Workstation Skylake Upgrade.

[MattLyons]

Hello All!

With the release of Skylake I'm looking at upgrading my workstation. I mainly work in Adobe After Effects/ Premiere Pro, but do occasional 3D work in Maya.

My current setup is a Dell T5500 Workstation and is about 5 years old at this point; It includes Dual Xeon X5650 Hexacore processors, 32gb DDR3 ECC RAM, and a GTX 660 Ti.
 

This is what I’m looking to upgrade to:

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/YvV4Lk

I'm a little hesitant to dump my 12 core system for a quad core one, but after watching Linus cover the Intel Pax Booth with their Skylake machine making 4K video look like nothing, it seems like it might be time for an upgrade. My current machine is feeling a little sluggish while doing a 2x 1080p multicam, and rendering times are a little excessive.

Please let me know what you think, is this a decent upgrade or am I completely insane?

Thank you for any help!

 

[DarkBlade2117]

You sure you don't wanna wait for Skylake Xeons? ( No idea when they come out but I think it is soin )

[Streetguru]

You should probably go X99 over skylake, especially with that budget.

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/8N6BBm

5930k(12 threads) + W7100 Workstation card $1870 right now, you could always add in those SSDs later on, left room for 32gbs of RAM

Went AMD mainly because from what I've read adobe has been supporting openCL a lot more recently, dunno about maya.

[manikyath]

i'm not too sure about how much of an upgrade it'll be, but i feel like the time iosnt there yet.

 

as @DarkBlade2117 mentioned, skylake xeons will be a thing, and i remember hearing something of them being right around the corner.

 

i'd suggest waiting it out, and pick up a skylake xeon with fitting mobo, looking into 8-core, if the wallet allows. (maybe look into dual-cpu boards if they will be a thing before the new enthousiast platform)

 

just slide the xeon with the fitting mobo into your current system, and watch it scream its pants off at rendering.

 

other than that, right now X99 with a fitting xeon is a better bet than skylake.

[MattLyons]

You should probably go X99 over skylake, especially with that budget.

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/8N6BBm

5930k(12 threads) + W7100 Workstation card $1870 right now, you could always add in those SSDs later on, left room for 32gbs of RAM, sure you can't reuse what you already have on the RAM front?

Went AMD mainly because from what I've read adobe has been supporting openCL a lot more recently, dunno about maya.

Thank you.

 

My current setup has ECC ram so I'm not sure if it would be compatible with consumer grade hardware, and while Adobe does use open CL, it LOVES nvidia CUDA which is why Im leaning towards the 980ti or Titan.

 

I'll probably look into upgrading my CPU and GPU in the current system until Skylake Xeons come around.

 

Thanks for the advice everyone!

[Streetguru]

May want to look into Quadro cards then

 

http://www.nvidia.com/object/adobe.html

[MattLyons]

May want to look into Quadro cards then

I have in the past. Price to performence is not great and I dont do enough 3d to warrent spending the extra cash.

[Streetguru]

Apparently it may help with 4k footage, though that could just be marketing. Are Nvidia's workstation cards really that much more, dear lord they really are, I gotta look into workstation stuff more.

Well here's AMD's marketing stuff for adobe, I dunno, it just seems like the workstation card is going to be a bit better than the consumer card from nvidia, but I wouldn't exactly know.

http://www.fireprographics.com/ws/mae/adobe/index.asp

[MattLyons]

Yes, ball park Quadro cards are roughly 1.5-2x price of their GTX counterparts.