Motherboard for 4K Video

[Hollywood_Video_Build]

Hello, I am need of some input guys. Been researching online and am stuck. 

 

 I work on an old workstation I built from parts off of eBay. I have been using it for color correction and editing 4K footage. Softwares I use are Resolve 12.5,  AVID and Premiere. Everything has been working just fine but now the limitations are storage and GPU expansion.  Media content is to large for me to keep on my internal 6 TB Raid 0. Instead of buying bigger Spinning disks for this system. I want to upgrade my workstation to a much newer motherboard that will give me more Sata 6Gb or 10Gb connectivity for faster read/write speeds and more PCI-E Gen 3 slots.

I also am considering using M.2 SSD for OS or to use it as a media drive for optimal read/write of content. The more PCI-E gen 3 slots would be great to buy more GTX 1080 GPU’s. Resolve benefits when having more GPU’s. I am considering buying 2 more GTX 1080’s to have a total of 4. 

 

My current workstation computer components are.

 

ASUS P79X LE

64gb of RAM

2 ASUS ROG STRIX GTX 1080’s

6 x 1TB spinning hard drives raided 0 for 6TB of working storage.

512gb SSD drive for OS

Corsair liquid cool kit off the shelf 

CPU is the Intel Xeon E5-2697 v2 12-Core 2.7GHz

 

 

future build components to buy.

ASUS X99 E WS/USB3.1

CPU considering are 

E5-2690V4 or i7-6950X

64gb of RAM

M.2 SSD for fast Content read/write or OS

8 SSD drives for Raid 0

2 hot swap spinning disk for Archival 

Cooling is not an issue I have both fans and liquid components that will work with this motherboard.

 

Please let me know if my choice of motherboard is the best to suit my urge to have all storage I/O, PCI-E Gen 3 and M.2 SSD.

 

I don’t want to do what Linus talks about at the beginning of 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cx8rS9_vNDo

where people just buy the most expensive and the system turns out to be a DUD and not what they thought. I have just become a follower of LinusTechTips and really appreciate those videos.

 

Thank you for your time Hope my question made sense and you can provide me some feedback.

 

[EminentSun]

You would probably be better off upgrading to one of these:

and keeping your motherboard, x79 is still pretty dope.

[Hollywood_Video_Build]

Thank you for the input. Yes, I love this board. It's solid. 

started to look at the specs. The only thing is I think the bus speed and amount of cores and threads might be a bottleneck. I will dig more on these to see if they work.

[-rascal-]

The Xeon E5-2697 v2 already have 40 PCI-E 3.0 lanes.

As of current, even the i7-6950X supplies 40 PCI-E lanes -- X99 motherboards can only allocate 40 lanes.

 

I am assuming you are not running the GTX 1080's in SLI(?) since you are using them for rendering / compute purposes. In that situation, 40 lanes should bot be an issue -- even if it is 8x PCI-E lanes for each GPU, for a total of 32 occupied.

 

Have you considered getting a server-grade or dual CPU socket LGA 2011-3 / X99 motherboard...or actually moving over the a SERVER chipset-based motherboard altogether?

 

As for M.2 SSD...to take advantage of the fastest speed possible, make sure it is a NVMe M.2 SSD. M.2 is just a form factor of the physical slot itself. For an example, a SATA 6Gb/s port. You can put a mechanical HDD or SSD into the SATA port -- but one is the MUCH faster one.

 

It may be difficult to find a motherboard so the PCI-E expansion slots are spaced out 2 or 3 spaces apart (considering each GPU will require 2-slots in size) -- that is, unless you go full water-cooling. You'll need to look for an Extended ATX board of some sort to get the full expansion slot space (4 GPU X 2 slots per = 8).

