When knowing too much holds you back

[zeph_ng]

Computer related.
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TLDR Version:
I'm contemplating about building a new system, but am unsure of what to get: i5 or i7, LGA1156 or LGA1366
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Comments

[zeph_ng]

Good points, and sums up pretty much what I have in mind with regard to GPUs and the X58 platform.

OC'ing is pretty much out of the question however, IIRC, some 3D render programs hate that, and if I recall right, especially 3DS Max, where in instances, it will inform you that your CPU is being OCed and refuse to work (this was what I was told, I'm uncertain of the credibility).

The advent of GPGPUs is exciting, but consumer level graphic cards (this, I'm assuming that the Geforce line and Radeon line of cards are the ones being used here) in general aren't programmed to have the accuracy of the Quadro or the FireGL line of cards, hence in my decision in going with a single card solution. While consumer cards are hyped on speed, they lack the floating point accuracy that the workstation cards have.

IIRC:
The i7 965 has a FP of ~70 GFLOPs @ double-precision
The GTX 295 has can do about 74 GFLOPs @ double-precision
The HD 4870x2 has a whopping 200+ GLOPs double-precision computation capacity

Honestly though, I'd be surprised if CUDA and Stream were programmed to the point of the level of accuracy that 3D Modellers/Animators would need, since that would jeopardize the existing Quadro/Tesla/FireGL family of cards.

That said, I'm also uncertain of the benefits of having a Quadro in SLI or FireGL in Crossfire mode.

For now, the worstation cards predominantly increase productivity in the real-time interaction with the program's interface, but Mental Ray rendering and Software rendering are still being programmed to be utilized under CPU computation.

That said however, the x58 platform is tempting in the sense that once the OpenCL platform matures more, the extra bandwidth of the extra PCI-X16 slots will actually be utilized for more computing power. Just hoping that Maya 2011 or 2012 would harness the power of CUDA/Stream, which may sway my decision to actually purchase a consumer level card, as they're more cost friendly compared to the workstation cards.