New Workstation Build - i7 X99, Titan X, Overclocking...

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Jeff, Would the Titan X Hydro Copper make sense for cooling and would it fit in the C70 box?

EDIT: OOOPS! Looks like Titan X is not out with the water blocks yet but you can get them separately from same mfg that is making them for NVidia. Well, I guess the question still stands. Would they fit? And, wouldn't this make the whole thing a lot quieter?

EDIT #2: Looks like Newegg actually does have the Hydro Copper version

You won't want the HC version of the cards with the C70 case. There just isn't enough room for a proper reservoir and liquid radiator system along with this motherboard in this case. Not to mention the room needed to manage hoses and wires. It's possible if you remove the internal 3.5" drive bays and do some extra creative planning.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

For those contemplating between this and a nMP, they should also keep in mind that the below shouldn't factor into their price, correct?

Areca - 500
BlackMagic - 995
6 x 6TB HD - 1600
RED Reader - 190
= ~3300

This is correct, these are additional components that are not directly required as part of the system build. Not everyone coming into this will want or need that sort of RAID storage, the internal REDMAG reader or the DeckLink card. When comparing this system build to a nMP, these line items would be additional to a nMP as well. And in the case of the Mac Pro, could end up being more expensive, depending on whether or not they're used along with Thunderbolt expansion or more integrated Thunderbolt devices are chosen instead -- such as the Areca or Promise Thunderbolt RAIDs and the Thunderbolt versions of the BlackMagic or AJA hardware.

 

[Jason Osterday]

$500 for that areca is a steal. Good find on that one. I just sold my spare 1882i24 for $450 so getting a next gen for half a grand is impressive.

IMO I don't think the HC is worth the squeeze with regards to pro apps and what we do. You're adding $600 of expense across two cards which aren't terribly throttled anyway when properly air cooled in a good case during Resolve, RCX etc. Unless you really need to silence the noise of the Titan fans, you're better off spending $600 towards a Xeon, RAM or another Titan-X if you don't already have a 2nd. Not to mention you'll need another radiator, bigger reservoir, pump good enough to handle 2 GPUs and CPU, piping and so forth. I wouldn't be surprised if the premium ran you a total of $1K over the stock EVGA's.

 

[Octave Zangs]

@Jeff, what Xeon could I consider for this setup that would not crank up the budget too much?

 

[Jason Osterday]

All Xeon's that are worth replacing the 5960X with are going to crank the budget up. As Eric mentioned (not sure if it was this thread or another) but the 2960 V3 or 2697 V3 with 128GB RAM would be the minimum required before going to a dual board. Both fetch over $2000 each so you are effectively doubling the cost of the CPU on the build. There are lots of discussions regarding playback vs render speed and the tradeoffs with i7 (5960) vs Xeon so I'd check around to see what best suites your needs.

 

[Octave Zangs]

All Xeon's that are worth replacing the 5960X with are going to crank the budget up. As Eric mentioned (not sure if it was this thread or another) but the 2960 V3 or 2697 V3 with 128GB RAM would be the minimum required before going to a dual board. Both fetch over $2000 each so you are effectively doubling the cost of the CPU on the build. There are lots of discussions regarding playback vs render speed and the tradeoffs with i7 (5960) vs Xeon so I'd check around to see what best suites your needs.

Good to know thanks Jason!

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

$500 for that areca is a steal. Good find on that one. I just sold my spare 1882i24 for $450 so getting a next gen for half a grand is impressive.

Er... That's because most vendors are price-gouging on it since not many carry them in stock for some weird reason. NewEgg has a few "open box" ones, or did recently, for under $500 and they're a great deal. I bought a couple of them -- they were not customer returns, but rather they received a handful of them where the boxes got a bit dirty and scuffed. Kinda weird, but whatever... They all arrived as new with the original tape still on the static bags and everything else unopened and in place. That said, MSRP on the ARC-1883i is $579 (IIRC). Many of your authorized vendors or partner integrators are offering it for $500~$575 installed in a new system. And that's really what you should be paying for the card alone when purchased from your usual online vendors.

IMO I don't think the HC is worth the squeeze with regards to pro apps and what we do. You're adding $600 of expense across two cards which aren't terribly throttled anyway when properly air cooled in a good case during Resolve, RCX etc. Unless you really need to silence the noise of the Titan fans, you're better off spending $600 towards a Xeon, RAM or another Titan-X if you don't already have a 2nd. Not to mention you'll need another radiator, bigger reservoir, pump good enough to handle 2 GPUs and CPU, piping and so forth. I wouldn't be surprised if the premium ran you a total of $1K over the stock EVGA's.

Completely agree. And that said, these Titan X fans don't seem to be terribly loud or annoying. Yes they ramp up under load, but they don't make me want to relocate the system to another room. And I'm usually pretty sensitive and picky about such things.

@Jeff, what Xeon could I consider for this setup that would not crank up the budget too much?

