Hi have been lurking the last couple days, reading through exhaustive! and informative thread. Many thanks to all contributors.
Time to upgrade my aging z9pe-d8ws with 2x ES E5-2665 (b0 8 core Sandy) qa8x, to v3 or v4 and new board. Mostly use it for odd Adobe CC work, but now and then do the odd bit of rendering in Maya, so 16 cores/32 threads at 2.4 all core turbo ain't really cutting it anymore (mostly vray, but yes looking at Arnold, Renderman, Octane etc). Can live with the higher core count lower ghz of 18-22 core xeons. FFMPG in any case pegs all cores at 100% for me transcoding video. At the moment only the one gtx770 4gb, will be adding newer vid card(s). Trying to avoid watercooling gpus to cut down on expenses.
Thinking older system will live out its remaining days gracefully as render node.
Budget somewhat limited, can stretch to RMB/CNY 5500 or so per ES cpu, which rules out v4 QS.
Am considering the ASRock Rack WS board this time after many asus headeaches (
ASRock Rack > EP2C612 WS)
or the following supermicro boards...x10drax (downside only 6 pcie)
Supermicro | Products | Motherboards | Xeon® Boards | X10DAX
or the beast
Supermicro | Products | Motherboards | Xeon® Boards | X10DRG-Q
Case? Well have a corsair 900D which is completely packed already with 13hdd and 5ssd and other crap, so looking at ghetto-building a version of the caselabs th10-d out of wood or something. X10DRG-Q is not going to fit in 900D without a lot of dremelling. Also only 10 pcie brackets.
In any case, (sorry pun!), not too worried about the case or ramming in pcie cards, can always change layout to horizontal for mb and use risers. Or 2 separate cases (keep 900d, use ikea ghetto-mod for render node). Budget doesn't run to a new case (say caselabs, or thermaltake wp200, or 2x thermaltake corex9). Budget would be around 2k max 2.5k usd (yes a lot of ebaying taobaoing).
Memory no problem, can find 64gb ecc ddr4 rdimms on taobao for around usd550. Ditto boards, run from 550 for supermicro beast to 350-400 for asrockrack.
ES cpu's tho! Found quite a few near-QS c2 e5-2699 v3's on taobao, cinebench around 41-4300, great step up from my current 1440 score. And guaranteed to work with the asrock board. 'Only' 18 cores tho! For rendering, extremely tempted to go with quite early v4 xeons in a1 etc stepping for around the same price (5700 rmb), e.g. e5-2686 v4, or 2698 v4 same deal. Are even some 2686 v4 very early stepping at even lower prices.
Of course, none of these are guaranteed to work with the asrock rack board, and have absolutely no idea regarding supermicro. Must be better than asus tho!
Here are some links (all Taobao...the ebay prices are just too high)..and no never taobaoed...will have to try directly to avoid 5-10% fee of taobao agents. Ideally looking for something that can at least manage CB14 score of 4000 or so. Not too concerned about Adobe...it just sucks for efficiency, will always suck, and then there's always Resolve (or Nuke, etc). Note this is for home use, still on my student licenses, may they never expire! Well autodesk never seems too
正式版现货INEL XEON E5-2696V3 2.3G 18核 36线 同比E5-2699V3
v4 here early stepping
Intel Xeon E5-2699V4 2.1G主频 QS不显22核44线程超E5-2699V3
至强E5-2696 V3 2.3G 18核36线 同比E5-2699 2697 V3 正式版现货
2698 v4...seen same stepping on ebay
https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?sp...6dBIG&id=549693679114&ns=1&abbucket=18#detail
https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?sp...6dBIG&id=530638470256&ns=1&abbucket=18#detail
2695 v4
https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?sp...NLuGX&id=540900834560&ns=1&abbucket=18#detail
Ok you get the idea...any thoughts/advice? Sorry for long post...great forum, keep it up!