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Cosmos II 3960X Sandy Bridge-E Workstation


sonic_agamemnon

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This workstation is designed for heavy post-production editing and software engineering, with some occasional gaming.

 

This

summarizes the chosen components and build design.

 

Here is the part list:

 

Cooler Master Cosmos II

Enermax MaxRevo 1350W power supply

MSI Big Bang-XPower II Intel LGA 2011 X79 maiboard

Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition Sandy Bridge-E 3.3GHz LGA 2011 CPU

Corsair Dominator GT 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR3 1866Mhz (PC3 15000) 1.5v CAS 9-10-9-27 SDRAM

Two XFX Double Dissipation Black Edition Radeon HD 7970 in CrossFireX

Two Pioneer BDR-207DBKS Blu-ray optical drives

1TB RAID0 boot set: 2 x Samsung 830 Series 512GB solid state drives

4TB RAID0 data set: 2 x Western Digital RE4 2TB SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" 7200 RPM disk drives

4TB RAID0 data set: 2 x Western Digital RE4 2TB SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" 7200 RPM disk drives

6TB RAID5 archive set: 4 x Western Digital Green 2TB SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" 5400 RPM disk drives

Two CyberPower PP110 battery back-up power units

Windows 7 Professional (64-bit)

Here are the boxing photographs:

 

 

UnboxingComponents1.png

 

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UnboxingCosmos1.png

 

UnboxingCosmos2.png

 

UnboxingCosmos3.png

 

UnboxingBigBang1.png

 

UnboxingEnermax1.png

 

UnboxingEnermax2.png

 

UnboxingIntel3.png

 

UnboxingCorsair1.png

 

UnboxingCorsair3.png

 

UnboxingNoctua1.png

 

UnboxingNoctua2.png

 

UnboxingWD1.png

 

UnboxingWD2.png

 

UnboxingSSD2.png

 

UnboxingBluRay1.png

 

UnboxingXFX1.png

 

UnboxingXFX2.png

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It's beautiful! But the cost is something outta this world! 5K+ I am guessing?

Not if you know where and how to buy the parts.

 

For example (my 2nd rig):

i7 3930K = $420

ASUS Rampage IV Extreme = $395

HD 7970 = $385

HD 7970 = $390

Corsair AX1200 = $235

4 x 4GB Samsung Extreme Low Voltage = $80

 

That's $1905 right there. The expensive stuff he has is the memory and all the SSD's and HDD's... with current HDD prices and his choice of SSD's.

 

My only advice is instead of two separate RAID 0's and a RAID 5, is to put all 8 in RAID 10 like I did with my server. Ungodly performance for HDD's.

Edited by El_Capitan

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I am surprised the OP did not choose a single 4gb GTX 680 considering he will be working with a lot of programs that can take advantage of an Nvidia GPU (e.g. the Mercury Playback Engine in Adobe). IIRC, the MPE does not support SLI (and definitely not CF) either.

 

Otherwise, wow, what a machine!

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I am surprised the OP did not choose a single 4gb GTX 680 considering he will be working with a lot of programs that can take advantage of an Nvidia GPU (e.g. the Mercury Playback Engine in Adobe). IIRC, the MPE does not support SLI (and definitely not CF) either.

 

Otherwise, wow, what a machine!

 

Same here, but I think 2 GTX680 would be a better option for performance.

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Mercury Playback Engine in Adobe

 

I just spent a few hours researching Adobe AMD support (or the lack thereof) in their CS6 suite. This is a bummer for sure. I didn't realize that hardware playback acceleration in Premiere Pro is CUDA only.

 

My admittedly belated research today in Adobe's forums revealed:

 

  • Premiere Pro: There is no AMD GPU support for Mercury Engine hardware playback.
  • After Effects: On a somewhat brighter note, all 5.87GB of Radeon VRAM is recognized by After Affects, although only 4.5GB is actually usable for texturing. OpenGL and hardware-assisted shader modeling also recognizes and utilizes AMD GPUs. However, ray-tracing will use the CPU instead of the GPU, because that is also a CUDA-only hardware acceleration feature-- a minor bummer.
  • Photoshop: Better news here with full support for AMD GPUs in advanced drawing mode, including GPU acceleration, OpenCL and anti-alias guides/paths. Also, 3D OpenGL drawing will recognize and utilize up to 3GB of VRAM.