Jason already answered just fine, but the only two Xeon chips I would recommend over the i7-5960X would be the E5-2690v3 (12-core) and the E5-2697v3 (14-core 2.6GHz). Everything else is going to fall short of the i7 CPU, especially if you overclock that i7 and it's silly not to when the chips consistently give 4GHz + without issue. And yeah, these Xeon CPUs are quite a bit more expensive. The 2697 is $2800.

 

[Jason Osterday]

Er... That's because most vendors are price-gouging on it since not many carry them in stock for some weird reason. NewEgg has a few "open box" ones, or did recently, for under $500 and they're a great deal. I bought a couple of them -- they were not customer returns, but rather they received a handful of them where the boxes got a bit dirty and scuffed. Kinda weird, but whatever... They all arrived as new with the original tape still on the static bags and everything else unopened and in place. That said, MSRP on the ARC-1883i is $579 (IIRC). Many of your authorized vendors or partner integrators are offering it for $500~$575 installed in a new system. And that's really what you should be paying for the card alone when purchased from your usual online vendors.

I think I was confusing builds, maybe with Phil's and thought you had picked up a 24 port card for that money. I'll have to root through Newegg's bstock and see what goodies they have too.

 

[David Moffitt]

For the record I am running a very similar case, the Corsair 500D - and I am using two Titan Xs with EK waterblocks (same people making the HydroCopper block for EVGA, but these work with their "bridge" to connect water passages between the two whereas the OEM ones don't due to width). I'm able to have two radiators and a 2-bay tall reservoir, but then, it's because I removed the lower drive cage and my only internal storage is a single SSD (everything else Thunderbolt). I did have to cut a small slot in the bottom of the case under the drive bay to accommodate the reservoir but it looks darn near stock. I'll snap and post a few pictures later if I have time. Mine's nowhere near as cool as Jeff's, just a Haswell i5, as it was originally built for gaming, but after all the problems I'm having with my Mac Pro in my office (nuked GPUs) I'm thinking of bringing my resolve workflow home and upgrading the MB/CPU as soon as Skylake comes out (either for that or driving X99 prices down).

 

[David Moffitt]

Sorry, it was the Corsiar 550D: http://www.corsair.com/en-us/obsidian-series-550d-mid-tower-quiet-case

The sound deadening in it is excellent. Between water cooling everything, and that, the only thing I (barely) hear is the hum of the water pump - aka I have to TRY to hear it over the HVAC or the birds chirping outside. With headphones in, zilch.

Funny, I was looking at the C70 and the only reason I didn't get it when I build this box is it was out of stock at NewEgg and Amazon both LOL. I freaking love the "ammo box" look of it. Darn near the same size (531mm x 221mm x 495mm vs 533mm x 232mm x 501mm). IMHO Corsair's build quality is fantastic for their rather low price.

Parts:

• i5-4760K (can run 4.5Ghz, turned "down" to 4.2 STUPID stable - i5 since it was a gaming rig, going to upgrade)
• Gigabyte Z87-UD5-TH (built in Thunderbolt - downside is only two GPUs capable, heh, again, going to upgrade)
• 16GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-14900 1866MHz TridentX Series CL8-9-9-24 (running at 2133 7-9-9-24 @ 1.65V - going to go up to 32 or 64 when I get a new MB/CPU, likely DDR4 at that point)
• 2x EVGA Titan X flashed with the HydroCopper BIOS (bumped up to 425TDP - stable at 1561Mhz Boost. Disgusting cards, love 'em)
• Samsung 1TB EVO SSD (likely go to a PCIe or M2 solution on a new MB, no more slots/lanes on this one to do so)
• Corsair RM1000 PSU (adequate, would go EVGA 1350 or similar next time, to be honest)
• EK water blocks (GPUs, CPU)
• XSPC 2-bay res w/ D5 Vario pump (going to get a new pump head / reservoir combo at some point when I change cases)
• AlpahCool NexXxoS ST-30 (two of them) with Corsair's quiet fans (forget the model, 2 each on the 240mm rads and 1 on case back 1 on case bottom)

Thing runs like a champ. I'm a Mac guy through and through but this blows my 6-core nMP away. In fact while my nMP is under the knife this weekend / next week I plan on loading up Resolve on this bad boy and blowing my poor mind with how much better it runs, even under Windows (ew lol).


Excuse the iPhone pics but here goes:

 

[Jason Osterday]

Good looking setup David. So, are you seeing any improvement to the Titan's? I littered my case with 120/140mm Noctua fans and separated all my drives into the bottom for ventilation so I feel like there wasn't much to gain with water-cooling, especially with 2 Titan's at stock clock/voltage not really bottlenecking the system anyway.

The nudge towards better realtime playback or more nodes is more so found in a 2697V3 (or dual Xeons) and more memory vs squeezing an extra 100mhz on the GPU core clocks. Your mileage may be varying though if you can push it more on those blocks. I haven't tested much beyond what I listed in my thread.

