The Monolith - watercooled 16-core mid-tower

[ThomasTheHuman]

Build’s Name: Monolith
Operating System/ Storage Platform: Windows 10 PRO
CPU: 2x Intel Xeon E5-2670 cooled by: 2x Corsair H45
Motherboard: ASUS Z9PA-D8
Chassis: Phanteks Enthoo PRO M Acrylic
Drives: Samsung EVO 240GB, couple HDDs found here and there
RAM: 16GB (2x8GB) Hynix DDR3, 1600MHz, ECC, Registered (will upgrade later)
Add-in Cards:
GPU - NV GF GTX980 (reference)
Asus DGX sound card
USB 3.0 adapter
TP-Link dual-band n Wi-fi adapter
Power Supply: Corsair RM850x 850W
Usage Profile: Blender rendering station. Mainly for cycles engine, on smaller scenes (<4GB) I render using both CPUs and GPU, which gives really good render times. When rendering more complex scenes I still can render pretty fast using 32 strong threads. 16GB of ram is for now enough, but I can expand up to 256GB in the future.

 

[T_Minus]

Clean

 

[William]

Nice build !

 

[TLN]

Really really nice! That's pretty close to what I'm about to build.
I'd add more storage for the system. And I see plenty of space in that case.
And I', looking for a case without 5.25 drives in front. I'd prefer vent panel instead.

 

[Patrick]

Great build. I looked at the picture first and thought... where's the RAM?!? Then I read your notes. I think I had an AMD GPU Blender render test machine in DemoEval that was using significantly more RAM but the person on the DemoEval machine was doing very large/ complex renders and there were 8x GPUs.