Need some starting ideas for a powerhouse Compositing/3D workstation at ~$4k or less

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Title says it all. I have yet to assemble a parts list as I am just looking for some general pointers for a beefy workstation around the ~$4K USD range.

The main things I know it will need:

Kick-arse processor. Debating Xeon or not...

High Capacity, fast, and reliable RAM: at least 64GB

A motherboard to handle all that, with a large amount of SATA(and eSATA) 6Gbps and USB 3 ports. I frequently have 10+ drives active.

Storage like crazy: I'm thinking a 500Gb SSD for the system and programs partition and the rest of the space will be used as cache and any IO that will benefit from RW speeds (like fluid simulation caches) After that I already have 4x 6TB WD reds, but these are in external raid enclosures. Id prefer something faster for the internal drives if there's a better option. I may instead look into some sort of NAS solution for storage but I honestly don't know what speeds are possible there and if it'd be worth it to try to use that for live-work.

GPU, I don't need quadro, but I do need some power. The last workstation I used was dual Titan, but I'm not married to that. But that's ballpark of what I need. I will be doing plenty of GPU rendering via Redshift, Furryball, Octane, and iRay.

I'm guessing I'll need some capable RAID controller or SAS board or something... I don't know much about this topic, but whatever I can get to make sure my storage is running at its max is what I want.

already have: mouse/keyboard, a decent calibrated dell monitor (but I'm open to suggestions for future upgrades), BDRW/DVDRW/CDRW combo drive, speakers.

So.... Any pointers where to start?

I generally go with ASUS or Asrock (has good customer support) for my motherboard, but outside of that I don't have much brand loyalty. I also could care less about the aesthetics of the thing. It's a tool not a toy :)

Do you think my price range is reasonable?

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Sounds like you know what your talking about more so than I would at this point... But I'd say go Xeon/Quadro and maybe a high capacity M.2 boot if theyve come down enough in price...

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Well do you need CUDA or OpenCL? As firepro cards seem to be a better value.

Do you need single core performance or a bunch of cores?

What are you even doing with it?

Otherwise maybe start here, just replace the case with whatever has that many drive bays

PCPartPicker part list: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/tBzZt6
Price breakdown by merchant: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/tBzZt6/by_merchant/

CPU: Intel Core i7-5820K 3.3GHz 6-Core Processor ($374.99 @ SuperBiiz)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler ($29.44 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: Asus SABERTOOTH X99 ATX LGA2011-3 Motherboard ($308.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 64GB (4 x 16GB) DDR4-2133 Memory ($394.99 @ Newegg)
Case: Cooler Master HAF XB EVO ATX Desktop Case ($94.99 @ NCIX US)
Power Supply: Thermaltake 750W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply ($86.44 @ Amazon)
Total: $1289.84
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-01-29 01:04 EST-0500

The sabertooth board, may need a firmware update for it

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Maybe you could go with a render farm? 2-3 nodes at $1500-$2000 each? I'm not familiar with any of the programs you are using so I don't know if a render farm is an option, just throwing it out there so you can consider more ideas, maybe a render farm will end up being suitable

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Unless you are doing colour sensitive work, dont bother with a Quadro. They are overpriced and a top of the line gaming gpu will outperform it in most cases. On the topic of titan's, The two current titans are the Z and X. Both have poor price to performance and lack that double point precision that made the original titan such a good buy for someone needing what you need.

GTX 980/ 980 ti is probably your best bet but if you want to save some serious cash and dont mind using second hand cards, Find some GTX 780/780 ti's. They are great bang for your buck at the moment and perform between a low end 980 and a 980 ti. They are not a great option for gaming due to Nvidia gimping their performance in gameworks games which makes then such a great buy for a 3D/Compositing build.

CPU, I would wait for the new broadwell CPU's and corresponding Work Station grade Motherboard. But if you're buying a now, Buy a 5960X and an ASUS X99-e WS. You need a very solid motherboard and only WS grade motherboards will provide. You could go for the ASROCK X99-E/10G which is also a very good option but dont touch gaming motherboards that people will recommend. You will need a cooler so go for a Corsair H110i and memory, grab something from Corsair or Kingston. You need the quality that brands like G-Skill dont offer.

PSU, Grab something like a Silverstone or CoolerMaster 1000 or 1200 watt 80+ Gold PSU. The important thing with these builds are stability and so quality is key. Case, grab whatever you like as long as it can support the motherboard.

