GB and 2 kits of 3x4GB is $50 for the Wintec Memory. The Kingston memory, which is almost just as good, is $250.00 cheaper for 2 kits of 3x4GB.



The other choice is to look at getting a mainboard that can support a much larger maximum amount of memory, which would give a path in the future of upgrading the PC in some way.

I believe those are due out in Q4... that is a ways off. And there is always something cool coming around the corner.



Regarding CK's comments about memory, he does have a good point. The price drops in RAM can be dramatic, especially once the next size sticks come out. It may actually be cheaper in the long run to buy 4GB sticks now for what you need, and then outright replace them later when/IF you want to go double it.



One thing though is to check the Motherboard manual. Some systems with lots of capacity will change the speed of RAM based on the # of populated sticks. HP has a good whitepaper on this for their Proliant servers that I can dig up a link to if desired.



And please, no RAID 0. RAID 10 is fine though. A dedicated HW controller won't help too much with RAID 0/1/10 unless it has some sort of non-volatile cache (Battery or Flash backed).

@Ryan

And there is the LGA2011 socket later too, idk if that is what you meant or not

@Walo

You can use more than one cooler, assuming there are enough fan spots on the case

Also, i work in IT. i build, configure and install about 15-20 Small Business and Enterprise Servers each year which are the heart of my client's businesses for up to 50 people.



I essentially see the components of your future PC as one hell of a big server. My opinion is don’t get SSD's, the read times may be great, but the write times are average. Everything i have read to date about SSD's have not convinced me to include them in my client’s servers yet.



While I am partial to Seagate hard drives, any enterprise 10K/15k RPM SAS hard drive should be an excellent choice.



I would combine this with a dedicated raid controller card. A raid controller card would contain its own CPU and would not force the PC CPU's to do the thinking for the Raids itself. Although the performance gain would be minimal, it’s still a gain.



The suggestions for Raid 0 (striping) are spot on. This will give you the fastest possible performance for you. The risk with Raid 0 however, is that if one hard drive in the raid dies, you lose everything in the raid. Which is why combining it with Raid 1 (Mirroring) is heavily suggested and would provide you with redundancy. (Which would be called Raid 1+0 or Raid 10). As stated below somewhere, Raid 10 requires a minimum of 4 hard drives (2 to stipe data across, and 2 more to mirror to).



I would heavily recommend some sort of backup for the PC. There are many choices out there, Acronis Trueimage, Symantec Backup Exec System recovery, but the backup system i consider one of the best is StorageCraft ShadowProtect. It’s light, it’s fast, it’s easy to restore (both files and the whole PC, even to completely different hardware). The backup image can be virtually mounted if need be.



The mainboard you have chosen has 12 memory slots can only take a maximum of 48GB of memory. 48GB of memory divided by 12 slots = 4GB memory modules. No sense spending extra money on 8GB modules to only fill half the available slots. Change to this instead  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820161422&Tpk=3SH13339R5-12GT or change to this to save even more money  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139268&Tpk=KVR1333D3E9SK3%2f12G



Apart from that, i imagine you know what you want and that you know what you can afford.

@Demagolka

since it will be a dual CPU setup, a Corsair H70 cooler will be useless.



@Ryan

That Corsair PSU has done a excellent job for me. Also that PSU has all the cables you would need to hook any drives, accesories, and a 3 way SLI setup if you want.

In regards to Demagolka's query as to how much memory windows 7 64bit can use, the physical memory limit, as published by microsoft here --> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778(v=vs.85).aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_7



is 192GB for Windows 7 Pro and Ultimate.

I have had some experience with building computers, though admittedly I have always built for gaming, instead of workstations. I would highly recommend building over buying, for the fun of it, and because you will know the quality of the build. If something goes wrong, you are far more likely to know what.



As others said, the SR-2 is a *massive* motherboard; there are only 10 cases that natively support it. You can find the list on EVGA's website somewhere. I *think* the one you have selected is one of the "approved" cases.



