[Adam Persson]

Hello everyone,

I am a naval architecture student planning to build a workstation for light CFD and CAD work. I will be running rather small VOF cases, 500k-5000k cells, often with coupled motion (i.e. free sinkage and trim) to solve steady resistance problems for yachts.

I will also run a lot of CAD for hull and general yacht modeling, mainly using Rhino. Now, as a student, I am of course on a tight budget, so looking for maximum performance/price ratio. I really like the smaller form factor of mATX, and this is the configuration I have come up with, which I think delivers excellent performance for the price:

Low-cost mATX workstation for CFD/CAD:

Motherboard: ASUS B85M-G mAtx, B85 chipset, 32GB RAM max
CPU: Intel Core i7-4770 4-core, 3.4 GHz
CPU-cooler: Cooler Master Hyper TX3 Evo (limited by case size!)
RAM: Crucial BallistiX Sport 1600Mhz, 2x8GB, CL9
GPU: PNY Quadro K600, 1GB GDDR3
SSD: Crucial M500, 240GB, R500MB/s W250MB/s
HDD: WD Desktop Blue 1TB, 7200RPM
PSU: Corsair CX500M, 500W, 80 Plus Bronze, Modular
CASE: Fractal Design Core 1000, mATX, USB3.0 (+1 additional 92 mm fan)

Total cost: 990€ (Euro) or 1374$ (USD)

Do you think it sounds like a reasonable build?
What do you think about choice of MoBo/chipset - and do you have experience with ASUS MoBo:s?
Anything that you would alter, or that I have forgot to take into account?
As I said, I am after reliability and maximum performance/cost ratio!

Best regards,
Adam Persson, Sweden

[nj_boats]

Motherboard: ASUS P6T DELUXE
CPU: xeon L5639 6-core, 3.85 GHz (max 4.1GHz)
RAM:Kingston DDR3-1600 4096MB PC3-12800 HyperX Black,
2x8GB, CL9
GPU: Asus GTX480, 1.5GB GDDR5, Memory Interface
384-bit.
SSD: Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB
HDD: 1TB,
PSU: 650W,
CPU/GPU-cooler: water

24/7 works in the flow of 4 months.
cost~1375.00USD (~200.00USD - water cooler CPU/GPU)

http://forum.katera.ru/index.php?/to...3#entry1564758