Project Reality Forums

Hey guys,

So, it's time for my computer upgrade season.

This is my current setup at the moment: Now.. I've gotten this before "Why the f--- are you already upgrading!?".. The thing here is that I originally built my computer to be "future-proof", the Titan Black can stay but I believe the RAM and CPU need to go. The reason why is because the X79 Chipset & the LGA 2011 Socket seem to be ending this year, and I intend on doing many crazy things as time goes on with future hardware, knowing that the products I am using right now it has come to my attention that they are going to be discontinued, when they're discontinued they aren't necessarily unsupported immediately, it's just that you won't be able to breathe any fresh air when new things like DDR4 come out.

I'm 9/10 going to wait for the new suite of Intel hardware to ship out, its around that time of the year when all of the new chips come out.

I want to replace my hard drive + ssd, I was considering 2x4TB WD Black Hard Drives and 1xSamsung 1TB SSD, CPU + MOBO, and my RAM (depending on which chipset I will get resulting in the amount of DIMMs I will have). For CPUs & replacement I was thinking about a Haswell-E 5960x that will run on the new X99 Chipset, it's rumored to be stock 3.0-3.3GHz but for 8 Cores I can invest in some awesome cooling to easily fix that OC wise..

techpowerup wrote:Intel's next-generation Core i7 "Haswell-E" HEDT (high-end desktop) processor lineup, slated for later this year, accompanied by the company's X99 Express chipset, will launch at three price-points, predictably, succeeding the current Core i7-4820K, i7-4930K, and i7-4960X. The platform will herald a new LGA socket, which will have 2,011 pins, but will not be compatible with current LGA2011 platforms based on the X79 Express chipset. That's because "Haswell-E" will be among the first client platforms to support DDR4-SDRAM memory. All Haswell-E chips will support DDR4-2133 MHz out of the box.

My plan B was going with the 4790k's successor in the Broadwell series the 5790k and running that off a micro or mini-itx watercooled build which I have anticipated for a while now, the issue is the amount of cores, the pros are I'm sure that the thing is going to be at a really nice stock clock which gives more room to OC it even farther (knowing the 4790k comes stock at 4.0GHz).

So overall, I need someone to feed me some ideas and tell me whether the hard drive + ssd concept was a good idea, and which route the CPU would be best in.

And lastly, I have tried to discuss this to my semi-techie friends and they question my taste in expensive hardware. The reason why I need such high-quality hardware is because I need high-performance and reliability, knowing that this revolves around me as a part time job, and things like ECC is something I'm lucky to be having running on my computer. I also am planning on running a 3-way monitor setup with two 1080p monitors and maybe a 4k monitor for color accuracy in editing photos and videos. My expectations for my machine are to run games at maximum settings (not @ 4k) while being able to render videos in 1080p@60FPS in the background, sadly I cannot render 3D animations in the background but hey, that's a different story. I utilize software such as 3Ds Max, Games, After Effects, Cinema4D, and developer tools such as UE&CE, and typically I run two to three of these at once.

Thanks to anyone who can help me out here. This is a pretty abnormal situation.

So.. Hard drives? SSDs..? How many.. What capacity? CPU.. Wait or keep what I have for a few years..?

You have a third gen core i7 and you want to upgrade already? They're only on 4th gen now. 5th gen at 14nm comes out next year, I would wait for that personally, I'm probably going to upgrade from my i5 2500k.

Of all the things you should upgrade, it's the SSD. Go buy a Samsung 850 EVO, brand new, ridiculously awesome. If you have the money you could buy two large capacity solid state drives and a RAID controller card.

The 5770k probably won't be released (widely available so you can actually acquire one easily) until after May 2015. The 5790K hasn't even been rumored yet, probably won't show up for a long time as the 14mm die problems are causing yield problems already.

You have no reason to consider upgrading your CPU and RAM until Star Citizen is released, imho. Late 2015 or early 2016.

Also, many options for SSDs, make sure you research.
Also, if really bored, you could upgrade your RAM, but it's so expensive it's not really worth it unless you need RAM scratchdisks.