As far as processors....you know what you need. I think the Xenons are a little overpriced, but there isn't much to be done about that lol. You might want to look into cooling for those things, perhaps overclock a slight bit? Unless you want to go full blown water cooling, I would recommend the Corsair H70. These are great, whether you overclock or not.



The RAM you have is insanely expensive, and that is not a server motherboard anyway...it is an extreme gamer/record setter, so you might as well use gaming RAM, such as Corsair Dominator, or some of the cheap new stuff all the companies are coming out with now, such as the Patriot Viper or Corsair's Vengeance.



Corsair makes good stuff...that is a good PSU IMHO.

I really don't know a lot about the Quadros, or any workstation GPU to be honest, so I can't say good or bad, but I know I like Nvidia's gaming cards.



Hard drives....there are so many options. I really don't see how you would benefit from SSD's at this point. If it was me, I would either get 4 600GB Velociraptors and put them in a RAID 10, or 6-8 WD Black 1TB HDD's and put them in a RAID 10. I say RAID 10 because that would give you the speed boost of a RAID 0 and the safety of a RAID 1, though it does cost a lot more. I don't know how much space you use, but I'm pretty sure rendering doesn't require a whole lot of disc access.

Another configuration would be to have a RAID 0 of WD Velociraptors, 2 or 3 of them, for stuff you are working on currently, then have a RAID 1 of WD Blacks for storing valuable files. Then you can copy stuff from the RAID 1 to the RAID 0 when you want to work on it. I have only mentioned WD drives...that is only because that is what I know and use...nothing says the others are bad. I just am not familiar with them.



As for OS, I would get the latest server OS, 2008 I think it is, because it is designed to handle more threads...or Win7 Ultimate. Not 100% sure, but I think Ultimate is the only non-server Win that can handle >=24GB RAM. Be sure to check though...

They make really good power supplies, although the corsair one looks pretty solid as well from the reviews I scanned. I'd say the chance of a problem with either PS is pretty small.



Installing the corsair though would be easier with the modular cable harness since you would only need to include the cables you want.

PCP&C is absolutely one of if not the premier stable clean power supply manufacturers.

I recommend a PC Power and Cooling Branded PSU, quite possibly the most reliable and powerful PSU available through consumer channels.



You should also check out what some crazier people have done to render stuff and get insane computing power in their home.



http://hackaday.com/2010/04/24/rendering-and-blendering-in-a-file-cabinet/

http://hackaday.com/2010/06/17/building-a-cluster-of-ipaq-pcs/

http://hackaday.com/2008/10/04/another-ikea-linux-cluster/

http://hackaday.com/2008/07/05/render-your-next-render-farm/

http://hackaday.com/2008/05/25/ikea-linux-cluster/

http://hackaday.com/2008/04/23/24-core-ikea-cluster/

God, if I won the lotto, I'd buy you your own $30K beast. Plus a small renderfarm to go with it! :P

The EVGA Classified SR-2 like it's Classified 4-way SLI sibling is a very large motherboard. Very few cases will work with it. Verify your compatibility!

Some independent reports put Intel's failure rate at about half other SATA SSD drives. Granted the failure rates are not high in general, but Intels are statistically better from what I've seen.



A drive marketed at 120GB drvive would likely have 128G of flash, but would appear as a ~111.6GB drive (93% advertised capacity).



HDD vendors use 1GB = 1 billion bytes instead of 1GB = 1024^3 bytes. That difference is about 7%, so SSD vendors generally take advanatge of people being used to that to add to their spare/garbage colleciton area.

From experience working at PC manufacturer, I can tell you that if your doing your renders on a workstaion with mission critcal software, mirroring your HD's is esential to protecting your data from loss. Also finding a MB that will support upto 64GB of memory would be ideal. A SaTA raid card that supports mirroring with rubust error correction in combonination with ECC RAM.



As for HD's, I would stick WD Rapter 10K RPM HD. It would be a good balance between perfromance and reliability.



