Sandy Bridge E processors out today...

[Brandon J.F.]

Getting my new system next week (i7-3930K 3.20 GHz, Asus Sabertooth X79 motherboard and the EVGA NVIDIA GTX 590).

Please let us know how well it works with R3Ds. I'm looking a building a similar system soon.

[DJ Meyer]

Upgraded one of my systems to it today. Currently reinstalling windows...

[Sven Seynaeve]

would be great to hear what kind of performance you get, planning on building one next week as well.

[PatrickFaith]

would be great to hear what kind of performance you get, planning on building one next week as well.

Same ... lmao ... hoping you guys work the bugs out for me ;) I am probably going to get the quadro 4000 and 32 gig ram too btw. So would be nice to see your entire build.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Will be building mine by the end of this week.

i7-3960X CPU
ASUS Rampage IV Extreme motherboard
8 x 4GB G.Skill RipJaw X DIMMs (2133MHz, CL9). Wanted the 2400's, but wasn't willing to pay the $450 premium
480GB Mushkin Chronos DX series 6Gbps SSD
2 x EVGA GTX580 OC's

Probably a RAID card and some internal RAID storage... still deciding.

Still haven't decided on a case and PSU and a couple other things...

System will be used primarily as a 3D modeling / animation / graphics workstation. Will run Adobe Master Collection, DaVinci Resolve (beta), Nuke, Modo, Maya, Lightwave... and a game or two. Hehe. I might put a RED Rocket card in it, might not...

Gonna have to do some gaming and other such things that I have not done in a while after getting this put together. Had to buy the Battlefield 3 bundle version motherboard since it's all I can find in stock anywhere. So I guess that gives me a great place to start. lol. :)

@PatrickFaith - Why the Quadro 4000? It's like, uh, slow...

[Jon Thomasberg]

@Jeff Kilgroe: Are you planning on water loops or air for your OC? At 2133 won't you need water with an external rad?

i7-3930k (3.2 native, OC to 4.2-4.5ish for a 24/7 stable OC) on Corsair H100 sealed loop cooler.
Asus P9X79 Deluxe mobo
32 GB RAM (4x8GB) Corsair Vengence 1888 / CL10 [ 4 slots left available for another 32 later]
2x OCZ Vertex 3 SATA3 6Gbps 240GB SSDs in RAID 0 on board for OS
1x MSI N580 Lightning Extreme 3GB (factory OC)
Corsair AX1200 gold PS
Cooler Master HAF X case w/ (3) 220mm, (1)140mm case fans + (2) 120mm fans for H100 Rad
NZXT Sentry LE fan controller
Pioneer Blu-Ray burner
REDMag 1.8 Reader integration mod on internal eSATA
Avid Control, Color, and Transport panels
Win7 x64 Pro, CS5.5, Avid MC6, Resolve, RC-X Pro

Debating on monitors right now. Leaning toward (2) Dell U2711 GUI + Pano 50 inch for grading -- thoughts/experiences are appreciated

Near future:
Waiting for the pricing to come down a bit before getting (4) WD RE4 2TB drives RAID 0
LTO 5 drive for backups
Areca 1882 HW SAS/RAID controller when business load requires it.

[David Rasberry]

Will be building mine by the end of this week.

i7-3960X CPU
ASUS Rampage IV Extreme motherboard
8 x 4GB G.Skill RipJaw X DIMMs (2133MHz, CL9). Wanted the 2400's, but wasn't willing to pay the $450 premium
480GB Mushkin Chronos DX series 6Gbps SSD
2 x EVGA GTX580 OC's

Probably a RAID card and some internal RAID storage... still deciding.

Still haven't decided on a case and PSU and a couple other things...

System will be used primarily as a 3D modeling / animation / graphics workstation. Will run Adobe Master Collection, DaVinci Resolve (beta), Nuke, Modo, Maya, Lightwave... and a game or two. Hehe. I might put a RED Rocket card in it, might not...

