workstation for 3D Cad & simulations

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

viv

New Member
Jan 9, 2017
17
0
1
41
hi,

I am looking to build a dual cpu workstation for 3d modeling. so far I have the Z10PE-D8 WS picked out. I will be using the build mainly fro simulations and gaming. I am guessing the MB might come with many other options which i may or may not be needing that is more pertinent to I.T or servers. Is it possible to turn off the things i dont need and simply use what will help me in my work. what I mean is are there things that are initiated during boot that i can turn off or do i have to go through the full boot up time.

Budget is def an issue. I will be starting with TWO E5-2609 v4 (8C, 1.7GHz, 1866MHz, 20MB, 85W) which is around 200$. To be honest, not really sure if there is a better choice for the buck which includes turbo. I am guessing 8 cores should be good.

in conclusion:
Z10PE-D8 WS with TWO E5-2609 v4

any advice on MB and CPU's.
 
Last edited:

littleredwagen

New Member
Dec 8, 2016
11
2
3
42
The Z10PE-D8 WS as the name implies is Workstation oriented board, less server features then other boards, (read less not none). Big question is how multi threaded are your applications? Because a faster Desktop 8 Core i7 can be had with a board for about 200 dollars more, also eschewing away the requirement of ECC and possibly buffered dimms, and increased system stability. For example Premier Pro would be much faster on 8 Cores that run at much higher clocks than low speed 16 cores.
 

maxermaxer

Active Member
Oct 28, 2016
289
48
28
48
I would strongly recommend reconsidering your need. I recently built my 3D workstation and I had some experience. If your main task is modeling then you'd better purchase i7 based system. But if rendering is more important then you should consider Xeon. Visit Boxx.com or pugetsystems.com to see their documents. Very useful source before decision made.
 

gaster

New Member
Dec 28, 2016
4
0
1
52
I would strongly recommend reconsidering your need. I recently built my 3D workstation and I had some experience. If your main task is modeling then you'd better purchase i7 based system. But if rendering is more important then you should consider Xeon. Visit Boxx.com or pugetsystems.com to see their documents. Very useful source before decision made.
I would second this. Here is an article from Puget that covers pretty much this exact situation:

Solidworks 2016 CPU Performance: Skylake-S vs Haswell-E/EP

Here is all you pretty much need to read:

"At stock speeds, the Intel Core i7 6700K was 13-36% faster than the Xeon E5-1650 V3. The only exception was rendering (which is highly threaded so the extra cores on the E5-1650 V3 makes a big impact) and FEA simulations where the E5-1650 V3 was actually faster. We are not 100% sure why the FEA simulation was faster on the Haswell-EP CPU, but our best guess it that it has to do with the increased cache available on that CPU (15MB vs 8MB)

When both CPUs were locked to four cores running at 4GHz, we get a pretty clear picture of just how important using the latest CPU architecture can be. We still saw a small drop in performance with the 6700K when performing a FEA simulation (which would make sense if it can take advantage of the extra cache), but for everything else the 6700K was anywhere from 15-35% faster than the E5-1650 V3.

This means that, clock for clock, Skylake-S is on average 23% faster than Haswell-E/EP in Solidworks. Since Solidworks is primarily single threaded, if you wanted to match the performance of a Core i7 6700K (which runs at 4-4.2GHz), this works out to needing to overclock a Haswell-E/EP CPU to about 5GHz. While this is possible to do with a lot of effort, it is not easy and would require specialized cooling. Even then, that would be a major overclock which would likely be unstable and considerably more expensive than simply using a Core i7 6700K.

Overall, we were actually impressed by how much of a performance difference there is between Skylake-S and Haswell-E/EP. We expected to see a 10-15% performance difference when using the same core count and operating frequency, so seeing a difference of up to 35% surprised us. Of course, this isn't a perfect comparison since the chipset and other factors are playing a role, but it does give you a very good idea of how much performance you would be giving up if you wanted to use a Xeon E5 or high end Core i7 CPU rather than a Skylake-S CPU like the Core i7 6700K."
 

viv

New Member
Jan 9, 2017
17
0
1
41
The E5-2630 V4 ES processors (QK3G or QHVK) provide ten cores and 2.1GHz or 2.2Ghz (depending on S-SPEC) and are quite affordable and should be compatible with the Z10PE-D8 WS. If you want to ensure best compatibility then the QK3G is an ES2 which has R0 production stepping.
I am assuming the engineering samples are also aimed at consumers and are specific to their uses. They can have problems like no boost clock, lower clock speed, disabled cores, incompatibilities....?? this is what ive been told unless there is something else that says otherwise.