Power supply, you definatly want the highest rated PSU out there that you can depend on.



The video card, I would find one that has least 2GB of on board memory and the fastest GPU you can find with HDCP.

New gen SSDs on sequential reads can max 3Gbps SATA connections fairly trivially...

Don't use a SSD drive for your system..Then are very faulty. My friend works at a datacenter and they have burned through several..



The honest truth is the Read times are where the speeds are high. Write times to the drive are horrible. There's no way your renderes will work on that. Your better off getting a SATA 3 drive..and at least 16 GB of ram

Speaking from experience, the Velociraptors are an amazing hard drive, they have very good I/O and are quite fast, I would recommend them. Assuming you are not RAIDing anything, they are very ideal. If you are RAIDing, I would go for the SAS's



Just to clarify though, none of the hard drives that you pick will max the sata 3gbs connection, so it doesnt matter if youve got sata 6gbs, altough it will be good for future protection.

You may trust SSDs from major manufacturers. The all produce at least 7% over capacity as spare bits to add if bad segments are found. They are blazing fast, consumer less power, are whisper-quiet, and usually have an expected life 10x HDDs with spinning platters. Some SSDs are available with up to 40% "spare" storage.



Do renders produce large intermediate files on disk? Or do they run high on disk I/O? SSDs could save you a lot of render time, if so.



My $0.02 :-)



Another $0.01: max memory is usually the cheapest way to improve program performance. Expensive CPUs are next, and SSDs can be the highest project cost line item if you chose them. Good fans inside the case are the cheapest "insurance" you can buy.

Just an out of the blue thought. Might it be a reasonable upgrade to include something like butterflynetrender software?



This would allow you to farm the images out to a render farm. Enabling you to keep your current machine going, and also adding capability gradually. With 6 core i7s at only $600 and using more commodity components...you should be able to get a lot more capability for the cash and retain the current render box as a node. Upgrading commodity machines every other year would keep your processing nodes current.



Negatives would be space, possibly power, and maintaining the network.



Just a thought.

I also still need a couple of HDDs and possibly a BD drive from Newegg, so you have another commission lol.

ever feel like you're lost in a foreat of HUGE trees??? The operative word here is "lost"--information overload!!! But I agree with Duncan--if you did the commission with newegg.com or TigerDirect.com I know when I get my act together for a new tower(that's how basic I am) I'd buy from there so you'd get the commission!!!

Ryan,

Although my gray matter is not complex enough to assemble computer gizmos and gadgets, I can lend some financial advise in that you should consider signing up with New Eggs's affiliate marketing program and placing a link on your website. That way, anytime someone (and you) shops New Egg from your site, you receive a commission. Check the bottom of neweggs website for affiliate details. http://www.newegg.com/Info/Affiliates.aspx

Sometimes when hardware goes bad it can turn into a game of whackamole to figure out what went wrong. The symptoms of a bad motherboard/cpu/memory/powersupply can all look similar. Just something to consider since this box is an important part of your income where downtime means money and a SLA/Warranty can be an important factor.



If you do get an SSD, stick with Intel. They cost a bit more but seem to be a bit more reliable compared to the other consumer drives. However I would only go with that if your doing a lot of random IO and latency is important. I suspect your mostly doing heavy sequential writes and normal workstation IO which they'd help a bit but not be decisive. I've tested a lot of different Solid State devices from consumer drives to enterprise class monsters and while they can do wonders, you'd probably be better off putting in that money elsewhere (cpu/ram/gpu).



Mike B. is right about large sequential writes. SSD's do not do well when hit with a lot of writes for an extended period of time. TRIM helps, but you lose that if you want to RAID them. You may or may not see that though depending on the size of the files being written though. Google "Garbage Collection" and SSD for more on that.

