[Miguel Piñón]

i can second that.. i am running sr-2 and x5650s w 24GB ecc and i already managed to max it out once or twice

home building the hardware is not that more complicated than a normal workstation imho, but overclocking&setting the bios up, or solving hardware related problems can be very tricky because the board is so complex.
..and it won't be much different with the new dual socket 2011 boards coming from asus and sooner or later evga.

right now asfaik only the asus is just out, so i'd wait at least one or two month to see if anything bad pops up about it.

the sr-2 is a bit old by now and still expensive, although performance is good.
@3500 the benchwell scene takes ~3min and scores almost 3500 benchmark.
the e5645 Eric mentioned is below 500€.. which is a good price/perf. ratio for a xeon cpu, assuming you overclock it

also don't forget that many functions in software are not multithreaded, so if you are not exclusively rendering on that machine, less cores at higher speed will give you a better workstation.

Thanks Polynurb and yes this WS is only for a rendering work.
Did you have any comments about the AMD Opteron system?

[Hervé]

wow $16K for your system.. with 64gb ram/dual Xeon E5 2687W 3.1ghz

[Tim Ellis]

I run an old Boxx 7400 bought just before they stopped that line. Twin AMD Opteron 244's and each has it's own dedicated bank of RAM, up to 8GB each on the Tyan thunder mboard the Boxx came with.

Theory is that the AMD dedicated RAM per CPU is better, but then Intel would surely have matched this method by now if it was.

Apple show that their Mac pro 12 core @ 2.93Ghz is 1.5 times faster with the Maxwell Benchwell scene than the Mac Pro 8core @ 2.93Ghz. http://www.apple.com/macpro/performance.html

Benchwell website shows the real results charts:- http://visualim2.o2switch.net/benchwell/

Eric, it's not your old machine at CS3D, it's the new one I built for my business.

I maxed out both machines I mentioned before with 24GB, running 5 5k renders at the same time, they didn't really bat an eyelid and just pooled more of the SSD virtual memory and kept going. Northbridge temp is prone to run high though on the Asus Sabretooth, but with the requisite fan on the heatsink this can be regulated easily.

I wouldn't, and didn't buy another Boxx machine. For the money they are very expensive and if I had spent the $3000 I did on my old 7400, on components instead, I would have built 2 of the Asus i7 960 24Gb machines and had change. Boxx's are very noisy and prone to hot running temps as Eric mentioned earlier. Buy an intellegently designed cpu case like the 600c from Corsair and spend the same money on components instead of a Boxx.

Tim.

[Hervé]

I might just buy another mac.. they run perfect.. very silent.. solid construction..

I still have a boxx dual AMD here.. turned off.. the noise drives me nuts.. can't stand that.. I mailed boxx some time ago and asking about the Noise.. he told me blah blah blah.. so that means they are still very noisy..

[dmeyer]

I've had 3 BOXX and didn't find them to be particularly noisy.

The only issue i had is with one using 150W TDP Xeons they tend to skimp on the cooling a little bit. Not on the CPUs, but the airflow over the RAM wasn't sufficient and it would cause beeping. I added a fan and everything was ok.

[eric nixon]

Re, AMD multicores at low frequencies... dont bother.

I guess now is a bad time to build a dual proc system, as new generation mobos are just appearing, and probably will be buggy for a while.

There must a better answer out there... If you had a really good friend who could build an SR2 in the xigmatek case with the normal size NOCTUA heatsinks, and lots of cheap gskill ram. That would be the fastest/cheapest. I also recommend cougar gx 1050 psu but you have to wire it up sensibly, not too many elaborate extensions.. and spread the load across both power rails.

I havent genned up on this for a while so there may be a new mobo contender.

Tim, Its good to hear my guess was wrong