meikat

Some of these also speak for those industries as well. If you're not one of the most competitive and talented individuals out there, you'll have a hard time making it in the Game Dev industry period. Programmers have an easier time than artists, but it's still competitive for them. Most of my friends who graduated from FS are either working completely out of industry or are working for Military contractors. One of my friends who took the Game Dev course at FS is currently a programmer for a Military contractor and is making $75k/yr. He also is interviewing for a position at Microsoft for more money, but he wants to be doing games. I suggest that anyone looking to do game dev currently should look into the programming side of things because Art, Design, Production, and most other roles in the industry are so saturated that it's near impossible to find work unless you stick out with an amazing portfolio. Coders on the other hand can work in many industries and it's a coder's market. I don't personally know a programmer making less than $55k/yr.

I wouldn't. I wrote a comment above with lots of info. Both DeVry and UoP give the same kind of degree that doesn't carry much weight, but Full Sail actually teaches you real industry skills. Full Sail and just about any technical college is not about the degree you get, but the skills and contacts you make. If you're going to any college for a piece of paper, you're doing it wrong. I've never failed to get a job due to not having a degree, yet I have numerous certifications that are worth a lot more to an employer than a degree.

I just saw the sponsorship spot on a handy tech episode and knew there would be a ton of misinformation flying around the forums, so I decided to pop over here. Disclosure: I have never attended or worked for Full Sail. I live 3 miles away from it, and have been in Orlando 12 years. I've known ~30 people who have attended Full Sail in that time. My girlfriend is a Full Sail grad along with a couple of my best friends. I posted this on another post: I think before you go to ANY college, you need to take a good hard look at yourself. Most jobs today, especially in highly skilled industries care more about certifications that prove you know what you're doing, or your body of work (ie portfolio). You can learn what Full Sail, or ANY college teaches you through online sources for free/cheap, and if you're one of the people who can do that AND you don't qualify for full scholarships, you should think long and hard about doing that. Just having a degree in hand for anything in the tech or creative sectors doesn't mean very much at all. Full Sail is great for people that NEED a scheduled curriculum and cannot push themselves to learn something on their own. They offer tons of scholarships, especially for women. They're also very very well known in the movie and game dev industry. If you go for an interview, there's about a 30-50% chance one of the people looking at your resume is a Full Sail grad. Now, with that said, no college will get you a guaranteed job. Full Sail has a TON of grads who fall on their face and fail and end up on a phone trying to explain to a customer why their Cell Phone bill is so high. These grads are very vocal about their hatred for Full Sail, because there's no way it could be their fault. My girlfriend graduated with 7 awards and was the Valedictorian. Here we are 2 years later, and her only industry related job was on a project she doesn't get paid for unless it makes a profit. But we're moving out of state with a 1 year contract for a game related job... FINALLY. How did she manage that? She kept her networking contacts from Full Sail. She went to every damn Game Dev conference she could. When she didn't get a job, she asked why and worked on those areas of her Portfolio. She was working two part time jobs plus working on her portfolio constantly. It takes hard work, luck of knowing the right person, or a little of both to get into a competitive industry like game dev, movies, etc. She regularly tells people the pros and cons of Full Sail, and insists she could not have learned what she learned there by herself and her $60k student loan debt was totally worth it. That's for her and ymmv. They do teach every student basic math and English classes if they are going for an accredited degree (this was not always the case since they used to not be accredited). Most if not all credits you earn at full sail will not be transferable to another college because Full Sail has a different type of accreditation than most colleges. If you're thinking the Full Sail degree will carry any weight outside of the industry, it will not. Many people will make fun of you for going to Full Sail because they think you wasted money. Ignore what other people say, and speak to grads IN THE INDUSTRY. Get their opinion. Oh, and if you're not a competitive as hell person, choose an easier industry. Most game dev positions get 200+ applications within the first few days of posting. If you're not ready for rejection, get a business degree. I am willing to answer questions if anyone has any. My personal recommendation to anyone about Full Sail is always based on a checklist. If none of these are checked, look at a different school. All of these apply to attending the actual campus. I would not recommend the online degrees as they're overpriced for what you get. __ Are you or your family rich and you don't mind throwing large sums of money at what might end up a useless degree? __ Are you terrible at motivating yourself and need a hectic schedule and looming debt over your head as a motivator? __ Are you a super competitive person who is going to take rejection from HUNDREDS of job apps ok and keep going? __ Are you good at networking and have enough money/will power to be unemployed in your industry for multiple years? __ Are you ok with ~$100k in student loan debt? There's probably some I missed, but if you checked any of those boxes then you should THINK about going to Full Sail and start by talking to some grads who are working in the industry currently.

