Sandy Bridge E processors out today...

[Petri Teittinen]

I spent an evening pondering on pretty much the same question as Philipe. I then discovered that, going by Passmarks' CPU Mark results, a singular Core i7-3930K is faster than a dual Xeon E5645 -- and quite a bit cheaper, too.

For the motherboard I picked the Asus Rampage IV Extreme because it is currently the only LGA 2011 mobo that has enough PCI-E lanes for my needs. Barely; you can have one x16 slot and three x8 ones. That should be good enough for a Quadro 4000 in the x16 slot, followed by a RED Rocket, a GeForce GTX460 and a SCSI adapter in the x8 slots. I bought 32GB of Corsair Low Profile Vengeances because I had reason to believe DIMMs with tall heat spreaders would not fit under the Noctua cooler.

[Philipe Ratton]

Thanks for the input Mike and Petri !

[Brandon J.F.]

Can anyone who has built a Core i7-3930K system comment on how the system performs?

[Petri Teittinen]

Brandon, I ordered the components only yesterday... but I will try to remember to comment on it once all the parts are here and the system is up & running.

[Subhadip Sen]

With those kinds of savings you could essentially buy another updated system later this year guilt-free (that said, IvyBridge is supposed to be pretty much the exact same as SandyBridge-E, except have ondie graphics and 20% heat/power reduction.)

Ivy Bridge will certainly be slower than Sandy Bridge-E for multi-threaded apps. It is still quad core, and Intel is focusing on power efficiency and graphics - CPU performance will be a minor boost over Sandy Bridge. By that time, Sandy Bridge-E will get a minor refresh too, with i7 3940K and 3970X. Besides, Intel has to protect its high-end - Sandy Bridge-E will be the fastest desktop CPUs till Ivy Bridge-E hits late 2012. After all, the top Ivy Bridge is Core i7 3700, Sandy Bridge-E is Core i7 3800 and 3900. The only wild card here is overclocking, but it won't be able to make up for the lack of 2 cores and only a minor IPC boost. Plus, trigate fabs are aimed at high power efficiency in the 2 GHz - 4 GHz range.

Also, we must remember that the Sandy Bridge-E die is identical to Sandy Bridge-EP. It contains 8 cores and 20MB L3 cache. The only reason why only 6 cores are enabled is to fit in under 130W. In the future, with process improvements and a new stepping, 8 cores at 130W is certainly no stretch of the imagination. We can see a Core i7 3980X or something that is 8 core, sometime in 2012. Sandy Bridge-EP Xeon E5s bring 8 cores at 150W in January.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Very new to the PC world, tired of waiting and a bit scared of apple.

What dou you guys think for a CS5/Resolve system:

Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition 3.3GHz (3.9GHz Turbo) LGA 2011 Six-Core Desktop Processor
ASUS Rampage IV Extreme/BF3 Extended ATX Intel Motherboard
G .SKILL Ripjaws X Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory
EVGA GeForce GTX 580 (Fermi) 03G-P3-1584-AR Video Card
EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti (Fermi) 02G-P3-1568-KR Video Card (GUI)

I just built nearly that exact same system. I suggest you go with 4GB RAM modules, as in 8x4GB. You can go with the 2133MHz G.Skill Ripjaws and do 32GB for less money that way. That motherboard has 8 DIMM sockets and SB-E supports quad-channel memory. So you want to install either 4 or 8 memory modules and make sure they're all identical. What do you plan to use for SSD/HDD's? I kinda went all out (or at least spent a bit) and have a 480GB Mushkin Chronos 6Gbps SSD for my system/apps drive and then 4 x 2TB Seagate Barracuda XT's (attached to an Areca 1882LP RAID card) in RAID-0.

The i7-3960X is probably overkill for most people unless they're doing a lot of rendering or intense computational stuff. You can save yourself a bit of money by dropping down one model of CPU. You still get 6-core. The difference is smaller cache (which is what makes the difference in the computationally intense stuff) and it is clocked at 3.2GHz instead of 3.3GHz.

(2X) Intel Xeon E5645 2.4GHz LGA 1366 80W Six-Core Server Processor
EVGA Classified SR-2 270-WS-W555-A2 HPTX Intel Motherboard
(4X) G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 12GB (3 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Desktop Memory Model F3-10666CL7T-12GBRH
EVGA GeForce GTX 580 (Fermi) 03G-P3-1584-AR Video Card
EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti (Fermi) 02G-P3-1568-KR Video Card (GUI)

any advice is great appreciated !

