Dual Intel Xeon E5 2696V4 | 88 cores | 450 FPS

[hnax]

Windows 10 Pro
Supermicro X10DRG-Q Motherboard

[Gordon]

System cost?  Overclocked?

[hnax]

No it's not overclocked. I am not sure if you can overclock Xeon CPUs

I built this about 6 months ago, I don't remember the exact cost but I am going to give you an estimate.

2xCPU (each about $1850 from ebay)   $3700.00
Mboard   $500.00
Ram (128GB)   $1200.00
HDD Samsung  960 pro 1T   $600.00
NVME Card   $40.00
Case   $200.00
Power Supply 1600W   $180.00
CPU Watercooling (2 x corsair H115i)    $280.00
VGA 1080ti NVIDIA (hybrid watercooled)   $899.00

Total:   $7599.00

For network rendering you will only need 32Gb of RAM, 128GB NVME drive, and the built-in VGA card. You could save money. I use this machine for gaming too.

>> super quiet workstation

I have another 2 more of them connected by Network Rendering for a total of 3 x 88 = 264 cores

[Chad Holton]

Nice setup! Thanks for sharing the breakdown.

[mattjgerard]

I'm sending this to my IT people. we are exploring ideas for expanding the speed of our workstations and networks render system. This is good info, thanks!

[DMerz III]

  super envious right now.

I too am going to bookmark this for the next time corporate gives us some darn money for better performance!

[mattjgerard]

So, my direct contact in IT is a very helpful fella, very excited about getting us some kicking hardware. Right now we are using a server that was retired from another building, its only 2 years old but has some dual XEON 2620 processors (i think) in it that gives us 32 threads @ about 2ghz each. Not bad right?

Well, he stopped by and was asking me what i would need next, as they are looking to update their main server stack and might be able to sneak something in there for us. I was just looking at specing out some HP z840's and comparable Threadripper systems and such. He asked how much each workstation was going for, since we are thinking of not using specific server grade hardware, just a couple workstation nodes stuck in a rack. I mentioned that we could shoot for the moon and get a couple of 88 thread beasts for about 6-8 k each then waited  for his cringey response.

His respnse was "Well, that should not be an issue,  I'll have them order one up for you to test. lemme know what you want." I was like  seriously? he said that their average virtualization server with software started at 20k, so this is peanuts.

This will be a fun next month or two researching and designing a couple builds!