Widescreen Gaming Forum

I am building a new productivity workstation.

I am setting up a 5x1-P on a Mega stand with a 6th display below the 5 in portrait. This is a productivity setup that will need to edit ~1min 4k gopro video clips.

This is the build so far:

MB: X99A GODLIKE GAMING | MSI

RAM: Dominator® Platinum Series 64GB (4 x 16GB) DDR4 DRAM 3200MHz

OS: vSphere ESXi Bare-Metal Hypervisor which will be running Windows 10 running off of a 1TB PCIe SSD most of the time. The other VMs will not need to use all of the monitors.

Secondary Internal Drive will be a Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive. Most projects will be saved on a Drobo 5N over ethernet.

5x1P plus 1 display: ASUS PB287Q 28"
The ASUS PB287Q 28" panels are budget 4k panels. They are 28" with a Height of only 14.9" which means I should be able to squeeze 5 of them onto a Mega stand in P. I likely will not be running them at anything more than ~2k or 1440 initially.

CPU & GPU: I am still deciding on the CPU & graphics cards so ANY SUGGESTIONS would be appreciated. I was considering the AMD FirePro W600 2GB Video Card bc it was reasonably priced & listed as one of the cards that would support 5x1-P Plus 1 but now I think it will be underpowered for 4k video editing. .
I am leaning towards two SAPPHIRE NITRO Radeon R9 Fury 100379NTOCSR 4GB 4096-Bit HBM PCI Express 3.0 x16 TRI-X OC (UEFI) Video Cards.

Again any suggestions would be appreciated.

What Software do you use for the video editing? If it doesnt support OpenCL then isnt the whole editing CPU bound?

I dont know much about ESXi but I assume you have PCI-E passtrough to the win10 OS? So the other stuff running wont be able to use the GPU's right?

With two fury's you have 2x3 DP Output and could use all 6 Monitors at 4k.
But if you intend to play games be warned. You only get double the performance in Crossfire mode which needs all monitors to be connected to one GPU.
I'm not sure about Eyefinity right now, (hope somebody can correct me about this) but I think when you have a 5x1P eyefinity Layout you also need all monitors connected to one card....

As for the cpu, the new Broadwell-E for Desktop i7-6950X 10Core looks pretty promising, but costs around 1500$.
But if you say productive you're maybe looking at a Xeon E5?


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Haldi wrote:What Software do you use for the video editing? If it doesn't support OpenCL then isn't the whole editing CPU bound?

This is very important ^^^

OpenCL is quite versatile, Adobe's implementation in Premire and After Effects using CUDA is also exceptional. They also use OpenCL, along with most big name linear, and non-linear commercial video editing software. Without any proper hardware acceleration you will find yourself waiting 10x longer. Even though you probably know this I just thought I'd add it anyway.

As far as the Hardware. these are my thoughts.
What are you using this for business or hobby? If it is business it would be a dire mistake to buy that Abomination MSI Motherboard. It is all flash and no substance. That doesn't mean it's a bad board, it's just the fulfillment of a marketing teams check list. For commercial use it's missing many of the things professionals need to have. You end up paying for a ton of stuff that you don't need or possibly wouldn't even want for a workstation. One of the most important things being support for ECC memory. The first time you have a deadline and something goes wrong and you need to render a 12 hour project again it pays for itself, because not meeting deadlines isn't just inconvenient it will make people less willing to spend money with you. While on that topic a UPS battery backup can be purchased for very very cheap these days and will make sure if a storm or something else cuts the power you don't lose any work.

For The CPU I'd go with a Xeon and one of the server chipsets, something like the C612 rather than X99. Also buying another hard drive for a scratch disk is a great idea.

For the GPU('s) these days I would very rarely advise anyone to get an AMD card at the very high end, but for a workstation with tons of monitors they are usually the way to go. The OpenCL performance of both FirePRO or Radeon cards is absolutely insane, and the compatibility using all kinds of monitor configurations is also exceptional. Like previously mentioned if you are using Adobe products Nvidia cards chew through renders as well, but you would need to buy multiple cards to be able to hook up 6+ monitors.

Now with all that said if this isn't for commercial use you can disregard most of this. High end "gaming" parts are fine to to what you want, it's the stability and piece of mind you get with workstation/server hardware. Although no matter what you'll probably still want to get a UPS and a scratch disk Larger than the size of the uncompressed data you re going to be rendering, 4k video with or without audio can end up being enormous uncompressed and a nightmare to edit quickly. Scratch disks help make editing so much faster and your workflow will thank you; because even short 4K clips can have giant source files.

Haldi wrote:What Software do you use for the video editing? If it doesnt support OpenCL then isnt the whole editing CPU bound?

adobe premiere CS 5.5. It does not use Open Cl, but I will upgrade.

I dont know much about ESXi but I assume you have PCI-E passtrough to the win10 OS? So the other stuff running wont be able to use the GPU's right?

Good point. I honestly didn't think about this. I really only need the PCI-E for NLE if it comes down to it, but maybe multiple 2 or 3 smaller PCIE drives will be better for this reason.

With two fury's you have 2x3 DP Output and could use all 6 Monitors at 4k.
But if you intend to play games be warned. You only get double the performance in Crossfire mode which needs all monitors to be connected to one GPU.

Mostly productivity, but it might be nice to play a flight sim as long as I have a 5x1-P. I didn't think about the crossfire issue. I think someone mentioned it before but I didn't understand that they must all be connected to one card with crossfire. Thanks for clarifying.

I'm not sure about Eyefinity right now, (hope somebody can correct me about this) but I think when you have a 5x1P eyefinity Layout you also need all monitors connected to one card....

As for the cpu, the new Broadwell-E for Desktop i7-6950X 10Core looks pretty promising, but costs around 1500$.
But if you say productive you're maybe looking at a Xeon E5?

I was looking at the Intel Core i7-5960X 3.0GHz 8-Core Processor and the Intel Xeon E5-2643V2 3.5 GHz 6-Core Processor - 25 MB - LGA2011 Socket.

Thank you for the Broadwell-E for Desktop i7-6950X 10Core suggestion. I will consider it. Where is it available?


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As far as I know and from my working experience adobe premiere CS 5.5 isn't bad. If you have a better version then much better.