$25,000 PC Build

[sheppkvn]

Hi. I am planning an ultimate PC build that would be able to do large renderings for my job really quick and game at high resolutions for YouTube. Price is not a real factor since I got a large bonus from work. I just want this to be the best possible machine that can literally handle anything that you throw at it. I'm not really looking into water-cooling yet so don't post anything about watercooling. Here's the list.

 

Motherboard

ASRock X79 Extreme11 LGA 2011 Intel X79 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Extended ATX Intel Motherboard

 

Processor

Intel Core i7-4930K Ivy Bridge-E 3.4GHz LGA 2011 130W Six-Core Desktop Processor BX80633i74930K

 

Memory

CORSAIR Dominator Platinum 64GB (8 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2133 Desktop Memory Model CMD64GX3M8A2133C9

 

Graphics Cards

2x EVGA 03G-P4-2884-KR GeForce GTX 780 Ti Superclocked 3GB 384-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 SLI Support w/EVGA ACX Cooler Video ...

2x NVIDIA® Quadro® K4000 VCQK4000-PB 3GB GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 Workstation Video Card

1x NVIDIA 900-22081-2250-000 Tesla K40 (GK110B) 12GB 384-bit GDDR5 GPU Computing Accelerators - Active

 

Storage

Boot Drive 2x Kingston HyperX 3K SH103S3/120G 2.5" 120GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) (Stand-Alone Drive) (RAID 0; OS)

Data Drive 4x OCZ Vertex 450 Series VTX450-25SAT3-512G 2.5" 512GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) (RAID 0; Programs and Games)

Data Drive 4x Seagate Constellation ES.3 ST4000NM0033 4TB 7200 RPM 128MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Enterprise Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive (RAID 10; Storage)

 

Disk Drive

ASUS Black Blu-ray Burner SATA BW-16D1HT

 

Case

Corsair Obsidian 750D Black ATX Full Tower Computer Case

 

Power Supply

ENERMAX Maxrevo EMR1500EWT 1500W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS GOLD Certified Full Modular Active PFC ...

.

Cooling

NZXT Kraken X60 RL-KRX60-01 Ultra Performance Water/Liquid CPU Cooler 280MM

3x NZXT FX Enthusiast RF-FX14L-OP 140mm 140LB PWM Fan

2x NZXT FX-120LB 120mm Enthusiast 3 Speed Fluid Dynamic Bearing 2600RPM Fan

 

Peripherals

Mad Catz R.A.T. 9 MCB4370900B2/02/1 Black 8 Buttons 1 x Wheel USB 2.0 RF Wireless Laser Gaming Mouse for PC and Mac

Corsair Vengeance K95 CH-9000020-NA Black/Metal USB Wired Gaming Mechanical Keyboard (NA)

Beats by Dr. Dre Black Pro 3.5mm Connector Over Ear High Performance Professional Headphone (Black)

Wacom Cintiq 22HD 19.5" x 11.5" Active Area USB, DVI-I Tablet

[BlackMamba]

i think you need 2 psu's for this build and maybe a bigger case such the 900D or the HAF stacker series... also for a workstation i would wait for the new haswell-E processor or go dual xeon...

[Markyod]

Please don't buy beats, I will cry.

[FloRolf]

i wouldnt really get vertex 450 drives. just get yourself a 250gb evo for booting and another 1tb evo foro games and your real HDDs for your data.

[Jamdude]

Will that motherboard support all those cards?  You'll have a dual slot hanging off the bottom.

[sheppkvn]

Will that motherboard support all those cards?  You'll have a dual slot hanging off the bottom.

Put the Tesla in the first slot. Put the Quadro's in the 3rd and 4th slot. Put the 780 Ti's in the 5th and 7th slot. The case has nine expansion slots.

[Jamdude]

Put the Tesla in the first slot. Put the Quadro's in the 3rd and 4th slot. Put the 780 Ti's in the 5th and 7th slot. The case has nine expansion slots.

The 780ti in the 7th slot will be a slot over the edge of the motherboard blocking the bottom connectors.

[sheppkvn]

The 780ti in the 7th slot will be a slot over the edge of the motherboard blocking the bottom connectors.

The first PCI-e slot on the motherboard lines up with the first expansion slot on the case. If there is a dual slot card in the seventh slot on the motherboard, it would take up the seventh and eighth expansion slot, there for allowing me to even put in the two port usb expansion in the ninth slot.

