Hi all,
New on the forums here.
After working on mac for the past 10 years, apple has disappointed me with their latest mac pro. sure its fast and sturdy and all that, but it feels way too much like a trinket, an upgraded mac mini on steroids at best. the lack of in-case expansion was a serious con for me. obviously HDX would pose a problem, those sonnet boxes are expensive and I am not sure if I trust thunderbolt with my PCIe cards. just imagine anything happening to that cable mid-session...
no RAID for the HD means no RAID means no data security. once again, thunderbolt for your data files... yea no. killing blow has been the delay from december to March (where I live). problem for me was that my current set up died a few weeks ago, so it left me no choice: the quest for an alternative.
and I think I have one.
I decided not to go for the "pro tools PC" route, even though it looked very good I decided to look what I could do myself. I read the i7 thread on the forums here but the Xeon factor was appealing to me, so after looking into that a bit more, I decided to build something based on that. I have tried to check on the forums here and on google for every component if I would be facing any compatibility issues with PT or anything else. it felt good, so I went ahead and ordered, but I can ofc still return and swap out any critical fail parts, so let me know if you find anything shady or flimsy in here.
The system is as follows:
Supermicro X9DR7-LN4F Motherboard
2x Intel Xeon E5-2697 V2
2x Noctua NH-D14 CPU coolers
128GB Kingston 1600mhz registered ECC DDR3
16TB Seagate SaS2 (raid 10)
Nvidia GFX 680 <-- this is what worries me the most, any experiences/thoughts with this?
Adaptec RAID 7805 (might be overkill, but just to be sure)
corsair ax1200i
Lian LI PC-D8000 case
+ any other random stuff like cooler master case fans etc.
all the parts should be coming in over the next few days, once I have put everything together we shall see how it survives the dverb tests etc.
the system may look pretty redundant here and there, but with the stuff I do, redundancy is key. the most epic part is that I still managed to stay under the cost of a maxed out mac pro, while ending up with quite literally twice the specs
Anyway, please let me know if you have any thoughts/suggestions etc, all help is welcome!