When it comes to storage, Dont bother with SAS. A good X99 WS motherboard will provide at least 8 SATA ports. Single 500GB Samsung pro for your boot drive then grab however many WD Black 4TB drives. Stay away from Seagate. Their drives have a poor history for length of use. WD Blacks are a great option without costing an arm or a leg. You would be more than fine with a 850 Pro 500GB and 4x 4TB WD Blacks. Thats 24.5GB's of space. Need more performance but also redundancy? RAID 10. Doubles write speed for a scratch disk while mirroring everything on the off chance a drive was to fail.

You could also look at another SSD as a cache for the raid

That should be enough to get you going along the right track. Just remember quality is key, you dont want your system crashing half way through a render. Most gaming rigs are not designed to run at full tit for more than a few hours. WS components are.

Source: Years in the industry and I built my system for the exact same reason. 4770k, ASUS Z87-WS and 8 drives and a GTX 780. ACX Classified. Built for stability.

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http://pcpartpicker.com/p/PHnGK8

Im no expert but you would be looking at something around this - and I havent added a RAID card because you would need something guaranteed to work and I would have no idea.

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The Titan Z does have double precision, the X doesn't.
I would look at ASUS Z10PE-D8 WS and ASUS Z10PE-D16 WS, and i would wait for intel to release E5 V4 series 14 nanometer broadwell Xeon's, should Launch in Q1 2016.

This probably isn't relevant but, I have been looking at this Supermicro 3u rack Chassis "SuperChassis 835XTQ-R982B"
http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/3U/835/SC835XTQ-R982.cfm
980W Redundant power supplies, 11x expansion slots, 8x 3.5" Hot-swap SAS Drive Bays.

with pci-e extender's and low profile Power Adapter's to move GPU's off the motherboard, this would give the gpu's lots of room to breathe, and free up the pci-e slot's.

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good idea but the cost to performance isnt there. Would be better off spending that on more GPU performance. Plus getting a case that will fit them will be an expensive venture

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I wouldnt recommend Crapsus x99 Ws board to anyone, I am actually an owner of one (second one ), first one was so faulty that its a waste of time to type the errors and bugs I had, second one is somewhat ok, but I had to get lower speed ram despite the kit beeing on supported list ( i have extra msi x99 board too so tested both cpu and faster kit on that and it works!) , occasionaly drops some usb ports on boot, reports extra number of usb connected hubs and keyboards. Also titan Z had some double precissions but there was some sort of bug or "nvidia feature" that reduced it to a silly level, I dont know if its fixed.

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Xeon's isn't that expensive compared with Core i7's anymore, maybe because intel don't care about the desktop enthusiast market, and they do care about the server/datacenter market.

Some examples taken from cpubenchmark.net
Intel Core i7-6700K Cores:4 CPU Value score 26.60
Intel Core i7-5960X Cores:8 CPU Value score 15.22

Intel Xeon E5-2620 v3 Cores:6 CPU Value score 23.06
Intel Xeon E5-2640 v3 Cores:8 CPU Value score 14.36

And after the drop to 14nm broadwell i think the Value proposition of Xeon E5 V4's will be as good or better than i7's, especially if you consider total cost of ownership.

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Something like this might be a very good place to start.
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/2z38nQ

If you could wait, untill broadwell-E is launched, there will be a 10 core 20 Threads i7-6950X.
Then i would recommend that.

In terms of the Motherboard, i choosed for the Asrock X99 WS-E.
Its basicly the same board as the more expensive Asrock X99 WS-E/10G.
But then without the 10G ethernet part.
If you do like the extra dual 10gigabit ethernet connection, and two dual 1GB connections which are all themeable then you might concider to grab the Asrock X99 WS-E/10G.

Titan X: the reason why i did choose for the TitanX in this case, is because OP wants to use it for some rendering workloads.
In which the extra vram of the TitanX will become handy.
THe 980Ti is ofc cheaper, but the only 6GB of vram might be a limmitation.

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Thanks a ton everyone who's contributed! I'm still going through your recommendations and will try to piece together a parts list tonight.

@Streetguru My work is Mostly compositing, VFX simulations like smoke and fire using FumeFX, Krakatoa, Maya Fluids etc., and rendering. I dont necessarily do final color grades as I am not a colorist, but the added GPU precision is preferred so I may spring for the Titan Z. I cant go ATI as Nuke has some serious performance tweaks specifically for CUDA so I'll stick to the CUDA world for now.

