Originally Posted by
mdocod
Aljbaba,
GPU:
I don't have reason to believe that the Adobe Suite and Resolve will benefit a from a quadro card from what I have seen. The only thing a quadro card does, is bring custom video drivers to the mix that provide support for proprietary graphics engines found in *some* 3D productivity/creation apps. These days a LOT of these apps are moving towards using OpenGL, DirectX, CUDA, and OpenCL because development is easier on these than trying to stay competitive in a proprietary "engine." I'd be surprised if you couldn't work in 10-12bit color space on the "GTX" cards.. It's an available option on an AMD APU in linux!
Davinci Resolve is written for CUDA and OpenCL, but they seem to favor CUDA. This program appears to benefit powerful GPU, and scales with multiple GPUs to improve processing time.
Adobe CC suite is good on either CUDA or openCL but performance scaling drops off pretty rapidly in most operations so big powerful GPUs have a limited amount of usefulness here. The only part of the CC suite that benefits
significantly from a powerful GPU (or multiple powerful GPUs) is encoding.
Since you want to work with 4K video this basically makes the decision for you. You'll want to go Nvidia, as the AMD hardware decoders don't support up to 4K.
I question whether or not the 6GB frame buffer on the Titan would translate to enough benefit to actually beat a GTX780Ti or 2xGTX770-4GB cards at a lower cost to implement. I understand that Davinci can leverage a lot of VRAM but there seem to be a lot of people using 1.5-3GB cards with acceptable results. The 1 x 4GB GTX770 (about half the performance of the Titan, at a third the cost), or a pair in tandem with similar performance at a lower cost, may prove to be a better value.
CPU/RAM:
I'm not particularly fond mixing a tuner build with a workstation build unless the productivity part is inconsequential. If you have deadlines and real work to be done on this machine, then I believe you should abandon the overclocking idea and stick with a Xeon CPUs paired with 1600MT/s RAM speeds so that there is absolutely no question regarding stability or compute accuracy. Build a separate "toy" rig for overclocking. Remember, overclocking is mostly about the sport of overclocking for the sake of it. The performance gains are interesting and fun, but not necessary.
Note: Performance scaling above a triple channel 1600MT/s memory configuration is going to be pretty negligible on a 6 core Ivy for video work. You'll always bottleneck on something else. Using overclocked CPUs and unsupported memory speeds will just open up loopholes for support to jump through should you have problems with the hardware or software.
I recommend the E5-1650V2 and a 4x8GB set of Crucial Ballistix Tactical (1600-8-8-8@1.35V)
Disks:
Highly dependent on whether you are working with RAW or compressed material. This part of the build can be scaled WAY up or down depending on the bitrate you're working with. For video work, SSDs belong in the field on the recorder next to the camera. [ example: Convergent Design recorders ]
On the toaster, big RAID arrays of mechanical drives make more sense. The primary benefits of the SSD for video work in the field are that they are physically robust, compact/light, and (some) can handle the high write speeds required for high quality, or high FPS recording. The access times are not particularly beneficial for this type of work, which is their primary benefit on the desktop. Use an SSD as a boot/application drive, but for cost effectiveness, just use lots of mechanical storage configured in large enough arrays to fit the bandwidth and space requirements of the work. As suggested, you may want to consider separate arrays for read/write operations, especially if you are working in RAW or with other high bit-rate footage.
SSDs don't always deliver their claimed sequential write speeds, often it is lower in the real world, so the benefits vs mechanical are often narrower than they would appear on paper vs mechanical.
WD Red drives have had some really awful trending for reliability. They
seem to have been launched with a design defect that caused a very high failure rate. I would not buy into a big RAID configuration of them unless I had confirmation that the "defect" had been solved in all currently shipping units.
RAW 4K 4:4:4 24FPS is nearly 500MB/s. If this is what you're working in, make sure to look-up bandwidth scaling of your mechanical drives across the width of the platter, it may take more than 4 RED drives to guarantee enough minimum bandwidth towards the end of the available space to maintain real-time playback of raw 4K.
Motherboard:
The Asus X79 Deluxe would probably represent the upper end limit for value on such a build. Most of the stuff above this price/size class is going to return very little if any tangible benefit. The Ballistix Tactical memory would look nice on the Deluxe