Workstation and Gaming rig's

[Henri108]

Hi everyone,
Again thinking about going to X99 or Z97 or waiting for skylake.
2 machines, would like to use the same components. 1 for gaming (almost exclusively) and other one for full time creativity.

[/COLOR]1) What will you be doing with this PC? Gaming? Photoshop? Web browsing? etc
Heavy Adobe Photoshop usage and rest of the CS6 suite (video editing only occasionally).
2) What's your budget? Are tax and shipping included?
No budget, just something that makes sense.
3) Which country do you live in? If the U.S, please tell us the state and city if possible.
Belgium
4) What exact parts do you need for that budget? CPU, RAM, case, etc. The word "Everything" is not a valid answer. Please list out all the parts you'll need.
Case, CPU, RAM, PSU, SSD, GPU, Mobo, cooling,…
5) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing? Please be especially specific about the power supply. List make and model.
Some 13000 rpm harddrives maybe, but got enough storage on our servers. Otherwise nothing.
6) Will you be overclocking?
Custom loop in the Gaming rig.
No OC'ing on the photoshop rig.
7) What is the max resolution of your monitor? What size is it?
Will be moving to Dell 34" Ultrawide. Maybe additional 4K screen (27" Dell).
8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC?
If going X99 asap, if you tell to wait, I'll wait.
Certainly because they will have to be working 5 years without maintenance about 6 days a week 10 hours a day.
9) What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Firewire? Crossfire or SLI support? USB 3.0? SATA 6Gb/s? eSATA? Onboard video (as a backup or main GPU)? UEFI? etc.
Just reliable.
10) Do you already have a legit and reusable/transferable OS key/license? If so, what OS? Is it 32bit or 64bit?
Yes already got multiple Windows 8.1 licenses from our current machines.

Here is what I was thinking of if I would build it now for the editing rig:
1 x Intel® Core™ i7-4790K, 4,0 GHz (4,4 GHz Turbo Boost) 1150 processor € 369,-*
1 x Seasonic G-650, 650 Watt voeding € 129,90*
1 x Fractal Design Define R5 Black, behuizing € 114,90*
1 x Samsung 850 EVO MZ-75E500B/EU, 500 GB SSD € 224,90*
1 x GIGABYTE G1.Sniper B5 (rev. 1.0), socket 1150 moederbord € 99,90*
1 x Crucial 16 GB DDR3-1600 Kit, geheugen € 134,90*
1 x Cooler Master Hyper212 Evo, Actieve CPU koeler € 34,99*
Or X99:
1 x Cooler Master Hyper212 Evo, Actieve CPU koeler € 34,99*
1 x EVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti FTW (02G-P4-3757-KR), grafische kaart € 164,90*
1 x Intel® Core™ i7-5820K 3,3 GHz (3,6 GHz Turbo Boost) 2011-3 processor € 419,-*
1 x Seasonic G-650, 650 Watt voeding € 129,90*
1 x Fractal Design Define R5 Black, behuizing € 114,90*
1 x Samsung 850 EVO MZ-75E500B/EU, 500 GB SSD € 224,90*
1 x MSI X99S SLI PLUS, socket 2011-3 moederbord € 239,90*
1 x Crucial 16 GB DDR4-2400 Quad-Kit, geheugen € 259,-*

Gaming rig will just add EVGA GTX980 (maybe hydrocopper, but most likely with watercooling block)

Doubts on parts:
Seasonic G-series or Corsair RM-series? Corsair is 5€ more.
Samsung 850 Evo or Intel 530? Same price.

For Z97 I would need a different mobo, this one would only work for the editing rig (no OC).

 

[Dangman]

In regards to your doubts:
Definitely the Seasonic PSU since it's of higher quality/performance
Definitely the Samsung 850.

As for the rest of the parts, for the most part, you have solid setups all around. But it really doesn't make sense to make the X99 as a gaming setup. I mean yeah, the X99 setup would work as a gaming setup but you would be paying significantly more money for barely if any gains at all in gaming performance. It does make sense for the editing rig to be X99 since X99 can go up to 64GB of RAM max. Some photoshop could easily use up that much RAM.

