Xeon or i7 Fusion Studio

Is there any benefit going with one over the other for 4k workflows in Fusion? This is provided that the RAID and cache drives are fast and 64 gigs of RAM in either. Just wondering if Fusion likes one over the other.

Just bought a E5-1650 v3. Was same price as a 5930K. So there's no reason not to go with the Xeon unless you've got your eyes on the 5960X, which is significantly cheaper than a E5-1680 v3.

But.... you can get 32GB ECC sticks for just $205! So if you wanted to get 256GB in a X99 system, the Xeon is awesome.

Thanks Chad, I'm assuming disk speed would outweigh the benefits of faster clock speeds in an i7, so whichever system has faster disk speed would be the faster machine? I primarily rely on loaders for the majority of my work.

The i7 doesn't have faster clock speeds, though. The E5-1650 and 5930K have the exact same specs. The E5-1680 and 5960X likewise are identical. The Xeon gets you more memory and ECC memory, but it's not any slower.

As for disk speed, that depends. If you load compressed images, the disk speed might not be a bottleneck at all, and there's a floor set by the creation of the image object and the painting of the pixels. Try loading in a highly compressed JPG sequence to see for yourself. But if you don't have enough RAM to cache, you'll be reading those files multiple times, and that involves increased disk and CPU load.

Just bought a E5-1650 v3. Was same price as a 5930K. So there's no reason not to go with the Xeon unless you've got your eyes on the 5960X, which is significantly cheaper than a E5-1680 v3.

But.... you can get 32GB ECC sticks for just $205! So if you wanted to get 256GB in a X99 system, the Xeon is awesome.

which mobo did you end up getting with the E5-1650? I am looking at the Asus X99-Pro when I'm ready to pull the trigger.

I didn't get anything fancy, just an ASRock X99 WS. I like having plenty of x16 slots, but couldn't justify getting another 7 slot one, and the X99 WS has a x4 M.2 slot, so that's what I went with. I have an Asus P9X79-E that has served me well, the ASRock was just a lot cheaper.

I just picked up a Samsung 950 Pro and an Intel 750 (the 2.5" one, it's cheaper that way), and I'm looking forward to seeing how they perform with Fusion and Generation.