The Xeons are due for an update soon. And the i5520 chipset especially is feeling very dated (it's 3 years old, after all). But that's a nice system and while it's clocked slower, it has a heap of memory bandwidth and quite a bit of muscle if you run a lot of multithreaded applications. I'm confused on your RAM selection you have (4X) in front of it which implies you're buying more than the 3x4GB (12GB) you list later on the same line. With this configuration you can take advantage of a triple-channel memory interface for each CPU. So RAM works best installed in matching groups of 3 for each CPU RAM bank.

Personally, I would go with the Sandy Bridge E system, probably with the 3930 CPU. ...Unless you really feel you need the 3960X. Which I would recommend if you're doing a lot of rending or other computationally intense multithreaded stuff. If you're playing games, editing in Premiere and playing in Resolve, the 3960X is probably overkill.

[Patrick OMara]

Intel Core Extreme Edition i7-3960X Six-Core Socket LGA2011, 3.30Ghz, 15MB L3 Cache, 32nm (Retail Boxed) (BX80619i73960X) $1,199.99

Asus P9X79 PRO Socket 2011 Intel x79 Chipset Quad-channel DDR3 2400(O.C.)/2133(O.C.)/1866/1600/1333/1066 MHz 4x PCI-Express
3.0 x16 Dual GLAN 8-CH High Definition Audio 4x SATA 3.0Gb/s 4x SATA 6.0Gb/s 2x Power eSATA 6Gb/s 6x USB 3.0 12x USB 2.0
Bluetooth V2.1+EDR ATX $319.99

G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Series DDR3 1600MHz (PC3-12800) 64GB (8x8GB) Quad Channel Kit (F3-12800CL10Q2-64GBZL) $1,099.99

OCZ (AGT3-25SAT3-480G) Agility 3 2.5" 480GB SATA3 6GB/s Solid State Drive, Read: 525MB/s, Write: 410MB/s $699.99 - main
OCZ (AGT3-25SAT3-480G) Agility 3 2.5" 480GB SATA3 6GB/s Solid State Drive, Read: 525MB/s, Write: 410MB/s $699.99 - swap/scratch
OCZ (AGT3-25SAT3-480G) Agility 3 2.5" 480GB SATA3 6GB/s Solid State Drive, Read: 525MB/s, Write: 410MB/s $699.99 - working drive

Maximus Config
PNY NVIDIA Quadro 6000 (VCQ6000-PB) 6GB GDDR5 Dual-Link DVI/Dual Display Ports/Mini Stereo PCI Express 2.0 x16 Graphics Card $4,099.99
Nvidia Tesla C2075 GPU Computing 448 CUDA Cores, 3 GB DDR5 Memory PCI-E 2.0 $2,549.99


DroboPro Dual Disk Redundancy 1,499.00 <- i know some of you hate these. I've had no prob so far.
Hitachi Deskstar 3TB 3.5" SATA3 6Gb/s 7200rpm 64MB Cache OEM (0S03208) $299.99 X 8


drool

[Jeff Kilgroe]

[QUOTE=Patrick OMara;898671
Nvidia Tesla C2075 GPU Computing 448 CUDA Cores, 3 GB DDR5 Memory PCI-E 2.0 $2,549.99
[/quote]

Unless you're running one of the 2 or 3 apps that actually support this, why bother? And with one of them, it's kinda like "meh..."

DroboPro Dual Disk Redundancy 1,499.00 <- i know some of you hate these. I've had no prob so far.

I know a guy who sells mopeds that cost almost as much as a new Harley...

Really though, if you're building that, looks like fun. :)

[Jon Thomasberg]

Can anyone who has built a Core i7-3930K system comment on how the system performs?

I have already here :: http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthr...hmark-Rankings

I suppose it would be better to have my thread in the Post-Production Hardware section -- mods, can you do the honors and move it?

[Patrick OMara]

Premiere (5.5.2 update) supports joining the Tesla card but I am not 100% sure if uses the processing power from both cards for effects/rendering. I think it might make one card for system, and other card for rendering effects.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/adobe_PremiereproCS5.html