Diazonium

Yeah, I am calling bullshit on the "100 °C is fine" argument. If your server is hitting 100 °C, you need to call the server room to have them kill power to all machines because the AC broke down. Tj(max) on Cascade Lake X (last gen X299) is 86 °C according to Intel spec, and based on the Tcase figure regular 28 core Xeons should have a Tj(max) of about 90 °C(+/- 2°C). Not 100 °C. If the CPU is constantly hitting 95-105°C, what sort of temperatures do you think the VRM is hitting? Even if the CPU really can take the heat for 5 years, can every component on the motherboard take it as well? Most notably, capacitors near the CPU and the VRM FETs. With typical laptop warranties being at most 2 or 3 years, do you really have the trust in the manufacturers to use more expensive capacitors to tolerate high temperatures? Or are they just going to go with caps rated for 3000h at 85°C? We see desktop motherboards being proud to have excellent capacitors (ie. 10 000h @ 105°C), when was the last time a laptop manufacturer bragged about the quality of the capacitors used? Recent Macbooks are in fact dying a whole lot, often with shorts developing in VRM capacitors and BGA/FCBGA failures killing CPUs.

Huh, for some reason I thought this will be the permanent solution for their editing room, replacing all their current editing rigs.

Hmm, what a nice Single Point of Failure you have here...it would be a shame if something happened to it. Seriously, I think this is a bad idea reliability-wise. So many components, hard to troubleshoot. Dual socket systems, HW passthrough, PCI-E port multipliers and liquid cooling are all temperamental beasts that might end up causing headaches at the worst possible times. Packing all of them into a single point of failure, especially since you need it for your core business activities just does not seem like a wise move.

you are probably better off buying a new motherboard+cpu+ram, even the fastest cpus on the 775 platform are kinda weak by modern standards but if you really want to stick with it, check if you mobo can be made compatible with 771 xeons you can get very nice quad core 771 xeons from ebay/aliexpress for 5-25 USD, but not all mobos are compatible, not sure about Q45, some boards need a modified BIOS, a couple dont work at all

So I have been looking at cases for a while, and the Corsair Carbide 300R comes quite close to what I want, but I would like to hear if anyone has any alternatives they would recommend instead of that. Things that are needed in the case: ATX size mobo support good airflow(room for 2*140mm front intake fans) support for tall CPU air coolers dust filters, ideally everywhere(important, the computers will be running 24/7) drive cages that can fit 1 SSD + at least 3 HDDs, and also keep them cool and dampen vibrations (will be using 2 to 3, maybe even 4 WD Blacks, those can get mighty hot for a HDD) aesthetics does not matter, sound dampening does not matter (no one will be in the same room with them most of the time) The 300R satisfies most of these requirements, with some minor drawbacks: the side panel has grills for 2 fans, so dust can get in, no dust filter on top, and only 4 drive cages(universal size). Since noise is not an issue the airflow is easily improved by putting a Noctua NF-A14 industrialPPC 3000RPM fan to the front, that thing is sure to pull push a lot of filtered air into the case, and if put into the lower part of the front of the case, it will also keep the drives cool. If a 4th HDD ends up being necessary, the SSD could be mounted in the 5,25" bays. So far this is the best plan I could hatch, I am interested if you have any other case suggestions. There are so many cases from so many manufacturers, that an exhaustive search is not feasible.

depends on how much cost 3200 mhz ram adds, also if you are lucky you can overclock the 3000 ram to 3200

If you want to go with Nvidia, there is nothing wrong with a 1070, if you can get it for a reasonable price. To be honest, I am not sure if Volta will bring great improvements over Pascal. I have a gut feeling, that Pascal is close to being as fast as possible without significant power increase. The age of die shrinking solving all your issues is also over (you can shrink but power/transistor remains roughly the same), so I expect a general slowdown of GPU evolution. PS: the proliferation of HBM2 may happen with Volta (2080ti maybe?), consumes significantly less power than GDDR5/5X/6, leaves more power for the GPU, but otherwise not much is expected

I am still using a HD 4890. I think no further explanation is needed here.