I'm struggling to figure out what you are trying to do. We know you are a smart guy. Well maybe not since you are thinking of getting a EVGA 780 Hydro Copper with water cooling these days.
(sorry couldn't resist).
But on a serious note, what type of machine setup do you have at present?
What are you planning to do with your current machine?
What are you planning on doing with the new "beast"?
Carlo
Lmao watercooling is to keep my system silent, and i do mean silent.
The area where i live is basically the country on a quiet lane. You can hear gpu fans and cpu fans easily in the room so watercooling keeps it nice a quick with 600rpm super quiet fans that hardly spin
Right now my rig is the following:
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1230V2 4 core 8 thread 3.6GHz
Motherboard: Asrock fatal1ty z77 Professional (yes i do use the dual lan)
Memory: 16GB Corsair Vengeance Pro **Running out quickly so needs to be 32GB**
Storage: 2 x 120GB SSD + 2 4TB WD Red's
GPUs: GTX 780 Hydro Copper + 3 MSI 750TI's
Monitor: 50" Plasma TV
So right now my system runs the following tasks:
Home Theatre
Gaming Rig
Web Server
Virtual Machines
Media Server
Video Editor
Image Editor
Coding system
As you can tell it does a lot of stuff.
The new one needs to do exactly the same but i need more power behind it. My VM's can get very power hungry running wallets or smaller servers for different tasks.
I use a lot of system memory with all the VM's running + games so i need a lot of memory
I code a lot at home so i need more then 1 display to help my work flow, i need at least 2 at all times.
Same goes for video and picture editing
I am replacing my 50" plasma so i need 4 27" screens to replace it for home theatre
The system is on 24/7 for the media server and home theatre so low power is a factor, GPU's wont rev up unless i want the so low power cpu is a must
Gaming, so this is why a second 780. If i am going to spend so much money on a machine i want some good gaming performance. You put 4 1080p screens together and that is a lot of pixels to render. A single 780 would fall over and die if you tried to game on those resolutions with good settings
Watercooling fittings are more to make my life easier. I am adding in quick disconnects to the entire system so i can remove parts if need be
The current machine will be given to my girlfriend along with a 750ti so she can use it instead of her laptop plus so she can game. She isn't so into gaming so doesn't need such a high end gpu. She will also be using 2 of the 4 monitors i buy when suing the system, so we will have 2 each but when she isnt on i will have all 4
Have i missed anything?
Wow that's a lot of "eggs in one basket". You have a lot of competing functionality on the same box.
I have all the same things you do and then some. But for me I run PLEX as my media manager and have this running on it's own machine with about 25TB of storage. I have a "shared" library that usually has 2 or 3 other people streaming movies most of the day. Typically 2 to 8 streams are going 24 hours. It's setup like Netflix (only better content)
I have another XEON machine setup for VMs (Hyper-V) with 32GB of memory and a couple 4TB drives and several SSD drives which make running VMs much faster.
I have another machine setup that runs IIS and external programs (could have used a VM).
My Dev machine is my high end laptop with 3 SSD drives in it and 32GB memory. Also supports 4 external monitors if needed.
I have a couple other server machines also but they do stuff not talked about here. I have a 1 or 2 GPUs in each machine that I use to pay for the electric as the machines are on anyway so this is profitable for me.
I surely could consolidate some of the machines if I wanted to but I prefer to have each machine setup for specific things and locked down accordingly.
Have you thought about doing something similar instead? Would be cheaper in the long run, give you redundancy, etc...
Carlo