I think before you go to ANY college, you need to take a good hard look at yourself. Most jobs today, especially in highly skilled industries care more about certifications that prove you know what you're doing, or your body of work (ie portfolio). You can learn what Full Sail, or ANY college teaches you through online sources for free/cheap, and if you're one of the people who can do that AND you don't qualify for full scholarships, you should think long and hard about doing that. Just having a degree in hand for anything in the tech or creative sectors doesn't mean very much at all. Full Sail is great for people that NEED a scheduled curriculum and cannot push themselves to learn something on their own. They offer tons of scholarships, especially for women. They're also very very well known in the movie and game dev industry. If you go for an interview, there's about a 30-50% chance one of the people looking at your resume is a Full Sail grad. Now, with that said, no college will get you a guaranteed job. Full Sail has a TON of grads who fall on their face and fail and end up on a phone trying to explain to a customer why their Cell Phone bill is so high. These grads are very vocal about their hatred for Full Sail, because there's no way it could be their fault. My girlfriend graduated with 7 awards and was the Valedictorian. Here we are 2 years later, and her only industry related job was on a project she doesn't get paid for unless it makes a profit. But we're moving out of state with a 1 year contract for a game related job... FINALLY. How did she manage that? She kept her networking contacts from Full Sail. She went to every damn Game Dev conference she could. When she didn't get a job, she asked why and worked on those areas of her Portfolio. She was working two part time jobs plus working on her portfolio constantly. It takes hard work, luck of knowing the right person, or a little of both to get into a competitive industry like game dev, movies, etc. She regularly tells people the pros and cons of Full Sail, and insists she could not have learned what she learned there by herself and her $60k student loan debt was totally worth it. That's for her and ymmv. They do teach every student basic math and English classes if they are going for an accredited degree (this was not always the case since they used to not be accredited). Most if not all credits you earn at full sail will not be transferable to another college because Full Sail has a different type of accreditation than most colleges. If you're thinking the Full Sail degree will carry any weight outside of the industry, it will not. Many people will make fun of you for going to Full Sail because they think you wasted money. Ignore what other people say, and speak to grads IN THE INDUSTRY. Get their opinion. Oh, and if you're not a competitive as hell person, choose an easier industry. Most game dev positions get 200+ applications within the first few days of posting. If you're not ready for rejection, get a business degree.

GTX 960. I've been really tempted to upgrade to a 480 because it looks like AMD is finally able to get back into the competition!

Kiro!

Minor update: The Titan Z's are out, and I'm waiting on Titan X's. I'm going to take the SSD array off to a machine shop soon to get the aluminum cover plate made. Client still hasn't decided on a reservoir. I've done some minor wire cleanup, and I'm planning the loop around what parts we have done so I can get a list of bits needed to be ordered for final assembly. I wont be bringing all 3 monitors to my house. I just need one monitor to boot it, test it, configure things etc. Tesla model S I assume? He ended up buying a Tesla and keeping the Caddy. He got the P85D and it's amazing. I've driven it for a few hours on one of our weekend excursions. It's a thing of beauty, but I'm glad he kept the Caddy. I love them both. Ehhh I don't know if it'll be a straight up smash. This rig is also essentially over 6 months old at this point too. My medical issues really put a damper on the build.

Update posted under April 19th spoiler on original post.

Update coming later tonight. Stay tuned!

Doubtful. I've been going by this screenname in most communities/games since ~2002.

More than likely ebay them. They're still selling for a lot of money since they have way more computational power for things like GPU renderfarms, or computational heavy workloads.

I would never deprive the internet of this much badass. I'll be snapping pics as I go. I'm just waiting for the project to be dropped off here. I'm not sure when that's happening. I'll be sad to see the Titan Z's go, but the benchmarks on the Titan X are redonculous. I still don't understand how the Titan X can beat a Dual GPU Titan Z. I think we can cram 3 of them in the rig, and blow away the performance he's getting on the Titan Zs. (and also eliminate some of the issues we're running into with the Titan Zs, like only 1 Displayport per card Come on Nvidia...)

