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1

I am a graphic designer and new owner of a sign shop and needed to buy a new computer as the one I currently use is very slow. I looked into buying one pre-made and based on the programs I run, and the tune came to $6-8k!!
That seemed a bit high, and so I looked into building my own.
I have no idea how or what makes a good PC, but I've been able to ascertain that Dual Core Xeons are fast. and I like fast, because that means productivity, which is not my current mode of functionality at this point.
I found 2010 X5690 6 Cores 12 Threads 3.33GHz online at amazon for around $250. That sounds like 2 would make a good system.
So here's where my knowledge, (if you call it that), stops and yours begins......

1) Can the Xeon X5690 6core be used in a workstation or only a server? And would that be a fast system to run the listed programs with no lag?

2) If it can what motherboard supports them?

3) Once I find the motherboard, how do I know how much RAM will fit on it? Or SSD it will support, or Mechanical HDs it can support.

4) How do I run The ram in tandem? Is that the best way to do it?

5) Can the mentioned Xeon X5690 be overclocked? And if so what cooling system would I need and that the motherboard will support? And if so, how do you do that?

6) Do all motherboards come with the ability to jump on wifi, or is that a special motherboard?

7) What graphics card would you suggest?

8) What power supply do I chose to run 2?

Wendell....I obviously do not know what I am doing, but I think that once I have the specs and parts picked out, then I can build it, and you owe me nothing, but if you could help me, I would be very happy and thankful. If you could recommend the pieces that would work well with this system, or one that you think would be better, my budget is about $2500-3000 for this build.

Please, help me. In hopes that you will, I am including my specs I sent to other places and received the high bid computers....

I am a graphic designer and owner of a sign shop. I need a computer that can handle my workload and programs which are:

Adobe Photoshop CS6 - Adobe Illustrator CS6 - Adobe InDesign CS6 - SAi Flexi/LXi12 Quickbooks - RolandVersaWork - Microsoft Word - Estimate Sign Pricing Software - Vector Magic -
RDWorks - Gerber ArtPath - Gerber AutoCarve 3d - NetNanny - McAfee -

Those are the programs I need to run. I work all the time in Flexi/LXi usually in 408 MB files which are comprised of full scale building jpegs, or auto mobiles or in Photoshop in 30'x30' x 300 dpi (or larger) pixel images or however big I can get it. And my current computer takes about an hour to save/open one file. I cant have that, as that cost me money.

I currently use a computer with a: (I have no idea what any of this means btw)
ASUS desktop BM6AD_BM1AD_BP1AD
Intel Core 17-4770 CPU @ 3.40GHz
16 GB RAM
64 Bit OS

It was labeled a graphic design computer when bought through the best buy geek squad, but it is very slow, at least here more recently.

From that email, people have built me $6-$8/9k machines (on paper). That just doesn't seem right to me. I'm not rendering movies and 4k video, or rendering 3d games, but I do want it to be fast in its processing power.

Ideally, I would like 2 6-core Xeon (3.__ or higher) processors with 12 threads each, 64-128g RAM, 500gb SSD, 1-2 1Tb mechanical storage drives, and a graphics card to handle the stuff I do. Is this even possible for $2500-3000k. Please tell me what I need to make a good system like this.

Thank you for taking the time to look into this for me. I look forward to your reply. What ever you could recommend would greatly be appreciated

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Check out http://pcpartpicker.com

The first most important question is how much are you willing/wanting to spend.

2nd, have you ever used a high end PC to know what you want exactly.

If not, we can help for sure.

As far as what parts go with what pcpartpicker is the easiest to figure that out. Lucky for you with Kaby Lake and Ryzen coming around choices for CPUs will be even harder. :)

If you're not running 4k or 3d then a mid-high range Nvidia Quadro would be plenty. Definitely look up some videos on putting together a high end PC if you haven't already because it's time consuming and you may just rather pay someone else to do the dirty work.

You could be perfectly contempt with 2k computer though. 6-8k does seem a little much of its not prebuilt.

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Never trust Best Buy, btw. They will say anything for $$$$.

Also a Xeon could be run in a workstation as well as a server.

If you want wifi you need an adapter. I do not know of any manufacturer that sells a high end board with intergrated wifi. I could be wrong tho.

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I want to spend up to $3k. (2500 preferably). No, I have never used a high end pc, I have always been into Mac, but not the TOP tier Macs. I am wanting to buy older 6-8 core Xeons for a few hundred and build from there. There are plenty of builds online, but they are from 2015ish.....and I feel that may be too slow now for what I am wanting, If I get 2 older xeons, where do i find what fits with them? Pc parts picker doesnt recognize when I put those xeons in to suggest parts.

