Xeon 5355 or qx6700 or Both

[kjverine]

I am a user of 3ds max, vray, maxwell, archicad and photoshop. I am having sooo much trouble trying to decide on what system to build. I had a spec for a qx6700 but i saw the Xeon 5355 and its swayed my decision a bit. Actually, what i am looking for is a system to build my models in Max and sometimes ArchiCAD. Then have my images render over night when using maxwell on one system. i have some plants and car packages by xfrog, onyx and dosch that i need to convert them into having maxwell and vray materials . I am slowly learning the basics of vray and i would want to have system where i can do test renders using vray as well. Basically i really want an efficient workstation setup. I am thinking of jus getting both chips for the two systems(qx6700 and xeon 5355) but now comes the hard part. Motherboard? Memory? Graphic Card? Case? Power Supply Unit? Hard Drives? Cooling System? WinXp 64 or Vista?

 

Can anyone help me in my time of need:confused:

[AJLynn]

XP64, and the CPU depends on whether you want to use 2 of them - there's no particular reason to use Xeons if you don't want a dual socket system. As for the rest... a good power supply, stock cooling unless you want to overclock, normal RAM spec'ed for your MB/CPU combination (check the tested RAM list on the MB manufacturer's web site if you want to be more confident that it will work) unless you want to overclock - then you'd want faster RAM than the spec requires. Case is personal preference, video cards have been discussed to death and you can read the forum backlogs.