2x Xeon 2697 v2 build

[kyteman]

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!

[Craig F]

In box RAID is over kill
A NAS box running RAID 5 or 6 is adequate for storage

[RyanC]

Oh man I'm interested to see the d-verb numbers. I guess you can get up over 2000.

[feliponk]

It's gonna be a Windows system or a Hackintosh?

[Emcha_audio]

Just to let you know, from what I'm seeing of the motherboard cpu socket spacing, your coolers are not going to work on it.

[kyteman]

Originally Posted by Emcha_audio

Just to let you know, from what I'm seeing of the motherboard cpu socket spacing, your coolers are not going to work on it.

Owwwww really? I was looking that up and thought the spacing would work on this one... or is it a narrow spacing on the mobo after all?

[kyteman]

Originally Posted by feliponk

It's gonna be a Windows system or a Hackintosh?

not going to do a hackintosh. was tempted at first, but apart from the legal stuff I dont really feel like I'd miss it. free at last

[Emcha_audio]

Originally Posted by kyteman

Owwwww really? I was looking that up and thought the spacing would work on this one... or is it a narrow spacing on the mobo after all?

I'm looking at the fan itself which is pretty bulky, it's bigger than my own cooler, and the space of the two sockets First of, they are almost in front of one an other except that socket 2 (?) is slightly to the left of it (from the picture I've seen) but not enough so that the exhaust of the cooler would be sent right into the fan of the second cooler. That is if you don't put the two fans on and that the second and the first fan pushes the air through. Now with the second fan on the same units I don't think you'll have the necessary space. Best is to go at the shop and measure it up before you buy it.

[Emcha_audio]

Originally Posted by kyteman

not going to do a hackintosh. was tempted at first, but apart from the legal stuff I dont really feel like I'd miss it. free at last

I suggest you check your laws in europe. There's been something very interesting that happened over there that makes even resseling a used OSX license legal in europe

"An author of software cannot oppose the resale of his ‘used’ licences allow
ing the use of his programs downloaded from the internet"

http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/d...cp120094en.pdf

If I'm not mistaken you can actually buy OSX and download it on a thumb-drive(?) that means that if someone has done this they would be allowed to sell that copy of the license. It also means that this law actually voids (IMO) the restriction of the part of the license that says it has to be installed on a apple computer. Also http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/...16:0022:EN:PDF

basically it means that merely changing a minimal number of lines of code does not necessarily mean that a breach of copyright has occurred.

Anyways, I'd check it up more with your own research on that since you would have a better access to those laws than me in Canada :).

[kyteman]

Originally Posted by Emcha_audio

I suggest you check your laws in europe. There's been something very interesting that happened over there that makes even resseling a used OSX license legal in europe

that's pretty big news...! I'll look into it some more, if the legality is out of the way, I may as well install it and see how it feels. however, I haven't checked the compatibility for my components so that might become tricky. oh we'll see...