Sorry for the death of the thread guys. I went through a rollercoaster of medical issues over the last 6 months. I've been unable to work on it at his house, and he's moving about 45 minutes away in a few weeks, so he's going to bring the entire project to my house to finish up, and they we'll get it transported to his new house. Also, we're pondering switching the graphics cards to Titan X's because... why not? The rig is still working on air cooling. I have the radiators mounted, the fan controller in place. I have a lot to do still before I can setup the watercooling loop. I was over there the other day since the rig would not boot, and it turns out one of the UPS devices is not staying on longer than a minute, so I need to RMA that to Tripplite. For now the rig can run off of one since we aren't overclocking yet. Edit: Here's how we're planning on mounting the eight SSDs (One is missing because it's connected as the boot drive):

Does anyone have any idea if this will be able to handle a Plex server and be able to transcode @720p? I can't seem to find anything that says yes or no, but it's looking like no based on the history of other Atom CPUs.

Love you LMG! <3

Edited for some work from today.

We didn't order anything from Amazon sadly. I personally can't stand trying to use amazon's site to find anything. I guess if you know exactly what you want it's not bad, but the site design is so arduous to use. We used Newegg, NCIX, MonoPrice, FrozenCPU and a few other sites. Also we've ordered about 97% of what we have to already. Only a few odds and ends are left. I wouldn't mind the thread getting on the WAN show, but I would think we might as well wait until the entire build is done if that's going to happen.

Yay for learning new things!

Added this picture of the completed wall plate to the last update. I'm pleased with it. The mounts will be attached to the wall plate via bolts instead of to the wall, since it would be near impossible to get every arm into a stud. Also when he moves, he can just attach the wall plate to studs wherever he goes, and as long as the wallplate is level, the monitors will be level. I'm planning to attach to 3 studs with the wall plate so that we know it is secure since the outside monitors will be on 20" arms, I'm worried about the wall failing. No crappy drywall anchors for us!

I honestly have no clue as to any performance losses. Sorry I've never gamed on ECC ram. I did some quick google-fu, and found this http://www.techspot.com/article/845-ddr3-ram-vs-ecc-memory/ Which suggests that ECC ram having negative effects on performance is a thing of the past since the differences are very minimal. Edit: Also, I'm sorry for assuming you didn't know what ECC was/was for. I should have read your original question a little better.

Basically ECC should almost never be necessary in a personal use machine for 99.99% of us. It's designed for servers where a single tiny error during a read or write could screw up a database. When you have thousands of database queries going in and out every second, it's easy to see why writing a single error even once an hour could be an issue. Data corruption sucks, but on servers, the issue can be compounded way worse and way faster than a PC or workstation. For what he's doing, I figured we'd get better use out of going with a supported DDR3 module that has heatsinks that can be attached to water cooling blocks (since the aesthetics of cooled ram seemed important to him). Also, since he's gaming, ECC seemed kind of silly. 64gb of ram should be PLENTY for almost anyone unless you're doing tons of Virtualization or something like that. I run 2 virtual PCs on my personal rig which has 16gb of ram, and never hit page file. I know there's a video out there where Linus does a REALLY quick and thorough explanation on ECC, but here's an over simplified explanation from Luke

After all the lighting, pumps, fans, etc, it will probably be around 1800-2200 watts under load. It has to draw from two separate 15 amp circuits in his house (hence the dual UPS backups, one for one outlet, one for the other. We have one power supply for the GPUs, and one for everything else. Once overclocked, the GPUs will likely draw 600+ watts each. And yes, we plan to overclock them once they're watercooled. Hahahaha! I just watched his new video on overclocking the 2697, and believe me, I was taking notes. I really hope the motherboard has the right options to change the bus (I think I remember seeing it being adjustable, so yay!). I won't be overclocking until watercooling goes in though...

Neither one of us have time to do any design (not to mention, I'm not very good at it). I did contact someone who has extensive experience working with acrylic and making crazy one off reservoirs, and he seems like he has some great ideas. As soon as I have a chance to get him some exact measurements, he's going to make up a sketch or two and we'll decide on a design, so it looks like we'll more than likely be going custom.

HAH. Suuureee. Games recognize it fine, just some of the benchmarks don't. Since games work fine, I wasn't worried about it in the short term.

we tried Valley, but the score for some reason was low. It seems like some benchmarks are only recognizing one of the titan z cards, and we're too distracted to deal with it right now. soon though.