Intel Optane

[Chalenge]

I'm planning on building a new system to work with the Optane drives, Titan XPs, and so on. Has anyone done any testing with Optane yet?

[Gman]

Negative, but I'll be watching to see your results. I do have 2 Titan XPs, if you can find them, you'll like them, especially considering the 1080ti and it are close enough in price due to the market.  Are you watching Samsung's Z SSD stuff, they claim to be able to compete with Optane with it shortly too.  In my best system I'm using M.2 960 Pros, the rest 950s still from last year.  Use them for boot/primary drives, and then a bunch of Samsung Evos in 1tb and 500gb sizes.  I still have a couple larger WD Black 4 gig spinners too in most boxes. 

[Pudgie]

I'm planning on building a new system to work with the Optane drives, Titan XPs, and so on. Has anyone done any testing with Optane yet?

Not yet. Was waiting on the 480Gb 2.5" to come out before I picked up 1.

 

[Chalenge]

What got my interest was the 8,750TBW that Intel claims for the Optane SSD 900P. That should outlive me. The X299 offers PCIe 3.0 across 3 x16 channels, so no limits on devices that I plan to use. So, I already have Titan Vs, but I cannot bring myself to use them to play games, thus the XPs. The whole reason I am even considering an update is working with the higher resolution textures with Maya, Mudbox, Motionbuilder, Photoshop, Audition, FMOD, and a browser for listening to podcasts or streaming videos while I work brings about lag pretty bad. I plan on using Optane with a WD Gold 12TB HDD, but I have no idea if that is a good matchup, or not. The reason I mentioned the apps is because I know I will need a huge amount of memory (Photoshop alone has been breaking the 32GB limit), and I am looking for a MB that will support at least 128GB of memory (preferably 256GB but that is rare indeed).

I may have to approach Puget about this one, but I do love building them myself.

[Chalenge]

Negative, but I'll be watching to see your results. I do have 2 Titan XPs, if you can find them, you'll like them, especially considering the 1080ti and it are close enough in price due to the market.  Are you watching Samsung's Z SSD stuff, they claim to be able to compete with Optane with it shortly too.  In my best system I'm using M.2 960 Pros, the rest 950s still from last year.  Use them for boot/primary drives, and then a bunch of Samsung Evos in 1tb and 500gb sizes.  I still have a couple larger WD Black 4 gig spinners too in most boxes.

I just read about them. I have not been keeping up lately.

[Gman]

The longevity claims of Optane is what I'm most interested in too.

Have you tried out the Titan V/Volta with any games just for interests sake?  I came very close to buying one, but decided with Volta gamer/retail cards likely coming out in a few months to hold off. 

[Chalenge]

Yeah, the only real difference is the stability of the cards, as the drivers are rock solid. The drivers are not optimized for games, but the frame rate difference is pretty small. I don't remember exactly what the difference was. Rendering on-the-fly while modeling was laggy with XP and the V fixed that. I'm looking forward to trying it with Blender and their new rendering method due out later this year. V also allows textures to look much better, and rendering is much more accurate. That's important.

[Skuzzy]

To get passed 128GB of memory, it seems you will need to step up to a server grade motherboard supporting dual Xeon CPU's.

Might take a look at Supermicro.  They have motherboards supporting up to 2TB of DDR4 system RAM.

[Chalenge]

Thanks Skuzzy. ASUS makes a dual CPU board (2011-3) that supports up to 1TB of memory. After talking with a few tech heads in Atlanta and Auburn it looks like Optane is not quite what I am looking for. The ASUS WS MB should give me stability and offer enough drive controllers to keep me happy for a while.