I currently have a pre-sandybridge Dell t7500 Dual Xeon E5460's 2.76GHz with 48gigs of RAM and 2 1TB Workdrive and 500m C drive with a GeForce GTX 560
It's time to jump to a duel Xeon Haswell system with 64 gigs of RAM 1TB SDD System drive and 3 2TB work drives. I'm new to building, but my best friend is a builder and we are going knock this out. I have a decent budget and I'm not looking to cheap out.
I'm looking for advise, insights and the wisdom of the crowd.
Here is where I am at as of today.
CASE CaseLabs Magnum STH10 or Merlin SM8 or MAGNUM SMA8
CPU Xeon E5-2680 v3 Haswell 2.5 12 Core or Xeon E5-2660 v3 Haswell 2.6 10 Core
MOTHERBOARD Asus Z10PE-D8 WS or Asus Z10PE-D16 WS
CPU COOLERS Noctua NH-D15 SSO2 D-Type Premium CPU Cooler, NF-A15 x 2 PWM Fans
Budget $6k+, Location Nevada, Adobe After Effects, Premiere, Cinema 4d, Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, etc. I have a Dell 30 inch I'm still keeping, but may upgrade to the Dell 34 curved...
I'm not a gamer at all. ZERO games, but I love mograph and rendering particles. I do motion graphics, editing and lots of high resolution print work. I typically have 10-15 application open at once and am creating, designing and rendering. I'm really excited about some of the suggest that have. This really helps.
Caveman...how come no mobo's don't show up on part picker? Why XFX instead of Seasonic? Why AMD instead of NVIDIA? Why Merlin? I think I want to keep power supply seperate from Mobo for cooling?
brentb that is a killer system. I think I'm going to stick with Win7 Ultimate. Win8.1 gave me some problems with last system I returned to Dell. USB went wacky.
Marten, I'm not sure what to do with the t7500 is has been rock solid for many years, but with 4k video production and super wide screen production becoming more frequent I need the upgrade. I'm not sure what the difference is between ECC ram and other types. NAS might be with way to go, but when I travel and work I have to take files with me on typically a USB3 HD. I've never traveled with a NAS. I have a crap load of back up drives that I offload to when my projects are complete, but try to work locally for speed. I think I want three different drives for personal, business and photography. I'm open to suggestions.
IMHO...as a layman I would make your old machine a Freenas storage server with the new hard drives. Use I portable USB3 HD for travelling with data and skip the ECC ram and just get 64G ram. How big are the projects you work on ?
Perhaps a 120G SSD for Windows 7 or 10 since its coming and free. The 1TB SSD might be a good local scratch drive to work on if your projects fit inside 1TB.
All long term storage would be on the old machine in RAIDZ under Freenas available via the network.
PCPartpicker doesn't have a full list of all parts that could be purchased for a system. Although there is an option to add parts at the bottom Caveman opted to link his suggestions directly to give a better idea with access to the information on those pages.
Why AMD instead of Nvidia?
The short story is that the AMD card has better bandwidth and that will help with pushing data back and forth, has better statistics with software supporting OpenCL rendering, and generally a more reasonable price tag. As it is likely to come up Quardros are not really for the sole proprietor but rather large companies who cannot afford to have mistakes happening with any of their contract work. The Geforce series is faster than the Quardros but lacks the built-in insurance policy. The final decision I believe will come down to who plays best with C4D and AE as the difference in Premiere amounts to a few seconds between single GPUs.
Is it better to have higher frequency or more cores for my media purposes?
You're at a crossroads here. AE and Pr love a nice balance of core to clock speed, but 3D rendering prefers more cores than clock speed from my understanding. You're best served by looking at where the bulk of your workflow and time is spent and optimize in that direction.
If you're looking for more information on how to better optimize your next rig for video rendering I highly suggest reading the guide at PPBM7 (Premiere Pro Benchmark 7) and signing up for a free account to access their results page: http://ppbm7.com/index.php/results/new-ppbm6-results . The exact build information will require that Speccy be installed but that's free and easy to find. As for C4D I have no experience with it but according to Maxon's site Cinebench results should give you the best idea of how to design the system for optimum performance. Hopefully another C4D user will hop in and add their expertise.
Hi Caveman, my funding is in place and I'm ready to pull the trigger. I've decided on the Mercury S8 case and now I'm kind of stuck with all the options. I'm going to keep it air cooled...do you have any insight as to what would be the best configuration of the Mercury S8 case for airflow?
The best configuration would be to choose ventilated where ever there is an option, although it would be overkill so just try to have a couple ventilated parts and some windows.