Workstation for Creative Design

[iyr]

So this is kind of a repost from the "Show off your setup!" thread. But I'll go into a little more detail.

Specs:

Case: Silverstone Fortress FT-02

CPU: Intel i7 3930k C2 stepping, overclocked to 4.4GHz

Cooler: Corsair H80

Mobo: Asus P9X79 WS

RAM: 64GB (8x8GB) Mushkin Enhanced DDR3-1600 9-9-9-24

PSU: Silverstone Strider 1500w

Soundcard: Asus Xonar Essence STX

DVD-RW drive

Graphics:

AMD FirePro v7900 (Primary out)

2x EVGA Nvidia GeForce GTX 590 (for CUDA compute)

Storage:

2x 500GB Western Digital RE4 7200rpm (RAID 0, boot)

2x 250GB Seagate Momentus 5400rpm (RAID 1, 250GB usable, OS backup)

3x 250GB Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm (RAID 5, 500GB usable, aux storage)

OS: Windows 7 Ultimate

Monitors:

2x 1920*1080 displays

2x 1440*900 displays

Peripherals:

Ducky 104-key keyboard w/ Cherry MX brown switches

Corsair M60 mouse

Generic Drawing Tablet

3dConnexion Space Navigator 3d mouse

V-Moda Crossfade LP headphones

Eagle Arion 2.1 Speakers

Sorry for the poor image quality, stuck with a tablet camera.

Not beautiful, but I prefer function before aesthetic. Though one thing I found peculiar is that the Strider-1500 has this gorgeous clean black finish, but less-than-stellar sleeving. If you're thinking about picking up this PSU, it is a good unit but the cables are really thick and difficult to manipulate by hand. Also, it uses a different kind of AC power-cable to prevent users from using bad quality cables with the unit, so if the cable breaks, you need to buy a new one from Silverstone's website.

FT-02 isn't really designed for typical quad graphics-card setups because it's missing an eight expansion slot. The FT-02 and RV-02-E share the same internal chassis and are interchangeable-ish; however, the RV-02-E has 8 expansion bays available. So I may get a RV-02-E in the future and swap out the chassis with that of the FT-02.

My original intent with this build was to liquid cool the 590s and CPU, but the FirePro v7900 was much too long cram in a radiator this way or the other (among other complications). . . which is a downer because I currently have buried away a 3x180mm radiator, two 590 waterblocks and a great dual-pump/bay res collecting dust.

I can already hear people telling me to ditch the FT-02 for a case that would be better suited for this much cooling like the 800D or Cosmos II, but nevertheless my FT-02 was a birthday gift. Plus I'm a huge fan of the vertical orientation of PCIe components.

Everybody has their preferences for aesthetics but I find it repulsive to see a nice graphics card "sag" in a standard case, especially when equipped with full-cover waterblocks that add a ton of weight; can't be good for the mobo or component either.

That being said, the 590's reach a peak average temp hangs around 90 degrees Celsius while doing heavy compute jobs (probably enough to make some people here pull their hair out). While this isn't ideal, the 590's have not actually hit any thermal shutdown limits nor have they crashed randomly. They are rock solid. I am aware of the fact that them running hot will reduce lifetime, but the 590's will likely be replaced/retired sooner than end-of-life component death being an issue. Likely candidates for replacement are Xeon Phi, GTX Titan (since many more cores are enabled for double-precision compute than any 600 series geforce) or one or two 7970s if my workflow becomes more OpenCL compatible.

As far as the 590's are concerned, I use them primarily for rendering in Blender and for that they perform exceedingly well. SLI is left disabled because the sharing of memory bandwidth reduces CUDA compute performance, the SLI bridge is left in place just for the heck of it. The FirePro is used for view-port rendering/mesh-editing. It'll even run games decently too, but I don't game too much. The great thing about this graphics/cpu setup is that trolls can't accuse me of being a fanboy of any particular brand. :)

The most disappointing thing about this build is that I can't use the VT-d on the 3930k even though it's C2-stepping. This is due to the fact that Asus broke VT-d support on some of their x79 boards with a recent BIOS update. There's a place in the UEFI to enable/disable VT-d, but regardless of the setting, it won't work. Had VT-d been working, I'd probably using CentOS as the host OS with one or two Windows/linux VMs. I still do plenty of virtualization though.

The overclock on the 3930k may seem a little low, especially when you see a lot of people running their 3930k's with a ~4.7GHz clock for day to day use. I was running it at 4.6GHz when I was running only 16GB of RAM, but since bumping it up to 64GB RAM the overclock had to be reduced a little bit to be stable again. Also, the P9X79 WS isn't a particularly fantastic board for overclocking compared to Rampage boards.

So that's it:

My creativedesignrenderingmodellingvirtualizationpowe rhouse of a workstation.

[frozenskipper]

Interesting read, and equally interesting build. I'd love to see what happens next, especially if you decide to run either a Titan or the Phi ^^. Once you've decided to replace the 590's, i'd love to bid you an offer ;)