£1200 workstation

[Chris MacDonald]

Looking at building a home workstation, doesn't need to be as powerful as my work one but still needs a bit of grunt to be able to handle private jobs, etc. This is what I've put together:

 

 

The large number of hard drives is because I plan on making it a dual boot PC, one side for 3D, one side for music production. Anybody able to build a better one for the same money?

 

Also, scan don't seem to have the xeon E3 1270v3 in stock at the moment, is this because they have run out or it hasn't been released yet...? Oh, and I'll be taking the CD drive from my current PC, which will be repurposed as a render node.

[numerobis]

4x 2TB HDDs? Really? Why 2TB SSHD and not 2 HDDs and a real SSD? And why do you need two separate installations for CG and music?!? Do you plan to install OSX? Whatever... i really wouldn't build a workstation without SSD today - at least for OS and programs. These SSHDs are nice but maybe more suitable for notebooks or other builds with limited space IMO. I have banned all HDDs from my workstation last year, using two SSDs now for OS and current projects (256GB+512GB but could be less). The other data is stored on a server in the basement. The Workstation is completely water cooled --> silence!

 

I think the price is ok. But why the Xeon? The 4770K costs almost the same and can be overclocked. Here is a build with i7 4770K, different board and RAM... and with CPU cooler:

 

1 x Intel Core i7-4770K, 4x 3.50GHz, boxed (BX80646I74770K)

1 x Corsair XMS3 DIMM kit 16GB, DDR3-1866, CL10-11-10-30 (CMZ16GX3M2A1866C10)

1 x PNY Quadro K600, 1GB GDDR3, DVI, DisplayPort (VCQK600-PB)

1 x ASRock Z87 Extreme4 (90-MXGPC0-A0UAYZ)

1 x Thermalright True Spirit 140 (BW) (100700546)

2 x Seagate desktop SSHD 2TB, SATA 6Gb/s (ST2000DX001)

2 x Toshiba DT01ACA 2TB, SATA 6Gb/s (DT01ACA200)

1 x Fractal Design Define R4 Black Pearl, noise-insulated (FD-CA-DEF-R4-BL)

1 x Zalman Gold Rock ZM550-XG 550W ATX 2.3

(i have no experience with Zalman PSUs, but they seem to have only 3 years warranty. I think 550W with 80+ Gold should be more than enough for this config - maybe 650W whith overclocking and a bigger GPU)

 

This would be £1111 + shipping

Edited December 14, 2013 by numerobis

[Chris MacDonald]

4x 2TB HDDs? Really? Why 2TB SSHD and not 2 HDDs and a real SSD? And why do you need two separate installations for CG and music?!? Do you plan to install OSX? Whatever..

 

Whoa, calm down. I'm sorry a computer specification offended you. I'm doing the seperate SSHD's because the amount of storage required for system files (music stuff especially) is rather large, several of my plugins alone venture up into the 20GB+ area; and that's just plugins not audio files, which are all uncompressed.

 

I have no intention of overclocking, so the stock 4770 isn't as good as the Xeon E3; http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Xeon-E3-1270-v3-vs-Intel-Core-i7-4770

[numerobis]

Whoa, calm down. I'm sorry a computer specification offended you.

Why calm down...? I am calm! It's your build and i only tried to help - sorry if MY OPINION offended YOU...

But you should be aware that a cached HDD can only be fast as long the loaded files fit into the flash... and the Seagate only has 8GB... your Windows will start faster!

(maybe if you compress your plugins... )

 

Here are some benches:

http://techreport.com/review/25425/seagate-desktop-sshd-2tb-hybrid-drive-reviewed/8

 

I have no intention of overclocking, so the stock 4770 isn't as good as the Xeon E3; http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Xeon-E3-1270-v3-vs-Intel-Core-i7-4770

Yes, sure... the 3,5GHz Xeon is faster than the 3,4GHz 4770 non K (which is even cheaper) - what a surprise... but i selected the 3,5GHz 4770K which has the same speed - sorry that i didn't know that you don't like to be able to overclock the CPU.

 

ok... good luck! i'm out...

[Chris MacDonald]

I'm open to having SSD's, and I'm not arguing about the performance; you're absolutely right. The only reason I chose the SSHD's is because I thought it was a decent compromise between size & speed. You still get all of the benefits of an SSD, with larger storage, and yes I know the SSHD only has a limited amount of flash for "hot" data, but surely 8GB to house your most accessed files/programs is enough?

 

It's certainly food for thought, as I'll be putting together a spec with dual SSD drives to see how that affects the cost. My main concern is the music drive, which in comparison to the 3D drive will be housing the largest files; so I suspect a 400+gb SSD would be required.

[Dimitris Tolios]

You don't need 100% of your files in an SSD for it to be a meaningful upgrade.

Recently upgraded to a 500GB Samsung 840 EVO (TLC) from a 256GB Crucial M4 (MLC). The performance differences on paper are far less important between 2x SSDs than SSD vs SSHDs / hybrid drives, yet believe it or not I do "feel" it.

 

No, it is not when windows is booting - actually the m4 could be booting faster, but I did not perform a clean installation on the EVO, more like used the Samsung magician software to clone the m4..

 

At any rate, tho SSHDs are ok, the small cache that fits in only 1x MLC 8GB NAND chip, means there is no parallel access to multiple NAND chips, what gives SSDs their maximum speed and differentiates performance according to total capacity. Thus more SSDs are not reaching their maximum potential before you get to the 250/256 or bigger drives.

 

Seagate and WD claim 5x performance gains etc, but that's vs. 5400rpm 2.5" drives - not exactly the fastest performing HDDs.

 

Other than those technicalities, the setup is "sound"...

I don't know why you would go through the hassle with 2x separate OS installations, but if that is your personal preference and/or something you want to try out, by all means, go for it.

[Chris MacDonald]

Ordered the parts, which should arrive today...

 

This is what I ordered;

Fractal Design Define R4 Black Pearl

16GB (2x8GB) Corsair DDR3 Vengeance

1GB PNY Nvidia Quadro K600

960GB Crucial M500 2.5" SATA III

ASRock Z87 Extreme6, Intel Z87

650W Akasa Cobra, Hybrid Modular

Intel Xeon E3-1270 v3, S 1150, Haswell

2 x 1TB Seagate ST1000DX001 SSHD Hybrid

 

Gonna go for the single O/S install on an SSD like you guys said and simply separate music & 3d project files using the two seperate SSHD drives. And yeah, I went a little bit over budget, but not by a huge amount.

Edited January 6, 2014 by Macker