 

[David Moffitt]

Thanks Jason! I'm able to really aggressively overclock them (stock SuperClock card is 1127 base / 1219 boost, this is 1152 base 1366 boost) and the RAM is set to +400Mhz at +37mV and they don't thermally throttle. And of course they're dead silent. Haven't put them through their paces in Resolve yet but hope to this weekend - been busy toying with the CPU voltages and OC'ing the RAM (and playing games on it - playing in 4k UHD with 4x or 8x antialiasing is astounding)

 

[David Moffitt]

And yeah I agree re nodes and CPU, at some point even with "unlimited powwwaah" GPUs they bottleneck either with PCI lanes/bandwidth, CPU cores & threads, cache, system or GPU memory etc.

I have been debating an x99 w/ 5930K as an upgrade to this until Intel releases new stuff in q3/4...

 

[Jim Short]

Jeff, Eric, others,

Clearly the GTX Titan X cards have it all. What would the trade-offs be to choose the newer, less expensive GTX 980 Ti cards for a high-end OC'd 5960x build like Jeff's (in this thread)?

Thanks,

Jim

 

[Jason Osterday]

It's tricky estimating the 980Ti's handicap with only 6GB vs the Titan. The sweet spot may be the $750 980Ti Hybrid given that it seems to function identical to a Titan-X minus 6GB of memory.

Honestly, with such a close release to the Titan-X and seeing these Ti benchmarks, Nvidia should be handing out vouchers for the EVGA hybrid coolers to the X owners out there who shelled out nearly $400 more to (potentially only) double their memory. We'll see as Resolve and RCX tests make it into the wild.

If I were a gamer, I wouldn't see any reason to go Titan-X at this point, especially if I were in the mood to SLI two 980Ti's.

 

[David Moffitt]

I would say if you frequently see the "out of GPU memory / reduce nodes or corrections" the Titan becomes worth it, but otherwise computationally it's a maybe 5-8% difference (at the same clock - the 980 Ti ships quite overclocked vs the Titan X), at a $3-400 premium.

 

[Eric Bowen]

The only difference for the most part that I can see with the 980TI cards is Vram. Keep in mind though DDR5 is very expensive. So double the ram add's significant cost. You can see this by how much DDR4 costs. The biggest reason to get the Titan X cards is future proofing hardware to workflows. The greater the resolution and frame rate of media the more Vram you will require to use all of the Cuda cores. Cuda core utilization is tied to the amount of vram since Cores cannot share buffers for data processing different thread chains if required. Those buffers have to get duplicated. So the more Cuda cores in use the more Vram required to feed them. Along with this you also have GPU accelerated debayering which takes a massive amount of Vram. So if you are using high resolution media which requires debayering the vram usage will be even higher for the amount of frames cached. The final consideration here is scaling. 2x GPU's dont give double the GPU processing power for most applications that have GPU acceleration . Octane is 1 of the few right now that give anywhere close to that. So if you are not using Octane for C4D for example, 1 Titan X is greater than 2x 980Ti cards if you require that capability for the workflow used. Davinci would be the next application besides Octane that would make more use of 2x GPU's at 6GB versus 1x GPU at 12GB.

 

[John Bellari]

The only difference for the most part that I can see with the 980TI cards is Vram. Keep in mind though DDR5 is very expensive. ...

Turns out, GDDR5 VRAM 512-bit with 6100MHz effective memory clock is no longer expensive,
as the AMD R9 390 has 8GB GDDR5 RAM and only cost $329 launch!

The GTX 980 Ti uses 6GB 384-bit GDDR5 while the Titan X uses 12GB 768-bit GDDR5 to achieve roughly 7000MHz memory clocks.

For 2016, I assume the standard for 4K gaming performance going forward
will be 8GB HBM gen 2 on the next gen NVidia and AMD cards,
or a Dual GPU card like the Fury X with 8GB total HBM memory which I assume
will be the next Mac Pro GPU iteration...

 

[Eric Bowen]

There are different grades of DDR5 just like DDR4 and DDR3. The grades decide what speed and the ram can achieve as well as latency. Reliability is also a factor. For example the higher speed DDR4 close to the current limit of the die is close to double the price versus the lowest grade base speed ram. The greater the density ie double the size also increases price. The highest price is the current ceiling for both speed and density since those are the chips from the center of the die which is the smallest surface area ie number available as well. So just because you see slower speed DDR5 at 8GB for half the price doesnt mean DDR5 is far cheaper. There are far more variables here than just what you see for the base AMD card.

 

[John Bellari]

There are different grades of DDR5 just like DDR4 and DDR3. The grades decide what speed and the ram can achieve as well as latency. Reliability is also a factor. For example the higher Speed DDR4 close to the current limit of the die is close to double the price versus the lowest grade base speed ram. The greater the density ie double the size also increases price. The highest price is the current ceiling for both speed and density since those are the chips from the center of the die which is the smallest surface area ie number available as well. So just because you see slower speed DDR5 at 8GB for half the price doesnt mean DDR5 is far cheaper. There are far more variables here than just what you see for the base AMD card.

All true, and so once 8GB GDDR5 becomes more commonplace in 2016 on low end GPU's, as HBM becomes the standard memory type for next gen cards, we can all benefit from this cheaper memory...