[lilc]

What renders exactly are you doing.

 

 

Please don't buy beats, I will cry.

 

I will also cry.

[swansburg]

If you have all that money to spend please buy a professional set of headphones and not something that teenagers buy to wear around their neck so they can look cool. Maybe get a nice external dac too. Besides that everything looks pretty good, Please make a buildlog of this if this is actually going to be built, i think everyone would like to see something so overkill and awesome.

[Glenwing]

Pro graphics cards like Quadros and Teslas won't do anything for rendering, they're for people who need the double precision and ECC for 3D modelling/CAD or for complex scientific/medical research computation.  In single precision like straight video rendering a GeForce card will be just as good.  Although if you're going to be doing CGI and special effects then that's a different story.  More CPU power will help you out in this application.

 

RAID 6 is a more robust solution than RAID 10, you can lose any two drives and still maintain all your data.  RAID 10 can lose potentially two drives and still retain data, but if the two drives happen to be from the same mirrored set then you will lose all your data after two failures instead of three.  You will need a dedicated RAID card for this though since no current motherboard chipsets support it. 

 

I'm also not sure why you have a 240GB SSD array for your OS and another 2TB one for programs; no OS takes close to 240GB.  RAID 0 won't do anything to make your OS faster either, it only affects very large sequential file transfers.  If all your multimedia is stored on a mechanical drive array and your SSD is only used for OS and programs, 2x512GB should be plenty of space.  You can change them out for 1TB Samsung 840 EVOs if you really think you'll have over a terabyte of program installations, but the drives are not quite as good.

 

http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=21427711

 

You have two SSD mounts behind the motherboard, leaving you all 8 drive cages for 3.5" drives.  RAID 6 takes minimum of four drives, with four leftover drive cages you could do two sets of RAID 6 in RAID 0.  Put the graphics cards with 1 slot of space inbetween for breathing room, and put the RAID card in one of the two gaps.  RAM takes like 5 seconds to install so just get 4x8GB first and see if that's enough for you.  Overclocks will be more stable with less DIMMs.  Replace the fans on the H100i with the Gelid fans and install as a top exhaust, and put two of the 140mm fans as front intakes and one 140mm as rear exhaust.

[sheppkvn]

Pro graphics cards like Quadros and Teslas won't do anything for rendering, they're for people who need the double precision and ECC for 3D modelling/CAD or for complex scientific/medical research computation.  In single precision like straight video rendering a GeForce card will be just as good.  Although if you're going to be doing CGI and special effects then that's a different story.  More CPU power will help you out in this application.

I do modeling in Revit and AutoCAD and then render it in 3ds Max Design. Thanks for the info.

[Glenwing]

I do modeling in Revit and AutoCAD and then render it in 3ds Max Design. Thanks for the info.

 

Ok.  Quadros for you then

 

(Rereading my post you quoted, I should clarify my last sentence, I wasn't referring to CGI/special effects, but to purely video rendering)

[ManOfDisguise]

I guess everything is good...except the damn Beats get rid of that!

[Guest]

Why the RAM? Why not just get cheaper 2133? The other thing to think about with that motherboard is that apparently the fan is quite loud. 

[brob]

The build seems out of balance, even taking the intended usage into account. While gpu are important, if the rest of the system can't keep up they will not be used optimally.

 

Why does the build not use an i7-4960X?

 

I don't see a RAID card in the build.

 

The system drive would be better a single larger SSD or even a RAID array large enough for system, programs, and games. A large SSD scratch disk for AutoCAD would be a good idea. I'd suggest 1TB Samsung EVO for these. I'd also suggest using 1TB SSD in the RAID data storage array. I wouldn't even contemplate buying OCZ SSD.

[The PC Enforcer]

If you have all that money to spend please buy a professional set of headphones and not something that teenagers buy to wear around their neck so they can look cool. Maybe get a nice external dac too. Besides that everything looks pretty good, Please make a buildlog of this if this is actually going to be built, i think everyone would like to see something so overkill and awesome.

Agreed. This would be very overkill and I want to see it. This really would be cool if it was watercooled though but it would be hard finding a waterblock for a Tesla.

 

Pro graphics cards like Quadros and Teslas won't do anything for rendering, they're for people who need the double precision and ECC for 3D modelling/CAD or for complex scientific/medical research computation.  In single precision like straight video rendering a GeForce card will be just as good.  Although if you're going to be doing CGI and special effects then that's a different story.  More CPU power will help you out in this application.

