Hopefully people don't discount the cost of actually using this PC. The increased horsepower over a more energy-efficient model comes at a price. If you were to build this computer with 2 Xeon E5-2670's and two GTX 980 ti's, the at-load power consumption of this thing could exceed 900 watts per hour. Assuming you used the computer 8 hours a day for intensive tasks, or you just left it on all the time and didn't use it at load quite as often, the computer would likely be consuming $28-$33 dollars a month in electricity (I'm using an average cost of $.13 per kwh), or about $360 dollars per year. If you put together the same components on a newer board and with a more efficient processor, the computer would use anywhere from 220 to 290 fewer watts per hour. This doesn't sound like a huge difference, but it would be about $9 per month cheaper to run. That's over a hundred dollar difference per year. In a typical use-case, I'll guess that a person might keep this setup for about 3 years before upgrading/swapping any components. That's $300 more dollars in operating costs compared to a more efficient model over the typical-use lifespan of the computer. Just something to keep in mind. By the way, I ran my numbers using the calculator at
http://outervision.com/power-supply-calculator.
There is no way you are going to exceed 900 watts even with a pair of 980 Ti’s. As shown in the article they are actually quite efficient in terms of power usage using less than 50% more power than a single 5960X. Under maximum load the system can’t use more than 120 watts more than a single 5960X assuming they have the same GPU setup which obviously they would in an apple to apples comparison.
Even if you take your figures which are massively inflated, you say this system will cost you $300 more after 3 years of operation. I have no idea what this is compared to? Some other 16-core rig?
Let’s compare it to the 5960X because we have those figures and it is the most powerful consumer grade desktop processor you can buy. The entire dual Xeon build can easily be done for $1000, the 5960X build would cost over $2000. So you would have to run them for 10 years before the faster Xeons ended up costing the same amount.
We can also see looking at the power consumption figures that a single E5-2670 consumes less power than the 5960X and FX-8350. What’s more is it has twice the cores of the Core i7-6700K yet it consumes just 40% more power, not twice as much as you might expect (this is obviously due to the lower clock speeds).
Finally, I should point out that at idle the dual Xeons consumed the same amount of power as a regular desktop system using a Core i5 processor for example. At a cost of $.13 per kwh the Xeon system can’t cost over $15 more than the 5960X per month and that is assuming it sees 100% load across all 32-threads 24/7. If you are buying it for a rendering box it obviously won’t be doing that and the time you save will be incredibly valuable.
As of this moment, a pair of E5-2670 can be purchased from Amazon for $134.
While i7-5960X is frequently available for $900 in some shops. Some with delivery included, some without:
http://www.microcenter.com/product/437205/Core_i7-5960X_30_GHz_LGA_2011-V3_Boxed_Processor
In Fact, Amazon was selling it for $900 just yesterday, and that stock is already gone, prices are up again.
This means i7-5960X is selling really well. And E5-2670 isn't selling at all
You will get much better pricing on the E5-2670 from eBay.
How would it handle stuff like ZBrush and Maya?
Anything that can fully utilize the huge amount of threads this configuration offers will be incredibly fast.