Perhaps a future release of Premiere Pro will add support for AMD GPU hardware playback, although I did not find anything at Adobe's support site promising that.

 

Regardless, if I would have known ahead of time that hardware support for up to 4x performance during playback in Premiere was only possible with CUDA, I would have gone with two 680s just for that reason.

 

Bummer.

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Well, perhaps there is light at the end of the tunnel after all.

 

The Mercury Playback Engine in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 already supports AMD GPUs, but only for certain Apple MacBook platforms at this time, not full desktop Radeon cards.

 

Maybe Santa will bring Mercury by Christmas, although you can bet Adobe will force AMD owners to pay-up for an upgrade to get it.

 

Source is this AMD press release in April:

 

"AMD has been a vital partner in helping us bring GPU-acceleration through OpenCL™ to Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 on current generation MacBooks everywhere. I think our customers will find the enhanced Mercury Playback Engine to be a dramatic improvement and a great benefit to users who will experience an immediate dramatic performance increase with this new release software release. We couldn’t be more excited about the results of our work with AMD on Adobe Premiere Pro CS6. We’re definitely looking forward to continuing our work with AMD on future enhancements to Adobe Premiere Pro."

– Bill Roberts, Director of Video Product Management, Adobe

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It's hard to come to any firm conclusion on future additional AMD GPU support in Adobe Premiere Pro, based on this Adobe blog:

What are the system requirements for Premiere Pro CS6 OpenCL processing?

AMD Radeon HD 6750M and AMD Radeon HD 6770M graphics card with 1GB VRAM in MacBook Pro computers running Mac OSX v10.7

 

Why only those two cards?

We are very firmly committed to making Premiere Pro a stable, reliable, high-performance NLE. This involves thoroughly testing the configurations that we recommend and support. We needed to make sure that we could get the best possible performance and stability with these two very common systems before we could consider broadening our support to other systems.

 

Will you add more cards later?

We can’t talk about what we’ll do in the future, but I can ask that you look at how few cards Premiere Pro CS5 could use for GPU acceleration when it was first released, and then note how we’ve added cards to the supported list with several updates and upgrades. We make no promises about our future plans, but you may be able to determine something about our thought process by looking to past behavior.

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Why a single 6 core instead of dual 6 cores or dual quads? Seems like that'd be better, at least from a number-crunching point of view.

 

My workflow is not CPU bound. I rarely pegged four cores for any length of time with my prior workstation, mainly because the bus, I/O channel and disk drives are always the primary bottleneck in my work. Slow I/O causes frequent latent periods where the CPU does nothing while waiting for I/O to unblock. Reading, encoding and then writing hours of video content back to disk is an extremely I/O bound process. This is why I invested heavily in high-capacity, fast storage.

 

The next biggest bottleneck is memory, as in not enough to load all desired applications at once, each having their own appropriate caching in place for ideal performance. Invariably, things quickly begin to swap to slow scratch storage. Therefore, I again invested heavily in high-density, high-speed DRAM, leaving open slots to double down again if necessary.

 

When editing video, the third worst bottleneck is the CPU, as the encoding step does take advantage of all available cores. With the upcoming increase in storage and memory performance, there should also be fewer latent periods, but I don't think encoding will peg all 12 virtual cores. To hedge my bet, I did invest in the fastest 6-core processor available, and I am willing to take advantage of its unlocked crystal to over-clock a bit, but only if necessary.

 

When playing games, these bottlenecks change in importance rather radically. The GPU suddenly becomes the most critical component to maximize frame rates at high resolution pixel densities. Very few games require more than two CPU cores during game play, so the CPU is a distant second or third-place bottleneck when gaming.

 

It's a calculated risk, but instead of funding a more expensive 8 or 16-core Xeon platform, I decided to invest more heavily in faster storage, greater memory capacity and strong gaming GPU hardware.

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Ah, gotcha. I was thinking this was a production only rig for some reason. If gaming, the faster 6 core will be better than dual quads by a lot...especially if you OC.

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