If you run a good raid setup you'll have nothing but satisfaction in the end. My rig currently has 2x250 gig HD's running at 10k rpm a piece. I also highly recommend either a tri or quad-SLI. It's a bitch to wire up to the power supply, but if you run anything EVGA you'll have lot's of easy, basic control over your system. Acer makes phenomenal monitors. I have Phraxis as my background and it looks stunning at max res. I also highly recommend liquid cooling. Thermaltake makes a very convenient liquid cooler that slides right into a drive bay. Really, everything you could ever want is at newegg.com. AND, once you've built your first rig your self and compared it to anything prebuilt, you'll never go back :D

Ryan: Undoubtedly you should get an SSD for your boot/scratch drive and to run all programs from, this makes a _HUGE_ difference in program interactivity. I have one in my main machine and my laptop, and will never go back.



I don't have a feel for how big your renders are, or the size of media involved in a render. If it can fit on an SSD or a raid of them, I would suggest doing that.



If you need large cheap backup just throw a few drives into a big raid-1 array for redundancy. If you need a large fast redundant array then consider many drives in a raid-10 arrangement (takes at least 4), or raid 5 if you can get a hardware-based raid card (generally >$500). Best case scenario I would suggest you run your current render of an SSD, and then back things up and archive to a larger more redundant array of mechanical drives.

Definately look into a pci-e RAID card. I built a similar setup for work and we used 4 10,000 RPM Fujitsu drives on an Adaptec card in RAID 10. This setup will run about 350MB/s and is far more reliable than anything SSD. I am currently using an SSD in my personal desktop machine and I am quite unimpressed.

Honestly, do some homework on the raptors. Compared to the caviar black you may be better off with a bunch of these:



http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136793&cm_re=caviar_black-_-22-136-793-_-Product



Warning on the onboard controller - some times you are better off with pci-e cards vs the onboard. May not be as big of a deal with windows but you want NCQ for sure...



If you want more performance, grab a decent raid card and use raid 10 ( stripe across a bunch of mirrors ). I ran benchmarks on my caviar blacks and was getting 110-160 meg per second even on "file server" benchmarks ( aka lots of reading/writing concurrently ) which is likely to be closer to the activity of your rendering - well I think it is....

The intent and data thus far says yes, but they have not been in mainstream use long enough for an absolute "yes". Given no moving parts, the likelihood of wearing out or breaking is exponentially less.

thanks--do they last as long as "normal"(bear with me please!!)hard drives???

At the level of performance you are looking for, Ryan, you will get VASTLY greater performance at a staggeringly lower price than either commissioned builds or pre-built. As for the latter, you likely won't be able to get exactly what you're looking for.

no, laptops do almost always use 2.5" drives, but only recently do they have the option of SSDs. SSDs are generally similar in size to their platter based counterparts if for no other reason so they fit in the same mount point. They run quieter, cooler and with less energy used as there are no moving parts. Additionally, their access time is much quicker than platter based drives as there is no physical head that needs to move to read a physical sector. SSDs use the same technology that is in SD cards, which are much smaller.

you do realise I have NO idea what you're talking about--but I need a quick lesson in drives--are SSDs the ones they're using in laptops?? And aren't they generally smaller--or where'd I get that idea???

SSDs are super-fast to read, but can be slow to write large files, depending on the OS and controller support for AHCI TRIM commands. You really don't want your renders living on SSDs. Makes a great system drive, though.



Of course, you've got enough memory, I would imagine you're not going to have a lot of swapping to disk until the render is done. Or are you? I'm not too familiar with rendering software.

if you could use a raid-10 of ssd (or sas) drives you get the best of both worlds - speed and reliability.



the raid 10 is a high level of redundancy (check wikipedia). you could also throw in a hot-spare.



you'd probably want a raid controller with battery backup too - adaptec.

We have a couple High end machines here at work, from Cerise computers http://www.cerise.com/workstation-eight.htm They Are dual hex core machines with 96GB Ram and 2100GB Hard drives in raid 5, a Quadro 6000 video card with 6gb memory... They ran about 14K each from Cerise and chew through 3d renders and massive polygon loads without flinching... They also make lesser machines that stay under 10K with 48GB memory and still dual hex core machines... We use ours for architectural rendering and "digital lifestyle" work..



