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Let the comments fly on my proposed $4K system

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Aug 3, 2012
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Motherboard
GIGABYTE GA-Z77X-UP5
CPU
i7-3770
Graphics
ASUS GeForce GTX 670-DC2T-2GD5
Mac
  1. Mac Pro
Mobile Phone
  1. iOS
OK, I've done a bit of research. From what I can see, I could be more horsepower with a Xeon, but I decided to propose an i7 on a GA-Z77X-UP5-TH MoBo. I really want that Thunderbolt going into the future.

Primary purposes: Video editing (FCPX), Motion, Photoshop and 3D rendering. An occasional round of Starcraft II.

I am working with a pretty generous $4K budget, including monitor. Please alert me to any potential problems and feel free to suggest any improvements as I am not a experienced Hackintosher.

MOBO Gigabyte Intel Z77 Dual Thunderbolt ATX Motherboard with BT4.0/Wi-Fi (GA-Z77X-UP5-TH)
$289.99
CPU Intel Core i7-3770K
$329.99
GPU Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 OC 2 GB GDDR5 DVI-I/DVI-D/HDMI/Display port PCI-Express 3.0 Graphics Card (GV-N680OC-2GD)
$524.99
CPU Cooler Corsair Hydro Series H100 Extreme Performance Liquid CPU Cooler (CWCH100)
$103.74
Mercury Accelsior PCI SSD Bootable. Sustained Data Transfer Rates of up to 780MB/s read and 763MB/s write. 480GB
$767.99
Case
Corsair Vengeance C70 Mid-Tower Gaming Case — Gunmetal Black. (I like to top vent to accommodate the cooler)
$131.98
RAM
Corsair Vengeance 32 GB DDR3 1600MHz PC3 12800 Quad Channel 240 Pin
$209.99
PS Corsair Professional Series Gold 850-Watt 80 Plus Gold Certified High-Performance Power Supply - CMPSU-850AX
$174.99
HD Hitachi Ultrastar 7K3000 HUS723020ALS640 2 TB 3.5' Internal Hard Drive (SAS)
(5x 225.99)(RAID 6)
$1,129.95
Hardware RAID Highpoint RocketRaid 2720SGL
$154.99
RAID cabling HDE (TM) Mini SAS 26 Pin SFF-8087 to 4 x SAS SFF-8482 Pin Data/Power Cable
(2 x 11.00)
$22.00
Monitor Nixeus NX-VUE27 WQHD $430.00
$3,980.61
 
That ain't gonna fly...

You need to learn to count PCI Express lanes, as you've gone over your budget.

The graphics card will happily share bandwidth with the RAID card, but each will need eight lanes, i.e. you're now out of PCI Express lanes for the x16 slots on that board, as the third slot shares bandwidth with the second slot so they both become x4 slots. Sure, you could run the RAID card at half speed, not quite sure how it would perform in a RAID 6 with half the available bandwidth.
The problem is that that silly OWC SSD is using a PCI Express x2 interface which is non-standard and you don't really have the bandwidth for it as I explained.
Maybe you should look at a couple of SAS 6Gbps SSD's for that RAID card instead?
 
And with a budget like that, why not a better case?
 
if you're going to do 3d rendering you should go with a 5xx series NVIDA card as the 6xx series are crippled for GPUGP. Check out the benchmarks, the 5xx series win hands down and they are cheaper.
 
Swede: Thanks so much for the info. No, I had not considered the issue of using up the PCIx lane allotment. This is just the type of useful information that I needed. Of course I can add a SSD or two instead of the Accelsior, and save a few bucks in the deal.

Would you recommend that the boot/app SSD(s) be run off the mobo or off the RAID? I was hoping for a scenario where the RAIDed drives would sleep unless I needed them,

Thanks again,
Rick
 
OK, I've done a bit of research. From what I can see, I could be more horsepower with a Xeon, but I decided to propose an i7 on a GA-Z77X-UP5-TH MoBo. I really want that Thunderbolt going into the future.

Yet you aren't DOING anything with the Thunderbolt ports. Really it's only true uses are for highspeed external raids like the Promise external raid and just the BOX for that is $1000. I strongly suspect that by the time thunderbolt becomes truly useful, you'll be replacing the machine any way or there will be a PCIe card to add it.

You should probably at least consider an x79/socket 2011 build. They have 40 PCIe lanes and up to a 6 core chip wt a max of 64 gb Ram. Depending on the mother board of course, some only have 4 instead of 8 slots.

Exactly this sort of situation is why I went with one.

http://www.tonymacx86.com/golden-bu...page-iv-extreme-core-i7-3930k-successful.html

BTW, Xeons are not inherently more powerful or better than an equivalent non-xeon chip. Where the advantages come in are the ability to have multiple processors (2-4) and the upper end models do have more cores (up to 8) with somewhat greater L2 Cache. You pay DEARLY for this though. Two upper end Xeons will eat up your entire budget, with nothing left over.

Primary purposes: Video editing (FCPX), Motion, Photoshop and 3D rendering. An occasional round of Starcraft II.

AFAIK, the 6XX (kepler) cards are not actually that great for 3d work, the 5XX (Fermi) cards are better bang for your buck there. The kepler cards are fine for photoshop or video work, but suck (as in up to 1/8th the performance) at the double precision math for the 3D work.

CPU Cooler :Corsair Hydro Series H100 Extreme Performance Liquid CPU Cooler (CWCH100)

I would give the Thermaltake 2.0 water coolers a look. They are apparently better and significantly quieter.

RAM
Corsair Vengeance 32 GB DDR3 1600MHz PC3 12800 Quad Channel 240 Pin

The heat sinks on these are stupidly tall, However, that shouldn't be an issue with water cooling, it does present problems for a lot of the top end Air Coolers.
 
I'm in almost the same boat as you, putting together a video editing system ~$4k budget for Avid, Premiere, Final Cut, Davinci Resolve and After Effects. The poster above has some really good advice about dropping the Ivy Bridge processor and going for a 2011 socket, a lot of people overclock the 3930k to ~4.2gHZ (6-cores) and get ~20,000 geekbench scores out of it, the Sandy Bridge chips out right now are aimed towards the consumer market, you probably won't see a high-end sandy bridge i7 for almost a year.

As far as the graphics card goes, I'm currently trying to figure that out as well. The 680 is a newer, more powerful card than the 580 and it costs about the same. From what I understand the real key question is how much 3D rendering you'll be doing, if its minimal and video editing, coloring, light after effects stuff are your priority then the 680 will give you more bang for your buck. If you plan to do a lot of 3d rendering the 580 would be your card, which is why even though they are older they are still super-way-too-expensive.

good luck with your build!

PS: Oh and I wouldn't loose any sleep over not having thunderbolt. There are a lot things in that technology that have to mature before it could become a standard for video editing. Most other DIT's and editors I know are E-Sata all the way since very few clients have thunderbolt ports & 6GB/s E-sata is wicked fast/stable/standard.
 
I agree with swede,
everything looks solid except for the PCIe (its not PCIx, thats a very different thing) SSD. Just get the best 480-512GB SSD you can (samsung 830 is a good choice, but lots of options). Your not going to notice a difference between 550mb+ speeds and the 700mb+ that the PCIe offers on a system drive and you will be saving yourself a lot of headache and a wasted PCIe slot as well as probably a bit of money.
g\
 
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