Monster Build Advice Appreciated

Serephucus

Then the above setup will be fine. I'd maybe add an NH-D14 to the setup (CPU cooler) and you're set. There's not a whole lot of point dumping €500 on water cooling if you're not bothered about the noise.

Interloper

do you reckon EVGA GeForce GTX 670 will manage 3 monitors at decent resolution?

Serephucus

One of them will manage most games at high-ish settings very well. Two of them will own anything.

Dapics

I dont know if you seen this but here is a 4gb superclocked gtx 670

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/4gb-e...z-cores-1344-d

2 of these boyo's in sli and you will effectively have 8gb of dedicated memory.

deconduo

Dapics wrote: »

I dont know if you seen this but here is a 4gb superclocked gtx 670

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/4gb-e...z-cores-1344-d

2 of these boyo's in sli and you will effectively have 8gb of dedicated memory.

Common misconception. 2 cards in crossfire/SLI will NOT have double the dedicated memory. The data is mirrored and each card takes turns to render each scene using its own effective VRAM.

Dapics

alas, i have learnt something new today, i must get more into hardware capabilities.

WistfulSoul

That's a nice budget.

I can't help feeling that people have overlooked how important the "programmer / 3D modeller / video editor " piece of your opening post is.
You mention using 3DS Max, After Effects etc.
When it comes to rendering, the accepted wisdom was always the more CPUs and RAM the better.

If an application can use 6 cores, then the Sandy Bridge-E i7-3930k generally trounces the Ivy Bridge i7-3770k.

Note the Anandtech results for rendering http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/551?vs=552 .

Applications such as x264 video encoding, par 2 archive compression recovery and Chromium compilation have significant performance advantages.
The Cinebench 11.5 multi-threaded result is close to 33% better !
The i7-3930k can also support 8 memory slots, which would allow you to use RAM disks ( the ASUS p9X79 Pro supports up to 64GB of RAM )

The i7-3770k generally wins on gaming, but by tiny amounts.

You mention your priorities are : 1) rendering 2) gaming.
The more expensive i7-3930k would seem to be the perfect fit.
A socket 2011 motherboard would also allow drop in replacment of Ivy Bridge-E 6/8 core processors when they arrive in the future.

Or you could look at workstation class dual 2011 socket motherboards ...

This link might be relevant to you http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=23&t=1045347&page=1&pp=15

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Ignore online power supply calculators, they're usually rubbish.

Guru3d website gives a peak power usage of a tri-sli Gtx670 system ( fans, disks cpu ram motherboard ) as 583W
( Source: http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-670-2-and-3way-sli-review/4 )

A solid '80+ Gold' Corsair AX750 would be more than enough ..

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The GTX670 looks like a great card but the new Nvidia cards don't have the same 'Compute power' that the Fermi based 580/570 cards had.

From Anandtech

"Shifting gears, as always our final set of benchmarks is a look at compute performance. As we have seen with GTX 680, GK104 appears to be significantly less balanced between rendering and compute performance than GF110 or GF114 were, and as a result compute performance suffers. Cache and register file pressure in particular seem to give GK104 grief, which means that GK104 can still do well in certain scenarios, but falls well short in others."

Source ( http://www.anandtech.com/show/5818/nvidia-geforce-gtx-670-review-feat-evga/15 )

I only mention this in case you plan on doing GPU based rendering.

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You should consider if you need to get an IPS monitor such as a Dell U2410.
IPS panels give far superior colour accuracy ( maybe for your video editing ? )


Finally, beware of buying from UK sites at present, the exchange rate is horrible.

Interloper

Thanks for the input wistfulsoul, I'm taking your advice on board and will go for a 2011/ Sandybridge configuration, the extra cores will help the 3D modelling side of things as well as with video transcoding.

hopefully in the next month or so I'll start getting the bits in, and I'll put p some pics as the build progresses.

Thanks again to everyone for all the advice and helpful suggestions!

Interloper

hi all,
I'm still fine tuning the build, and came across this during my travels

http://www.idealo.de/preisvergleich/SubProductCategory/1342.html

It's a German price comparison site / aggregator that works well in Chrome using the auto translate. It may be useful if your planning any upgrades of your own.