Anyway, that's my 2 cents,



I would definitely donate if you decide to go that route!

I got that PSU on your list for a new Sandy Bridge system I built a month ago. A definitive recommendation, you won't be disappointed.



I was also thinking about buying an SSD but its read/write durability has taken me away from it. I need an HDD that last a looong time and be able to withstand a lot of file movement. So far I've been using a 1TB WD "green" HDD that I pulled out of an external enclosure after my previous HDD failed and it's a pain. It's hilarious seeing a lightning fast system being brought down by an HDD that takes forever to load stuff lol. I'm thinking about doing a SATA RAID but I'm still thinking on what HDD model to get.

With the 12 slots available on the Supermicro mobo, you can get two of either of those without compromising your triple channel. That being said, I believe 8gb sticks themselves require a buffered stick so if that is a particular issue, then that makes your decision for you.



As to your C drive, I'll again forward the idea of using smaller SSDs for your system and maybe even rendering app drives and a SAS or SATA RAID set for everything else. Superb perfomance and gobs of "inexpensive" storage.

I have that server with that mobo. Per the mobo details page at supermicro, "Supports up to 48 GB 1333 / 1066 / 800MHz DDR3 ECC / Non ECC Unbuffered memory". So when you go to over 48GB you'll need to move to buffered and replace all sticks, which you would need to do anyway at that point.



Look on crucial.com and plugin a supermicro X8DA3 motherboard and it will spit out all compatible skus from them. Specifically CT3KIT51272BA1067 or CT3KIT51272BA1339. Same price, but there's the timing/clock speed trade off.

Nothing wrong with the reliability of SSDs, so if you can afford it I'd definitely go for it.

Long time follower/subscriber, first time poster. Wait, this aint radio...



Upgrades are always great, and i would love to have a setup like that but I am more of a laptop person. Love the mobility and being able to sit where i want and do the same tasks... Anyways, my question is, do you know where the application is running slow on? Is the CPU not fast enough, do you push what you can to the GPU? Do the applications fully support GPU processing? Is the application multi-threaded and is the OS spreading those threads across the existing processors? Have you measured?



Sorry, if I am way off on the next paragraph. I am a out-of-date hardware guy turned software/sysadmin guy... My last custom machine was 1999 with a P-Pro 200mhz with 32MB RAM! :)



Also, ECC memory? Little over kill in this day and age since the machine seams lives for <10 years. I have machines (laptop & desktops) older then that that have things fail before the memory. Save your self some $$$ and get the 48GB of Non-ECC.



As to SSD, you use and trust your flash drives? Then you are using Flash with a different interface (USB vs SATA)... There are some under the hood differences but they are pretty close to the same concept. I would love to get N82E16820226169 (drull: N82E16820226169) for my lappy-toppy.

To clarify, do you indeed mean 8gb of sticks (8gb total) or multiple sticks of 8gb? In either event, I'd be very specific on the support or lack thereof to registered/buffered RAM.

Wow that preliminary build list you've got looks awesome! It will definitely fly! I would be glad to make a special donation to go toward your new machine. Should I submit a special donation now, or at a later date?

The Chipin is a great idea. I love supporting DB with my yearly renewal, but when you need new hardware, you need new hardware. I'd be absolutely willing to help "chip in" more money where it is needed. One could argue that's what paypal is for, but I like the structure of CI.



Also, speaking as an advanced PC user who happens to have SSDs both at work and at home, unless you are IO limited, platter based hard drives are fine. From what I remember from my days tinkering with rendering software, the software was FPU intensive and not IO intensive, though that could be different with the new software out now.



I would spring for a largeish SSD boot drive just to make it easier to start the system up, but for your heavy lifting and major storage duties, SAS/SATA is plenty fast and even more so when RAIDed. I have both the Intel 40GB X25-M SSD at work, and the Corsair Force CSSD-F120GB2 at home in my laptop and objective results are "meh" at best. My Raptors in RAID 0 on my desktop are still plenty fast, and I do video render work on a fairly regular basis.