So the photoshop rig should be the X99 and the gaming rig the Z97 setup. In addition, make absolute sure that the RAM you're getting for the X99 setup is 2 x 8GB. Do not get a single 4GB stick of RAM as that utterly defeats the whole point of a X99 rig. As for the Z97 setup, there's not much info on that specific motherboard for me to actually recommend it. For the gaming Z97 PC with overclocking in mind, I recommend this motherboard:
$145 - Asus Z97-A Intel Z97 Motherboard

 

[Deleted member 126051]

Okay one thing.

DEFINITELY reuse one of those hard drives you talked about for local mass storage.
You don't want to store stuff on your SSD and you don't always want to be pulling stuff across the network.

 

[Henri108]

In regards to your doubts:
Definitely the Seasonic PSU since it's of higher quality/performance
Definitely the Samsung 850.

As for the rest of the parts, for the most part, you have solid setups all around. But it really doesn't make sense to make the X99 as a gaming setup. I mean yeah, the X99 setup would work as a gaming setup but you would be paying significantly more money for barely if any gains at all in gaming performance. It does make sense for the editing rig to be X99 since X99 can go up to 64GB of RAM max. Some photoshop could easily use up that much RAM.

So the photoshop rig should be the X99 and the gaming rig the Z97 setup. In addition, make absolute sure that the RAM you're getting for the X99 setup is 2 x 8GB. Do not get a single 4GB stick of RAM as that utterly defeats the whole point of a X99 rig. As for the Z97 setup, there's not much info on that specific motherboard for me to actually recommend it. For the gaming Z97 PC with overclocking in mind, I recommend this motherboard:
$145 - Asus Z97-A Intel Z97 Motherboard

Shouldn't I go for quadchannel? Instead of 2x8, go for 4x4? So I could upgrade to 32GB (I think this will suffice for the next 5 years).
I'll check out that mobo. I would really like these 2 systems to be equal, but 500€ difference for almost no improvement is pretty hard to swallow. I'll do some more research.

Chas, HDD's are only 160GB. Now everything is done through our network, the programs/OS alone is a good 120GB, 40GB is for open projects (PS takes up a lot).

 

[Henri108]

I checked out the Asus z97 A, it's 164.95€. The Asus Z97 Pro Gamer is also the same price (with 11x more reviews in my local shop) would this be an even better mobo?

 

[Dangman]

Shouldn't I go for quadchannel? Instead of 2x8, go for 4x4? So I could upgrade to 32GB (I think this will suffice for the next 5 years).
I'll check out that mobo. I would really like these 2 systems to be equal, but 500€ difference for almost no improvement is pretty hard to swallow. I'll do some more research.

Quad-channel doesn't make a real world difference. WIth that said, if 32GB of RAM is all you think you need, then that means the X99 route is out. The three main reasons to go X99 are:
1) Usage that can take advantage of more than four cores
2) Usage that can take advantage of more than 32GB of RAM.
3) Triple GPU gaming setups.

Three is obviously out. Current versions of Photoshop aren't that heavily multi-threaded and your occasional video editing use could work just fine on an Intel quad-core with HT. There's a small chance that future version of Photoshop could be heavily multi-threaded but that chance isn't high to justify the extra costs for X99 alone. Since you just said 32GB of RAM is sufficient, that rules all three reasons to go with X99.

So be absolutely sure about that RAM requirement. It's a 500 euro difference as you said.

I checked out the Asus z97 A, it's 164.95€. The Asus Z97 Pro Gamer is also the same price (with 11x more reviews in my local shop) would this be an even better mobo?

In theory, it's suppose to be better than the Z97-A. But since the Z97-Pro GAMER hasn't exactly been widely released or purchases here in the U.S, I can't really vouch for its actual quality and reliability. Here in the U.S, the Asus Z97-A has over 360+ reviews on Newegg and Amazon.com combined with an average rating of 4.5 stars.