I'm building a new workstation to do architectural design and rendering. I use:
AutoCAD, Revit, 3Ds Max, V Ray, Rhino, and Adobe Creative Suite. I want to be able to render on my CPU, but I'm really interested in starting to GPU render.
Here are the components that I want to use in my rig, other than the power supply, MB and hard drives I'm not married to any of these, so recommendations are welcome:
- CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-U12DXi4 55.0 CFM CPU Cooler (Purchased For $0.00) x 2
- Motherboard: Asus Z9PE-D8 WS SSI EEB Dual-CPU LGA2011 Motherboard (Purchased For $0.00)
- Storage: Samsung 840 EVO 120GB 2.5" Solid State Disk (Purchased For $0.00)
- Storage: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (Purchased For $0.00)
- Case: Fractal Design Define XL R2 (Titanium Grey) ATX Full Tower Case (Purchased For $0.00)
- Power Supply: Corsair RM 1000W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply (Purchased For $0.00)
- Optical Drive: LG WH14NS40 Blu-Ray/DVD/CD Writer ($59.99 @ Microcenter)
- Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Professional SP1 (OEM) (64-bit) ($137.98 @ OutletPC)
- Other: Intel Xeon E5-2620 v2 ($439.99) x 2
- Other: Quadro K5000 ($1799.00)
- Other: Noctua NH-U12DXi4 (Purchased)
- Other: Kingston 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Unbuffered DDR3 1600 Server Memory ($380.99)
- Total: $3610.74 Remaining (peripherals removed for brevity)
I've been planning this for a few months and really going back and forth on using this MB. My concern was that I've seen a lot of negative reviews on this board, but the people who really know their stuff seem to love it, so I went ahead with it. I'm not a tech expert...more of a dabbler, but I don't mind a challenge, and I’ve never built a system this complex before, so please bear that in mind when answering.
The graphics card is tough. I can do one of the following:
Quadro K5000 and then put a second GPU in at a later date
2 x GTX Titans
2 x GTX 780 Ti
From what I have read there is an ongoing discussion about Quadro vs GTX and I'm not really trying to rehash that. My preference is to do the 780 Ti. The trouble is that the 780 Ti isn't on the QVL... So I'm wondering if anyone is running these on this MB? And if so, do you think I can get them to run without jumping through too many hoops? I'm torn between the Titans and the Quadro, so I have to decide if I want reliability and support vs raw rendering power. But if I can use the 780 Ti I get more power for way less money and the decision gets a lot easier.
I know the post says 2620 v2, but I may go with SB. I can get them at a local store (Chicago) for about 360, so I may do that. But I'm worried that since the RAM is 1600 and the CPU only supports 1333 that I may run into issues. Any thoughts?
If you read this far, thanks and thanks in advance for anyone wanting to tackle this with me.
Input, ideas and opinions are always appreciated.