In any case, if you open it up to donations, I for one would love to help you out. You bring so much joy to my desktop and many of my friends who have signed up through the years by my recommendation. It's the least I can do to return the favor. :)

That specific issue could at least be somewhat mitigated by simply offering limited donation brackets each of which correspond to the price of a gifted 1 yr or lifetime membership cost. Double karma.

They're one of the few revolutionary upgrades you can put in your machine. While the impact on your render times probably won't be as significant, especially with a pile of RAM like that, interactive tasks really love the SSD. And other posters are right, you can get a very good SSD for well under $500, making it entirely within the budget for this machine.

Although Kickstarter is a great way of raising money, you need to offer rewards for donating, depending on the amount donated.

Have you ever thought of using this nice little site?

http://www.kickstarter.com/



I've seen many projects started up that have great success. I'm not sure how long it would take for the funding to grow to the required amount, but going by your dedicated followers, I don't think it would take long.

Computer components are one of the more passionately debated topics, but for what it's worth - I'd highly suggest Crucial (Micron) CT3KIT102472BB1067Q or CT3KIT102472BV1339 for the 7046A box. The latter is faster but with a slower timing. http://www.crucial.com/store/listparts.aspx?model=SUPER%20X8DA3

Be advised that using all 6 slots in the eVGA will likely disable the benefits of multiple channel memory which are substantial.

Case and board look good.

Drop PNY; they use shit memory.

PSU excellent.

Xeon's hell yea.

Wintec? No no no...Item#: N82E16820226169. Multiply if necessary.

Go SSD. David below is right; I'd recommend Acronis for bootable backup. Trust us :)

If you are spending that much on a workstation, I'd definitely go with an SSD for the boot/application install drive. I've been using them in my laptops for the last 2 years and I can't imagine a computer without them anymore. The new Intel SSD 510 Series 250GB, would be ideal! If you are worried about reliability, just make sure you have a good backup strategy.

I know hard drives are not the most important part of rendering but I would think you would benefit from 4 HD's in a RAID 0,1 config. I've done that on a couple of systems built for friends and they just fly.

I hate to appear ignorant, that should have read "compatibility issues". I will also add that data throughput and multiple access points are generally limited by number of spindles (drives) as much or more than bus or drive transfer technology capacities.

I would highly recommend confirming that mobo accepts buffered (registered) RAM as the memory you selected is registered which could cause compatibility. Also, consider lower CAS latency (timing) than 9-9-9. Additionally, consider a two tiered storage solution. Use SSDs for the system and rendering with a RAID10 card plus some SAS or even SATA drives for archival in either RAID 10 or 1. RAID10 gives all redundancy benefits of RAID1 + as much or more performance than RAID0.

I was thinking the other day you needed a new machine, seriously.



On another note though, I got my first dell 30" about the same time you got your first one. I left it with my former employer, and yesterday got a new one.



The new 3011 is SO MUCH nicer than the first one I got. It tilts, pans, goes up and down, and has a zillion on-screen options for input, color depth, etc.



Something to think about. :)

Ryan,

Have you ever heard of ChipIn.com ? It'll let you put a widget on the website that allows people to see the progress of donations toward your goal and click on it to donate via PayPal. Just a thought anyway.

Wow Ryan, it looks like you use a LOT of storage unless all those HDDs are just what you're picking from instead of what you plan to install...



I can't really comment on most of this stuff, but what's really keeping you from trying a SSD?

It might make sense to put your operating system and programs on a SSD,and render directly to that just to cut downtime in seeing initial renders. Then you could back everything up onto another hard drive, which you should do anyway.



If stability's what you're worried about you could install your OS and programs on another drive as well, which would mean you'd be back up in the time it takes to choose a new boot priority. (Unless this interferes with licensing...?)