 

Server-Grade motherboard -- ASRock EPC612D8 SSI ATX

http://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=EPC612D8#Specifications

http://asrock.pc.cdn.bitgravity.com/Manual/EPC612D8.pdf

• Supports Broadwell-E and Haswell-E E5 Xeons
• M.2 connector (can reach up to 10 Gb/s shares bandwidth with a PCI-Express 3.0 slot)
• Five PCI-Express 3.0 slots, which can all either run at X16 or X8 (with a 40 lane CPU)

 

Enthusiast consumer side, you've got a few more easy-to-find options, including:

• ASUS X99-E-10G WS
• ASRock X99 WS-E/10G
• MSI X99A XPOWER GAMING TITANIUM
• MSI MSI Gaming X99A GAMING 9 ACK
• ASUS ROG RAMPAGE V EDITION 10

You may run into one or more of these:

a) PCI-Express spacing constraints for 4x dual-slot GPUs

b) One of the PCI-Express X16/X8 slots share bandwidth with the M.2 slot

[Hollywood_Video_Build]

18 hours ago, -rascal- said:

The Xeon E5-2697 v2 already have 40 PCI-E 3.0 lanes.

As of current, even the i7-6950X supplies 40 PCI-E lanes -- X99 motherboards can only allocate 40 lanes.

 

I am assuming you are not running the GTX 1080's in SLI(?) since you are using them for rendering / compute purposes. In that situation, 40 lanes should bot be an issue -- even if it is 8x PCI-E lanes for each GPU, for a total of 32 occupied.

 

Have you considered getting a server-grade or dual CPU socket LGA 2011-3 / X99 motherboard...or actually moving over the a SERVER chipset-based motherboard altogether?

 

As for M.2 SSD...to take advantage of the fastest speed possible, make sure it is a NVMe M.2 SSD. M.2 is just a form factor of the physical slot itself. For an example, a SATA 6Gb/s port. You can put a mechanical HDD or SSD into the SATA port -- but one is the MUCH faster one.

 

It may be difficult to find a motherboard so the PCI-E expansion slots are spaced out 2 or 3 spaces apart (considering each GPU will require 2-slots in size) -- that is, unless you go full water-cooling. You'll need to look for an Extended ATX board of some sort to get the full expansion slot space (4 GPU X 2 slots per = 8).

 

Server-Grade motherboard -- ASRock EPC612D8 SSI ATX

http://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=EPC612D8#Specifications

http://asrock.pc.cdn.bitgravity.com/Manual/EPC612D8.pdf

• Supports Broadwell-E and Haswell-E E5 Xeons
• M.2 connector (can reach up to 10 Gb/s shares bandwidth with a PCI-Express 3.0 slot)
• Five PCI-Express 3.0 slots, which can all either run at X16 or X8 (with a 40 lane CPU)

 

Enthusiast consumer side, you've got a few more easy-to-find options, including:

• ASUS X99-E-10G WS
• ASRock X99 WS-E/10G
• MSI X99A XPOWER GAMING TITANIUM
• MSI MSI Gaming X99A GAMING 9 ACK
• ASUS ROG RAMPAGE V EDITIONd 10

You may run into one or more of these:

a) PCI-Express spacing constraints for 4x dual-slot GPUs

b) One of the PCI-Express X16/X8 slots share bandwidth with the M.2 slot

5

Replying to -Rascal

Thank you for your input. Much appreciated.

 

 

[Spudbilly]

If spending the money on great hardware helps you make lots of money. Then yes...Go for it. Your not indulging...Your investing. 

[Hollywood_Video_Build]

30 minutes ago, Hollywood_Video_Build said:

 

 

 

Thanks guys for all the input. LOL I have gone the rabbit hole. I love this customization part of this. 

The truth is I worked at some high end facility and they have the budget to purchase the server type systems with dual cpu(supermicro). But what really blew me away was that I worked on those systems and they were not anymore better then my frankenstein system I had built from all the parts from ebay. These gaming mother boards and processors are becoming much more faster and for a reasonable priced these days. Even if dated by a few months or years.

 

-rascal-

Yes I do not run the 1080's in an SLI configuration because Resolve on some of the editorial softwares can't utilies the SLI set up yet. I am not sure if they will ever implement SLI support in the future.

Thank you -Rascal- for all the input on the 40 lane info.

I will dig into the systems you recommend and research. 

About the spacing of the GPU's yes that is a concern but I was thinking of using the Thermaltake Core p5 case and a hefty power supply or and expansion chassis for just the GPU's.

will look into the server grade motherboards ASROCK you noted.

 

rrubberr- you are right I had a chance to work on a HP x800 and it worked great. the problem was when trying to expand GPU's it was limited. Other then that it was my first choice of system. HP workstation are bullt with amazing design very easy to work on. Loved it.