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Hardware for work and play

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c0d1st

Posts: 3

Joined: Fri Sep 23, 2016 9:44 pm

Post Fri Sep 23, 2016 10:51 pm

Hardware for work and play

Hi all,

Found this place by watching Pinkskull and MiRai.

I'm due for a hardware over hall. I'm first and foremost a productivity nut. I run 3 monitor stands each with dual monitors (2 rows of 3) on a raised platform. I currently have 1 PC powering each row. Below that I have various laptops. To control everything I use Synergy.

What do I use all that crap for? I work in IT as a Data Engineer/Scientist (or PITA depending on who you ask). I do little bits of all kinds of things, though I was formally educated as a Software Engineer.

I currently have x3 U2715H monitors.

I'm thinking about two routes:
    1) get 3 more of U2715H's to replace the odds and ends in my top row.
    2) get one more of U2715H to have my 1st and 3rd stands populated and get x2 U3415W's for my 2nd (center) column.

I'm going to build my system around my monitor setup, so deciding that first is a big deal. The U3415W is a 21:9 @ 1440p curved panel. I'm not sure how well that works for ISBoxer, but I think for productivity it would be nice.

My plan is to start with 4-5 WoW accounts. I want to farm and solo content mostly.

Does anyone know if ISBoxer plays nice with Synergy? I cannot lose that functionality.

My understanding of the GPU / Monitor relationship means I should have one card for each panel I'd like to run. When gaming, my plan is to use the two monitors in my second (middle) stand.

As of right now, I'm leaning towards option two. My only concern is having enough GPU horsepower for both of the big boys.

Thanks! c0d1st
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bob

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League of Extraordinary Multiboxers

Posts: 4587

Joined: Sat Feb 15, 2014 11:14 am

Location: In the dining room, with the lead pipe.

Post Fri Sep 23, 2016 11:37 pm

Re: Hardware for work and play

ISBoxer doesn't care what your monitors are. As long as they are not lying TV's (ones which have a different native resolution to that which is reported by the interface).
Your graphics card might care about the number of pixels you are asking it to drive, although you're not quite talking 5K resolutions per row, so there are a good number of choices, depending on the eye candy you want.

c0d1st wrote:Does anyone know if ISBoxer plays nice with Synergy? I cannot lose that functionality.
It does. Input Director is another choice (I believe it was recently updated to play better on Win10).

c0d1st wrote:My understanding of the GPU / Monitor relationship means I should have one card for each panel I'd like to run. When gaming, my plan is to use the two monitors in my second (middle) stand.
For multiboxing, it is best to not have game windows swapping between monitors powered by different graphics cards, so if you can plug each row into a single graphics card, then that would work better and save your from the performance hits of cross monitor swapping (which I guess should really be phrased cross GPU swapping), although as your plan seems to be to use a single monitor for the games, then it wouldn't matter.

c0d1st wrote:As of right now, I'm leaning towards option two. My only concern is having enough GPU horsepower for both of the big boys.
I run more pixels on a 980TI, and a 7970 before that. You will need a fair bit of grunt for gaming on it though, so you would probably want to be using a high end card, e.g. 970GTX or better.
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c0d1st

Posts: 3

Joined: Fri Sep 23, 2016 9:44 pm

Post Sat Oct 15, 2016 2:27 pm

Re: Hardware for work and play

Hi bob,

Thanks for the reply. Sorry for taking so long to get back to you. Was traveling abroad for work.

Meshuggenah's post and your response got me thinking - I might be better of building two systems either with a single cards or sli/crossfire for video output and split the load across both of them. I'm going to wait and see how Zen shakes out. I sorta want to build one Intel/NVidia system and one AMD system. This will also allow me to run more experiments, offload certain work tasks between the two machines and do some benchmarking. I know at some point my work will have to go to the cloud, but for now, it allows me to get my hands on some nice hardware.

I have a video card related question:

TL;DR:
Using isBoxer with the proper configuration, I would like to have ONE powerful card for video output and the rest for compute. Would a 1070 handle it? (Full pixel row: 8560x1440; Gaming pixels: 3440x1440)

    I know the SlI limit for 10XX series cards is two. I have not read anywhere stating there was a limit for non-sli cards. I do some GPU work and have bumped into a Digits box before. It does not SLI the cards, which allows you to run 4 independent experiments. Some deep learning experiments CAN run on SlI, but success is limited by the breadth and depth of the neural net and how well it's been optimized.

For each machine:

    A hex core over-clocked with an AIO;
    no matter what I do, I'll need gobs of ram - 64gb min;
    I'd like NVME and a secondary ssd of 2+ tb;
    finally, a video card baseline of the GTX 1070 (sli?) range.

Bulk Storage
In 2016, I'm building a NAS for bulk storage (great place to backup my pcs), containers (plex/git/etc), vms (windows versions/linux distros/bsd). I'll also be setting up some cloud backups through this box. I have an old two bay Synology NAS, but have long since outgrown it. It will become my secondary backup of my document repository.

Thanks again, c0d1st
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bob

User avatar

League of Extraordinary Multiboxers

Posts: 4587

Joined: Sat Feb 15, 2014 11:14 am

Location: In the dining room, with the lead pipe.

Post Sat Oct 15, 2016 3:33 pm

Re: Hardware for work and play

c0d1st wrote:Using isBoxer with the proper configuration, I would like to have ONE powerful card for video output and the rest for compute. Would a 1070 handle it? (Full pixel row: 8560x1440; Gaming pixels: 3440x1440)
Probably. I've run just about that on a AMD 7970 3GB with no issues, but it couldn't run top notch eye candy, but was fairly decent.


Only other comment is that AMD cards don't do crossfire in windowed mode, only fullscreen, and as multiboxing (ISBoxer) requires and forces windowed mode, then crossfire is kind of useless in this scenario.
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c0d1st

Posts: 3

Joined: Fri Sep 23, 2016 9:44 pm

Post Sun Nov 06, 2016 10:36 pm

Re: Hardware for work and play

Update:

I have went with option 2:

2) get one more of U2715H to have my 1st and 3rd stands populated and get x2 U3415W's for my 2nd (center) column.

I was able to get a 1080 on loan and do some testing. It will push the U3415W, but not at fully candy. Would x2 1080's do it, or do I need to spring for 1080 Ti's.

Further, based on experience, what are are hardware recommendations regarding my use?

I was using x99 as a template and contemplating either building one massive tower, or splitting the load across two. In both scenarios I would be using x99 as a baseline. I'm just spit-balling here, so I'm more than open to suggestions.

Thanks!

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