Gonna have to do some gaming and other such things that I have not done in a while after getting this put together. Had to buy the Battlefield 3 bundle version motherboard since it's all I can find in stock anywhere. So I guess that gives me a great place to start. lol. :)

@PatrickFaith - Why the Quadro 4000? It's like, uh, slow...

depends on the software, but the Quadro card drivers provide native support for some CAD and modeling software packages that the GTX consumer cards don't. Quadro cards also support the Tesla rendering GPU/s. I know from personal experience that Autocad is not well supported on the consumer cards, a low end Quadro 600 will perform better than the GTX 580 on Autocad.

[Subhadip Sen]

depends on the software, but the Quadro card drivers provide native support for some CAD and modeling software packages that the GTX consumer cards don't. Quadro cards also support the Tesla rendering GPU/s. I know from personal experience that Autocad is not well supported on the consumer cards, a low end Quadro 600 will perform better than the GTX 580 on Autocad.

Very true. However, considering we are talking about software like Adobe CS5.5 or Resolve, Quadro 4000 is quite slow. Something like a $180 GTX 560 is much faster.

[PatrickFaith]

Very true. However, considering we are talking about software like Adobe CS5.5 or Resolve, Quadro 4000 is quite slow. Something like a $180 GTX 560 is much faster.

Much thanks ... putting in my order now. I am mainly adobe cs 5.5,resolve and blender guy ... so two 560's looks like a real sweat spot. I did look at the 580's, is for sure better, but is a price/need thing. I sometimes do tesla processing, but thinking of just renting some grid time for that via amazon.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

The Quadros do have some advantages in a few apps -- AutoCAD, SolidWorks, Maya... I use AutoCAD and SolidWorks myself on occasion, mostly when clients give me files to work from for doing visualizations and whatnot. I don't know if I'll be doing much of that on this system... I own AutoCAD, but not SolidWorks -- have a colleague I visit when needed. :) Anyway, that said, I bet the AutoCAD performance on this system is still better than the system it's replacing, which has a GTX480 card in it, and AutoCAD runs pretty snappy. There's not much difference between the Quadro and GeForce drivers these days and the GeForce drivers have application-specific tweaking you can do (limited, but it's there). Biggest Quadro feature for CAD is the additional acceleration for line drawing. In Maya and XSI, the Quadros perform better with the additional stencil buffers and extra OpenGL precision -- you don't see as many holes and pixel anomalies along edges while working. Then again, MAX, Modo, Lightwave, C4D, etc.. don't suffer from these anomalies when using non-Quadro cards or ATI cards, so it kinda makes one wonder WTF is up with the OpenGL engines in Maya and XSI.

When it comes to the current Quadro line, the 4000 is just OK. The 5000 is the best price/performance card and with some tweaks you can overclock it to almost match the 6000. So it's my choice.

Don't need liquid cooling on the system configuration I'm assembling. But I am considering it. Motherboard, RAM and SSD is supposed to be here tomorrow. I already have the 580's and the CPU... I need to make a quick decision on the water cooling because if I go that route, I will swap out the video cards for the EVGA water-cooled models. But as of right now I think I'm going for air cooling. I don't intend to do massive overclocking with this system, I'm going for stability above anything else. Hope it works out.

Much thanks ... putting in my order now. I am mainly adobe cs 5.5,resolve and blender guy ... so two 560's looks like a real sweat spot. I did look at the 580's, is for sure better, but is a price/need thing. I sometimes do tesla processing, but thinking of just renting some grid time for that via amazon.

Dual 560's is a reasonable choice. Saves a bit over the dual 580s for sure. Also, you can go with the 590, which is like having dual 560's on one card, but with less total RAM (IIRC) and bandwidth is obviously restricted to the single slot... Which could be an issue depending on what you're doing. Although, CS5.5 and Resolve are not going to tax the bandwidth of such a configuration.

As for the Tesla processing. You really have to go big to see the real benefits. Too much of a luxury item at the moment, more so than SSD's by far. For most practical purposes and broad use with multiple applications, you can build other systems to share rendering loads and get more performance gain for less money.