@flamesilver I had thought about that, but specifically Nuke is hard on ram so unless the renderfarms are all 32GB+ then it usually caps out and performs badly on the farms I've used in the past. Farms are something I'll look into further down the line. for now I just want to get the best performance I can hope for from my workstation directly.

@Rudster I actually am currently using a 3GB 780, and I find its GPU rendering to be noticeably worse speed than the last workstation I worked at (not mine) which had a Titan X. Why do you mention color sensitive work, is this about the higher precision on the Titan Z and quadro cards? I do color sensitive work constantly even if I am not a colorist, but I'm not sure how much the impact would be if I'm missing that added precision. I've been working on a Titan X and the color accuracy in Nuke seems perfectly fine. For the storage that sounds like a good solution. 24TB is my current storage capacity (8x 6TB WD reds) and I'm already about 3/4ths full. But of course once I'm done working the speed isnt important so it can be moved to cheaper drives. 24TB is plenty for live storage. I'll definitely get a SSD for cache, good call. Thanks for the experienced suggestions! What do you do for a living? It sounds like we have very similar needs.

I think I'll go with Asrock for the mainboard simply because of their wonderful customer support. I know if I have issues (very possibly with this sort of build) I can call someone up in America and get right to a person.

Thank you all for the advice! I'll check back in once I put together a parts list and hopefully can get another wave of suggestions based on that.

be back soon!

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The Titan X has roughly 50% more power than a GTX 780 and so would be roughly 50% faster at rendering. Colour precision is something I'm actually not very familiar with but I do understand than a proportion of people in the industry including Linus from Linus Tech Tips use a mid range Quadro card for colour precision and generally the work enviroment within commonly used software is optimized for Quadro cards leading to better performance when working on a project. They then use a number of Geforce, FirePro or Tesla cards to do the final render. Probably in your case you wont need to worry about that as the impact is low but there is an impact. Might be a good idea to ask around the industry. You wont get a great answer here when it comes to specifics.

Double point precision is when a gpu has to deal with much more accurate measurements. comparing say 2 to 2.1393 as a point on a mesh. Higher double point precision performance means better performance overall in rendering. However to my understanding the only high end GPU in the Geforce range that has the performance and Double point performance is the titan z and it has been discontinued? So as @MisteryAngel said, Titan X is probably your best bet.

Personally, I am currently studying at Auckland's University of Technology doing Computer and Mobile Engineering but I have done a short course in 3D Animation and Visual Effects. I do 3D modeling for video games and also for 3D printing. Also a bit of video rendering on the side. Bit of a jack of all trades. I have also been building computers for years as my family owns a small PC company in New Zealand. Pick up the slack and fix the odd problem that leaves everyone else scratching their heads nowadays.

On a side note, People will hate me for recommending this but take a look at Puget Systems.
https://www.pugetsystems.com/

While you will be paying a premium, they can build you a system that will be rock solid. They design their systems to a very high standard. Its an option.

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I thought all of linus's workstations were using 980tis for some reason

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Not fully sure what he is using.
I do know that he uses a couple of Titan X cards in some of his workstations.

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There was one or two at a time that used Quadro's for colour sensitive work

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Quadro´s will definitely be a benefit if you need FP64 for your workloads.
Since a Quadro M4000 is $860,- with 8GB vram, it might be something to concider.

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The Titan x has nearly double the spu's and is clocked at a higher clock. Not to mention has a larger memory bus. The Titan X would outperform it easily when rendering. On the other hand if you had 5 grand, the M6000 is a Titan X optimized for this workload. Same 12GB's of memory. same core. In all honesty, go for the Titan X. Best bang for your buck and you can throw as many into your rig that your motherboard can handle due to this workload not being limited by SLI limitations.

Down the track you can put other GPU's in from a different architecture and they will also work.

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Ah i thought i readed somewhere that the maxwell titanX was gimped on FP64.
I suppose that i did not realy readed that fully correctly then.
Still i had recommended the Titan X above in the build, simply because its a good card for productivity workloads like rendering.
Its still a way better bang for buck then the M6000 in this case.

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I really don't know what is going on with the Titan cards. Some people say their gimped, others say otherwise. No real hard facts. But even considering that, they are the best bang for your buck in the industry.