Estimated performance with Dual Xeon E5 Workstation with GTX 1080ti

[traderjay 6]

Hi all - I've been an eternal Arma fan and basically grew up with this franchise from the Operation Flashpoint days. I am currently in the process of building a workstation for video editing, financial computation and scientific simulation and to play Arma 3 :) I know high clock speed, IPC, RAM and and storage speed is king for this game but I hope the new workstation with the following spec can at least provide a decent experience:

 

CPU - Dual XEON E5 2696 V3 (22 core) (4 core turbo 3.3Ghz, 7 core turbo 3 Ghz)

RAM - DDR4 ECC PC 2666 Mhz (crucial 8 x 8 Gb)

Storage:

Application/Games 2x HGST 800GB SAS SSD in RAID 0

OS Windows 10 Pro - Samsung SSD 850 Pro 512 GB

GPU - Nvidia GTX 1080 ti

 

I am currently using a i7-3970x with the GTX 970 and I am hoping this new system will offer a decent performance boost.

[Ry4nD 84]

I am curious why you would go with dual Xenon E5? Are you hard set on that instruction set? Why not Threadripper?, your single core CPU clock will be low, along with slower memory, man the price on that chip is insane 

[FallujahMedic -FM- 866]

Single core performance is King in Arma. Here is a good reference: https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks  You will see that your CPU performs significantly worse than my almost 5 year old i5 3570K. While it may make an amazing workstation, it won't be so great for Arma. In fact, there are quite a few i3's in the list that are far superior to your dual Xeons. 

[Grumpy Old Man 3540]

In terms of arma it's cpu speed > RAM speed then probably SSD and the rest.

Get a watercooled 7700k and oc it to 5ghz and the fastest RAM your money can buy.

 

Cheers

[Guest]

On 10/09/2017 at 10:41 AM, Grumpy Old Man said:

(...) and the fastest RAM your money can buy.

 

Grumpy,

 

Ram speed is also important for dedicated servers?

I can overclock a i7 4790K to 5Ghz with an excelent water cooler?

[traderjay 6]

Thanks all for the replies! For my non-gaming task, I need as many physical cores as possible hence the decision to go with the dual Xeon configuration. For those of you who are not familiar with the XEONS, although the core clock speed is slower than the desktop counterparts, it has different turbo speeds depending on the core load. For example my CPU have a seven core load turbo speed of 3 Ghz. I hope this, along withe DDR4 PC 2666 will give me a decent performance in Arma 3. 

 

I've also read that the GTX 970 is more than adequate for this game and will hold off the purchase of the 1080 ti. Once my system is ready, I'll report back with benchmarks :)

[traderjay 6]

I finally got the system up and running with the final specs below. Pleasantly surprised that I am able to maintain FPS above 50 in most MP situations with everything maxed out (View distance 4000 m). Since the 64 bit update, I am seeing improved core utilization and my XEON single core turbo really helps with the performance. The Samsung NVME SSD also aids tremendously with the load times and textures. 

 

CPU - Dual Xeon E5 2696V4
RAM - 64 GB Crucial DDR4 PC-2666 (8x8GB)
Storage: 2X800GB HGST SAS SSD RAID 0 for application/scratch disk
OS - Samsung 1TB 960 Pro NVME
GPU - ASUS Strix GTX 1080 ti
Case - Lian-Li PC-V2120x
Motherboard - z10pe-d16 ws
PSU - Seasonic Titanium 1000W