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do motherboards come with a place to fit that adapter? (probably a dumb question)

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Yep. You can get one that connects to pcie or USB. USB ones are external, while the pcie are internal.

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First and foremost take your time to gather knowledge. I always spend 1-3 months tinkering with "on paper" configuration before I decide to update mu workstation - and I consider my self experienced (but I build my own rig every 3 years, not everyday system builder).

1) Xeon X5690 is already too old - year 2011
2) Only server boards supports more than one CPU, PC enthusiast boards could support Xeon processor
3) board vendor must specify that on their site and manual,
4) Dual or quad channel.
5) no Xeons cannot be overclocked - there is some possibility on some "enthusiast" motherboards but, that is not something that you should do when you need stable workstation.
6) no, not all. As a matter of fact most professional mobos and especially server once do not have WiFI.

7) I have no experience in the programs that you run in you workflow. So my regards to the graphics cards take with some amound of distrust. However graphics card might be the main reason the price you mentioned is so high. The Nvidia Quadro cards strictly made for professional use (with some really specialized exceptions) are veryu similar to the Geforce Gaming cards. However in some cases Floating point precission on Geforece cards is artificially or on chipset level limited - so the gaming card still do well in games but in specialized graphics/cumputational workflow is limited to low precission (32bit float values) And there is a huge price difference between gaming and proffesional card. THe price difference in part might be also contributed to software licensing of the drives that comes with the graphics card. As far as I know it is symilar like with the NVIDIA video codecs - decoding is for free, encoding with NVEC and x265 - not for free . Again if someone have more experience in those matters please step in. I'm also curious if my "feelings" are correct in that matter.

8) in all cases sum of power need of all components + some reserve 20%

For dual Xeon setup with two powerful graphics cards I would expect 400W + 2x300W = ~ 1200W
And expect idle power usage at ~500W.
(those values are just to put you expectations).

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If you're wanting trashcan Mac pro performance you'll get that and more with just 2-3k. If you plan on uploading and transferring your files to a network or Dropbox or something similar you are not going to want to use wifi. All the time you save rendering will be wasted on Wi-Fi Ethernet anyway possible.

Once you get past top end consumer i7s the only thing you will be throttled by is gpu power. Past a certain price range there's no huge discernable difference in power and render time if you aren't doing 4k or 3d.

Of course there's nothing wrong with wanting the best of the best.
PCI network and Wi-Fi adapters are usually only around 50 each.

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So are there any builds you would recommend?

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Unless it is needed immediately I would wait for Ryzen to come out on i believe March 2nd.

No ome really knows how much better or worse than Intel it will be and will affect your decision if you're wanting the best. You may want one of the two. And if not it will drive down the price of anything that's come before it.

Look at pcpartpickers community builds they are rated and commented on with better recommendations and watch lots of videos. Unless of course you need it immediately.
Regardless of you have never built a PC before you'll want As much viewing experience as you can get.

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ok. thank you

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I hope following links will work.

Still missing few parts (mainly cooler) , only one Xeon (Xeons that can work in tandem are little bit more expensive) - only 64MB, good SSD, average HDDs - two to put them at least in software raid on windows, two gaming cards (e.g. cheaper from Quadros).

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/x6zdtJ

So you have 8 core / 12 thread machine, instead of 24 core / 48 threads one.

And here is 2x Xeon 2660 128GB RAM + 1x Quadro K6000
(20 cores/ 40 threads).

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/zPpLqk

Without the GPU it was already higher than first configuration.

I would not trust the prices on that site, and those are my "random" picks of components that should work together. Although M.2 SSD on the dual CPU motherboard might require some PCIe adapter (and I' also did not checked if it is M.2 SSD for PCIe/NVME os SATA interface).

Just to put wide area of possible configuration prices into perspective.

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I would recommend a Quadro. A 1k Quadro will outperform SLI 1080s in rendering software, definitely not games though. Also pretty difficult to do as a first build and cheaper.

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wait for zen then get a 1800x + mobo and a h115i + 64 gb of dd4r the faster the better and a intel pci e nvme drive and the quadro. you should be able to oc the 8 core ryzen chip to 4.8 or higher and quite a few adobe products can only use 6-8 cores so you want that high clock speed. i'll make a pcpartlist post when ryzen comes out

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Yeah i agree on this, Ryzen might be an interesting platform for topic starter to jump on once its out.
Of course we have to wait for certain benchmarks and such.
But the 1800X would probably gonne cost arround $500,- for a 8 core 16 threads unlocked chip.
So that might trully be interesting, depending on how it will perform in the applications and workloads that topic starter is doing.