Slade workstation vs regular PCs

Your build is quite strong and will do everything you ask of it quite well. Fits your budget, and checks all the boxes with what you'll need for best performance at that number.

I would trust that DS has a vast experience with the Slade as a very workable chassis. It's been around here for a very long time. Having said that, I am not entirely comfortable with any case that has sound dampening. The adage among users has been here for over a decade: trap sound, trap some heat. I can't assure whether it's true or just a suspicion. If you wish, DS will build your parts into any case you want.

Your parts are very well chosen. The only thing is you will have to get with DS about building into one of the more common gaming cases, as the Configurator is not set up to offer enterprise GPUs as you prefer in the "gaming" cases. The Velox is reputed to offer the best airflow in the midtowers, but the Lumos is very close behind. With the window on the right, the Velox has it's motherboard mounted upside down. The Lumos is a bit of a show piece, with glass all around. The Lynx is the budget pick with RGB fans standard. I don't know a thing about the Antec. When it comes down to it, the chassis is just a box to hold your system, and good airflow is just... better.

Hope it helps.

AFIK, the workstation GPU is far more suited to editing and rendering because they are specifically designed to perform those tasks error free and efficiently. The gaming GPUs have an entirely different focus on speed above all else. If errors or artifacts creep in, they are gone in an instant as the game moves on to the next frame.

I have to believe the better result is going to be with the proper tool. You can game on the Quadro, but photo-realistic rendering isn't what the RTXs are made for.

As usual, @Cretae has covered things quite well.

Even so, I'll toss out a few details.

Originally posted by matt2929 Is there anything special about the Slade compared to any of the PCs?

Its focus is on reducing system noise.

I did see a review on YouTube a short while back -- can't find it now -- in which the user claimed the sound dampening features compromised the airflow capability somewhat. Obviously, take it as a grain of sand.

Originally posted by matt2929 Now, that brings me to my second question, is that Quadro RTX 4000 going to be better for video editing/rendering than something like the GeForce RTX 3070 or GeForce RTX 3060. Those were the 3 GPUs I had thought about when configuring the Slade. It seems that everyone reviews the GPUs with gaming in mind, and not so much anything else.

I've done significant research recently on professional vs. consumer Nvidia GPUs as I've been looking to invest in a 3D scene rendering rig.

The GeForce line indeed emphasizes speed above all else. Although, much of that speed difference (at least regarding the recent series) is due to the AIB GeForce models offering substantial overclocking.

The benefits of the Quadro RTX, RTX A-series (A6000, A5000, A4000, etc), and other "professional" graphics cards:

• more VRAM for higher resolution assets/resources (though slightly slower memory) than equivalent GeForce card
• utilizes ECC memory chips to improve output quality
• lower power consumption than equivalent GeForce card
• consistent performance
• cooling system optimized for multi-GPU configurations
• NVLink available on more models

Premiere Pro 15 PugetBench scores - AMD Ryzen 5950X systems

Adobe Premiere Pro workstation class GPU comparison - PugetBench

TLDR: When using Nvidia's "Studio" driver and automatic overclocking/boost features, GeForce cards will provide a better overall value

The following explains things more in-depth, very well point by point

Pro vs. Consumer GPUs – What’s the difference & Why so expensive?

Originally posted by Cretae The most important points seem to be stability/error frequency, and price. Did I get that right?

For the most part, reliability/stability and extra VRAM.

My issue (at this point) is the pro cards are also being affected by high demands. That is, they have an extra premium (to put it nicely) -- not nearly as much gouging as the consumer cards though -- as well as similar shortages.

For example, one electronics reseller is currently offering the RTX A6000 for $5,500 (original MSRP of $4,650) with a shipping estimate of two to four weeks.

Are the pro cards still worth considering? Indeed, but a similarly ugly situation as the consumer models.

Originally posted by Cretae Looking at matt2929's build with a 3080 instead of a Quadro 4000 is $259 more. The 3070 is $160 less, it says. Something to consider.

Generally, these are the card associations:

RTX A4000 ~ RTX 3070
RTX A5000 ~ RTX 3080
RTX A6000 ~ RTX 3090

The "A" is for Ampere.

Due to the lack of or much lower boost/overclock and slightly slower RAM, the pro cards are about 5 to 20% slower.

The Quadro RTX 4000, 5000, 6000, and 8000 are of the Turing architecture. In OctaneBench, the A6000 is ~40% higher than the 6000. With gaming-type/focused benchmarks, the difference is ~20%.

Basically, you sacrifice speed and money for extra stability, reliability, and consistency.

Edited by MrCheetah - 21 May 2021 at 12:13pm

Fundamentally, they are designed for different tasks. Gaming, for example, does not require the CPU to do a lot of intense number-crunching "on the fly", so it requires less cores/threads for it's job. It's mostly just feeding pre-programmed info to the GPU for display. the GPU does most of the intense computing.

A workstation CPU, on the other hand is using special software to perform (often) highly intense higher level mathematics in real time all the time. The software is not pre-programmed to merely provide information in a linear sequence like a game. It enables complex number manipulation to produce new and unique paths/answers. These are tasks that perform better the more processing can be made available in the form of more/faster cores/threads, and even multiple processors.

I think we established above that the difference in gaming vs workstation graphics processing is in stability and error avoidance. A minute error in delivering a game scene may go unnoticed. An error in a CAD design spoils the work.