If that doesn't work I know that some professional backup packages can get you back up and running in less than 4 hours. (I personally love HP's Home Media Center running Windows home server; which can back up 10 computers if you put enough storage in it, (and you can pull the HDDs out and run in case of fire)).



Do you think that would help you at all or would it just waste effort?

Case- I'd go with the CM HAF. Essentially the best full-tower case you can buy, and it has plenty of space for the long graphics cards.



Motherboard- Excellent choice. It will be better than any usual server board.



HDD- The EVGA doesn't support SAS, but the Raptor should be plenty fast. Maybe 2 in RAID 0, or 4 in RAID 1+0, if you want extra speed + data security? SSDs probably aren't the best choice for your application anyway, simply because of the price/GB problem. I have a 64GB Kingston that works great, but I can really only have the OS and my most important programs on it before it gets filled. DO NOT GET SEAGATE- always go with basically any other company. Hitachi drives are really fast, Samsungs are slower but reliable, and Western Digital is my personal favorite. Seagate doesn't know how to make drives anymore. Again, don't forget that you can't use SAS, but 7200rpm hard drives can't put out 6Gb/s anyway (more like just over 1Gb/s).



Everything else looks great. Those 6-core Xeons will beat two AMD 12-cores any day. Just don't forget to get some thermal paste (Arctic Silver 5 or Arctic Silver Ceramique maybe). 1200W might be a little overkill, but you would definitely want 1000W; Corsair is the best.



Those are my suggestions. Sorry for the length, but I just got done building a computer for myself and I spent a lot of time doing research. Good luck!

I would go for the barebones workstation. That case looks to have a lot more space for fitting the long GPU card. Also, the front-to-back ventilation looks to be more solid. (Too bad the manufacturers don't provide CFM ratings...) From what I read of that GPU, you will need all the ventilation you can get. The couple hundred dollars you save will make the higher cost of the SAS drive more palatable, too. :)



One concern: The barebones's PSU is significantly lower powered than the a la carte option you picked out. I assume you have done the math, and found it to be enough, but you won't want to be running the PSU too close to its limits all the time.

From what I've read, Intel SSDs are the ones to trust. They are the ones Apple uses in their Macs, and all the testing I read on hardware sites said Intel were some of the best performing and didn't have the massive number of glitchy bugs that other brands had. I've had a MacBook Pro for a year with an Intel SSD in it and I've been very happy. Zero problems and lightning fast.

Ryan - your list seems to only be available to those who also have an account there, at least I was prompted for an account so I was unable to go any further.



Generally speaking, you have a better chance of getting everything to play together nicely if you start with a bare bones system. I have built workstations and you can put together a fantastic system, but it requires you to really look closely at all the details to make sure you don't miss something crucial.



Toms has a good article comparing SSD to HDD:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-array-hard-drive,2775-5.html

There are some significant changes in the works further improving performance in SSD while reducing the price. It might be worth looking into. One thing toms points out is the energy savings and performance/watt available with SSD. Of course the big question is whether SSD is stable enough a technology to rely on. I haven't taken the leap myself yet, but mostly for cost reasons though.



Overall I would recommend going with the bare bones system and customizing it. I have done both in the past and was consistently happier with the bare bones packages than I was with the ones I put together piecemeal.

This thing looks to be darn fast! Currently, the 6 vs. 8 core situation is just as you describe. In 6-9 months it might be very different. But that's not for another 6-9 months :)



Intel enterprise SSD's seem to have a good reputation, but they are expensive, and I imagine you're mostly limited by processor speed rather than storage I/O when rendering. I think you made the right choice there.



Since both motherboards you're looking at can accommodate a memory upgrade, maybe try 24 GB to start and move up to 48 if you need to.



Good luck and enjoy!

Too bad it sounds like you can't wait until the workstation/server variants of Sandy Bridge come out later this year. Those will offer significanty better performance per dollar and up to 8 cores per socket. But if you need something now, you need something now. . .



BTW, that link seems to take me to the wish list page associated with my own account, rather than your list. Maybe just me?