 

RAID 6 is a more robust solution than RAID 10, you can lose any two drives and still maintain all your data.  RAID 10 can lose potentially two drives and still retain data, but if the two drives happen to be from the same mirrored set then you will lose all your data after two failures instead of three.  You will need a dedicated RAID card for this though since no current motherboard chipsets support it. 

 

I'm also not sure why you have a 240GB SSD array for your OS and another 2TB one for programs; no OS takes close to 240GB.  RAID 0 won't do anything to make your OS faster either, it only affects very large sequential file transfers.  If all your multimedia is stored on a mechanical drive array and your SSD is only used for OS and programs, 2x512GB should be plenty of space.  You can change them out for 1TB Samsung 840 EVOs if you really think you'll have over a terabyte of program installations, but the drives are not quite as good.

 

http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=21427711

 

You have two SSD mounts behind the motherboard, leaving you all 8 drive cages for 3.5" drives.  RAID 6 takes minimum of four drives, with four leftover drive cages you could do two sets of RAID 6 in RAID 0.  Put the graphics cards with 1 slot of space inbetween for breathing room, and put the RAID card in one of the two gaps.  RAM takes like 5 seconds to install so just get 4x8GB first and see if that's enough for you.  Overclocks will be more stable with less DIMMs.  Replace the fans on the H100i with the Gelid fans and install as a top exhaust, and put two of the 140mm fans as front intakes and one 140mm as rear exhaust.

I do see why he would take RAID 10 over RAID 6. Most motherboards don't support RAID 6 so he would have to remove a graphics card (one K4000 based on his configuration) for a high end RAID card. Also if one of his drives do fail in RAID 6, the rebuilding process would take forever and also, RAID 6 has some bad performance penalties but it does offer better protection.

 

I guess everything is good...except the damn Beats get rid of that!

Agreed.

 

Why the RAM? Why not just get cheaper 2133? The other thing to think about with that motherboard is that apparently the fan is quite loud. 

It is 2133. That motherboard fan doesn't really start spinning until it gets hot but I've been around one while someone was playing Crysis and it was audible.

 

The build seems out of balance, even taking the intended usage into account. While gpu are important, if the rest of the system can't keep up they will not be used optimally.

 

Why does the build not use an i7-4960X?

 

I don't see a RAID card in the build.

 

The system drive would be better a single larger SSD or even a RAID array large enough for system, programs, and games. A large SSD scratch disk for AutoCAD would be a good idea. I'd suggest 1TB Samsung EVO for these. I'd also suggest using 1TB SSD in the RAID data storage array. I wouldn't even contemplate buying OCZ SSD.

I agree. A 4960X would really bring out the full capabilty of this build. Also, there's no RAID Card because the motherboard has a built in LSI RAID Controller on it with 8 SATA 6Gb/s ports on it. Also, just one large SSD RAID Array would be smart. Put everything on a 4TB array with that much money in RAID 0 and then use a couple of 4TB HDD's in RAID 1 for a backup.

 

 

That's just my 2 Cents.

[Guest]

I was talking about the fact that it is dominator platinum - pure money for aesthetics.

[The PC Enforcer]

I was talking about the fact that it is dominator platinum - pure money for aesthetics.

Haha. True.

[The PC Enforcer]

Wacom Cintiq 22HD 19.5" x 11.5" Active Area USB, DVI-I Tablet

What's this for?

[marcbodea]

basically the LTT community reaction to beats

[brob]

 

I agree. A 4960X would really bring out the full capabilty of this build. Also, there's no RAID Card because the motherboard has a built in LSI RAID Controller on it with 8 SATA 6Gb/s ports on it. Also, just one large SSD RAID Array would be smart. Put everything on a 4TB array with that much money in RAID 0 and then use a couple of 4TB HDD's in RAID 1 for a backup..

 

Thanks, I had missed the on-board LSI RAID controller. I notice that it doesn't offer levels 5 or 6, which is too bad. Had 6 been possible creating a single 6 x 1TB array of SSD with external backup would make sense.

[WoodenMarker]

I do modeling in Revit and AutoCAD and then render it in 3ds Max Design. Thanks for the info.

If you really want faster renders, I'd suggest getting several 8320's for render nodes.