Project Workstation

[TwinXeon UK]

Hey all,

So my eyes are looking towards the near future (2016) to build a replacement WS. I currently have a Dell 690 Precision and it is used mostly for CAD and a little gaming. For those interested in specs - It runs a pair of Xeon E5320, 1kW PS, 1/2 TB 850 PRO SSD, 2TB HDD,  32GB ECC FBDDR2 on 4 riser cards, 2 x Dell Ultrasharp U2412M and an EVGA Geforce GTX 660 Ti SC.

 

On the whole its been a good and reliable machine - although noisy with the number of stock cooling fans, but showing signs of age. Recently I had to replace a set of RAM sticks and this type are pricey!!! So I have begun to look at cases and boards and came across some board porn - Asus Z10PE D16. What I wanted is feedback as to this board, like is it a good product? how easy is it to build with? What larger cases would be good for a WS? Watercooled recommendations? Compatability issues? RAM type (ECC or not)?

 

I have decided to stick with 2 Xeon setup, as CAD programs and associated analysis software are high load animals. I also want to up the specs, including 2 hardcore GPUs. (My old WS is slow with rendering).

 

Your advice/feedback is greatly appreciated. There is a dizzying array of choice of products, as an engineer I like excellent quality and good design features (I don't like cheap and nasty).

 

Thanks

 

(Maybe Linus or Luke should make a build video using this board  )

 

 

[Deletive]

Budget? 

[TwinXeon UK]

Well being in the UK, I thought around £4000 ( I'm not sure how the market here reams us for import taxes etc.)

[TwinXeon UK]

A cousin build a hardcore gaming rig for £2000 which included a GTX780 and a good i5

[slightlyjaded]

I will say that the 1p version of this is probably the most brilliant motherboard on the market (and yes it looks downright pretty)  Hardware compatibility isn't an issue with ASUS doing the certification for anything you care to stick in it. As to using a xeon, not my field of expertise, but I'm sure someone could advise you.

 

I will say my rig cost 6000 AUD, but the exchange rate sucks, I had to pay the australia tax, and I had to source components from all over the globe at the time. I'm sure you can get away with certain components costing far less than mine.

 

I will sugest however that you make sure that whatever CAD program you are using is optimised for cuda, as a lot of them are optimised for the directcompute standard which gamer grade nividea cards do not support.

[CJ Chua]

A cousin build a hardcore gaming rig for £2000 which included a GTX780 and a good i5

 

Seriously bro????? I made a build list on pcpartpicker and I got these EPIC LIST

http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/dfj3D

[slightlyjaded]

Seriously bro????? I made a build list on pcpartpicker and I got these EPIC LIST

http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/dfj3D

(cough) not found

[Deletive]

ECC is something I would reccomend for RAM with this type of worklord. but lets get down to the components:

CPU: dual E5-2630 v3 8 cores, so 16 cores and 32 threads to work with. this should be a sizable upgrade from your 8 cores/16 threads. 
CPU coolers: however, I don't remember what supports these versions of sockets (different from consumer x99) 

RAM: we can either for with 64gb of ecc ram to work with or 32, reason for going 32gb is because of the steep cost extra of it.

Motherboard: didn't have the other version but this one is fine, if you look around and find the other one it shouldn't change much.

Storage: 500gb for stuff to work with and the programs, with the 3tb for bigger projects, few other things if you want, you can change this around.

GPU: this is where things get weird, SLI/Crossfire with these things usually either don't work or are a pain to work with, depending on what you're going to be working in terms of rendering such as CUDA or OpenCL, I chose one 980ti because of these values and should be taken into consideration. Although you do lack ECC ram for Rendering which is rather important but it improves render times, by quite a bit. 
Case: change it as you like
PSU: something that works well, yeah it's a little overkill, but workstations should be built to last so put a premium PSU into the build. 
OS: Windows 10 works well and is free if you want to upgrade, you can also use your old license. 

 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

 

CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2630 V3 2.4GHz 8-Core Processor  (£513.42 @ More Computers) 

CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2630 V3 2.4GHz 8-Core Processor  (£513.42 @ More Computers) 

CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler  (£24.95 @ Aria PC) 

CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler  (£24.95 @ Aria PC) 

Motherboard: Asus Z10PE-D8 WS SSI EEB Dual-CPU LGA2011-3 Motherboard  (£392.00 @ Amazon UK) 

Memory: Crucial 32GB (2 x 16GB) Registered DDR4-2133 Memory  (£209.99 @ Ebuyer) 

Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 500GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  (£129.37 @ Amazon UK) 

Storage: Seagate Barracuda 3TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  (£69.96 @ Aria PC) 

Video Card: Zotac GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB Video Card  (£520.00 @ Aria PC) 

Case: Phanteks Enthoo Pro ATX Full Tower Case  (£88.33 @ Scan.co.uk) 

Power Supply: SeaSonic 760W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply  (£140.11 @ Scan.co.uk) 