Also, renting 3D rendering farm time is cheaper than buying a server for a small office/ independent contractor.

So, my suggestion, if you are actually making good money on your graphic design work, would be the industry standard for part-timers.
3 options:
1. PCIE SSD (which is falling out of fashion) (not a good option for you)
OCZ RevoDrive 350 Series RVD350-FHPX28-480G PCI-E 480GB PCI-Express 2.0 x8 MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
OCZ RevoDrive 350 Series RVD350-FHPX28-240G PCI-E 240GB PCI-Express 2.0 x8 MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

2. 4 SSDs in RAID 10 and/or and/or (PCIE RAID card or a PCIE Gigabit LAN card and Drobo SCSI type solution) and/or 32 GB of ECC RAM. Industry standard rendering in RAMDISK while scratchdrive and redundancy on SSD RAID 10,

3. 4 SSDs on a PCIE RAID DISK (suggest getting one that comes with RAID solution) RAID 1,0 again for redundancy, and 2 SSDs in RAID 0 connected to your 2011 mobo. Use the 2 SSDs as the render storage and 4 SSDs as storage and scratch.

Or you know, just download some scheduling software and render when you're not in front of PC

[R-COM]LITOralis.nMd wrote:Also, renting 3D rendering farm time is cheaper than buying a server for a small office/ independent contractor.

So, my suggestion, if you are actually making good money on your graphic design work, would be the industry standard for part-timers.
3 options:
1. PCIE SSD (which is falling out of fashion) (not a good option for you)
OCZ RevoDrive 350 Series RVD350-FHPX28-480G PCI-E 480GB PCI-Express 2.0 x8 MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
OCZ RevoDrive 350 Series RVD350-FHPX28-240G PCI-E 240GB PCI-Express 2.0 x8 MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

2. 4 SSDs in RAID 10 and/or and/or (PCIE RAID card or a PCIE Gigabit LAN card and Drobo SCSI type solution) and/or 32 GB of ECC RAM. Industry standard rendering in RAMDISK while scratchdrive and redundancy on SSD RAID 10,

3. 4 SSDs on a PCIE RAID DISK (suggest getting one that comes with RAID solution) RAID 1,0 again for redundancy, and 2 SSDs in RAID 0 connected to your 2011 mobo. Use the 2 SSDs as the render storage and 4 SSDs as storage and scratch.

Or you know, just download some scheduling software and render when you're not in front of PC

Sweet, I'll look up on this. Might have the interest in running a ton of SSD's in RAID 10.

Have you ever messed with NAS Storage?

NAS is essentially a RAID array with a controller just not physically in the computer is it not?

NAS is always an option for gfx artists,
You get what you pay for.
IDK if your mobo has two separate LAN ports though, meaning you'll need an ethernet PCIE.

You should probably go ask on a gfx designer forum, so many options on the market it's hard to just through out options.

Steeps wrote:NAS is essentially a RAID array with a controller just not physically in the computer is it not?

I believe so.

Because I might have an interest in putting all of the 'data' on a NAS System because if I want to have large amounts of data a 10TB NAS might be ideal knowing I might be interested in utilizing my laptop when it comes to data sharing between my computer.

What about a RAMDisk?
Won't that blow any RAID array out of the water?

SnipeHunt wrote:What about a RAMDisk?
Won't that blow any RAID array out of the water?

Yeah.. uhmm.. It'll blow my wallet out of the water.

Nah. You only need more ram. You've got 16 GB.
Windows handles the setup of the disk.
I assume its 4x4GB one in eash memory channel.
Your mobo should have 8 slots?(I didn't research it,but all of the 2011 mobos I was looking at did.)
Add another 4x4GB? 32 GB is plenty for a RAMDisk
Money doesn't seem to be much of an issue for ya..
Go with 8x4GB,
Either way should be cheaper than a mess of ssds
.
edit: looks like you have to use 3rd party software to make the RAMDisk .
I thought the Win PRO version included it.

Any discussion of a RAM disk has to include the upcoming X99 platform and it's support for 128 GB of DDR4.