Yeah its indeed a bit hard to find hard facs about it.
I know that the original titan the kepler GK110 was not gimped down.
The only diffrence between the Kepler Titan and its Quadro equilevant, was basicly error correcting vram, and professional drivers.
With the maxwell cards i´m not fully sure, diffrent sources seem to report diffrent assumptions.
Still the TitanX seems to be a very popular card, by content creators and video editors.
I would look into quadros but dont discriminate as the firepros are actually really good to be frank. Since you say its a 3d works rig I do not think you really are looking for a high end gaming card lol. You can look in that direction but the titan Z will be the one you want if you look in that direction
The cards are good, the support, not so much. You need to look at the support on the software side before buying into a FirePro and even then, cost to performance a Titan will do better
Fair enough it really depends on the work load though. I did not see enough about his work loads to give an exact recommendation
All good, It would be nice to see AMD on the table more. Autodesk finally started supporting FirePro cards back in 2012?
I think software support is the biggest thing.. AMD is really struggling though
I'd do something like this, but wait for Broadwell-EP http://pcpartpicker.com/p/WWhmYJ I'm not one for the 5960X in a workstation scenario. Frankly overclocking and stability are not two things I like to cross when it comes to a serious work machine. Go Xeon, grab ECC, and go. I'd definitely wait till Broadwell-EP and just choose the Xeon with the most cores at the $1000 price point.
My idea was too have the Samsung 950 Pro for boot and programs, because PCIE storage is just so much better then Sata shill. That's been my opinion since my first boot on a SM951 M.2 SSD. You'd have the 850 Evo for mass storage of projects that are being worked on. The projects that are being archived should be moved to your Nas. I would not recommend working off hard drives for anything that requires file sizes which I presume your talking about when we're requiring 64GB+ of ram.
My next change I would make to this list is actually not to pursue the Titan Z, but instead grab 2 Titan Blacks. The core of the Titan Black is the same on the Titan Z, except that there are 2 of them on the Z. If you are willing to use eBay to its full potential or are willing to track down some people with New Titan Blacks, go for those. You'd save $300+ or more if you buy the two separate Titan Blacks, and you'd get a bit more performance because although the core is the same between the Titan Black and Titan Z, it is running at a faster clock speed on the Titan Black.
Asus X99-WS board to the rescue ! will handle all those needs.
The RED drives are great for a NAS but to me you can get away with WDBlack 6TB drives. They have more cache [128MB] than some others.
Sounds like you need a Quadro card IMO. They are made for the kind of work you are doing, Also the support/ driver is there for that kind of work DFPP 64 and other features are built in.
Set up a 10Gb NIC with a NAS and you should be fine.
I would suggest considering a monitor upgrade (I'm in love with my crossover 324k) and a 1tb-2tb ssd (new ssds are in bound and should have better price per gig judging by the videos Logan posted recently) considering the massive budget.