Operating System: Microsoft Windows 8.1 OEM (64-bit)  (£75.24 @ CCL Computers) 

Total: £2701.74

Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available

Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-08-23 12:01 BST+0100

[multifrag]

Anything past evga sr-2 will have locked overclocking on xeons. So you're basically going for the looks. Xeons I think only supports ECC memory, but DDR3 sticks are cheap. Look into the case as some of those board are huge. I bought my s5520sc and it fit with millimeters to spare in CM haf x, but upgraded to evga sr2 and had to cut some of the case out

[CJ Chua]

New one

~http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/VqgR3

 

 

Edit : http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/89QFkL

[slightlyjaded]

Anything past evga sr-2 will have locked overclocking on xeons. So you're basically going for the looks. Xeons I think only supports ECC memory, but DDR3 sticks are cheap. Look into the case as some of those board are huge. I bought my s5520sc and it fit with millimeters to spare in CM haf x, but upgraded to evga sr2 and had to cut some of the case out

2011-3....just pointing out ddr3 isn't compatible.

[multifrag]

2011-3....just pointing out ddr3 isn't compatible.

Haven't looked into the new socket. Xeons past 1366 socket are not worth their investment. They cost a lot more and on the entry level you will get more out the overclocked i7

[TwinXeon UK]

Thanks for the info so far. I have watched the video comparing Xeon to i7, seems to me that i7 is generally faster with gaming refresh rates or something similar. Unfortunately I don't have much spare time for gaming, if I did I would build a sick single cpu i7 bad boy with 4gpu and monster gaming RAM etc. on a P9X79-E WS - Also sexy...

 

I'll check out the list - thanks for that Deletive. I don't mind overkill, long life reliability is worth the outlay.

 

Slightlyjaded - I know what you mean, I used to live down under for 3 years, but you've never been reamed for your cash fully until you've lived in the UK and had H.M. government remove it. 

 

This WS project is work focused. As for software, I use Catia V5, Solidworks 2015, Ansys and COMSOL multiphysics. Some designed components/assemblies can currently take 24 hours+ to run a fine mesh CFD. Time saving is the real goal here, if 128GB ECC  DDR4 speeds up the analysys process - cool, 4 GPUs speed up component finish rendering - no problem. I believe that the GPU processors can also be utilised for computational analysis, so maybe my idea of two is me being ambitious? I was thinking that a PCIE boot SSD would be good too? My SSD to Motherboard is only SATA2  .

 

What about M5000/M6000 Quadros for this project? Any thoughts?

 

And yes, Solidworks is crap, well partly crap.

[slightlyjaded]

Thanks for the info so far. I have watched the video comparing Xeon to i7, seems to me that i7 is generally faster with gaming refresh rates or something similar. Unfortunately I don't have much spare time for gaming, if I did I would build a sick single cpu i7 bad boy with 4gpu and monster gaming RAM etc. on a P9X79-E WS - Also sexy...

 

I'll check out the list - thanks for that Deletive. I don't mind overkill, long life reliability is worth the outlay.

 

Slightlyjaded - I know what you mean, I used to live down under for 3 years, but you've never been reamed for your cash fully until you've lived in the UK and had H.M. government remove it. 

 

This WS project is work focused. As for software, I use Catia V5, Solidworks 2015, Ansys and COMSOL multiphysics. Some designed components/assemblies can currently take 24 hours+ to run a fine mesh CFD. Time saving is the real goal here, if 128GB ECC  DDR4 speeds up the analysys process - cool, 4 GPUs speed up component finish rendering - no problem. I believe that the GPU processors can also be utilised for computational analysis, so maybe my idea of two is me being ambitious? I was thinking that a PCIE boot SSD would be good too? My SSD to Motherboard is only SATA2  .

 

What about M5000/M6000 Quadros for this project? Any thoughts?

 

And yes, Solidworks is crap, well partly crap.

If you can afford quadros, and the price to performance makes sense to you, then buy them. Gamers will say they aren't work the money, but in CAD and 3D rendering being able to apply all that horsepower makes them romp all over the consumer grade bad boys.

 

As for PCIe SSD's I can't recommend them enough. A 10 second boot time might seem a bit extreme, but the current generation of NVMe drives apparently puts my xp941 to shame.

 

Structurally a 900d case has amazing build quality, but I have some the tinfoil nature of at least two panels a let down so far (the basement doors) It is also one of the few consumer grade case able to fit the 2p ASUS WS board, and have enough room to cool it.

 

In the end, if the time savings earnt by going balls to the wall with your system outway the cost of building it, then I'd recommend you go nuts.basic maths says if you're charging 50 bucks an hour, and you save 2 hours a day.....you save yourself $36400 a year..... for even an industry professional, that's a new system every year. Also if it's a work expense, well it's tax deductable (at least that's what you tell your missus when she catches you playing witcher 3 at 3 in the morning on your "work" machine)