iMaxx wrote:The workstations are not designed with gaming in mind, however, they will knock them out of the ballpark if configured properly.
I've been using the Z4xx series at home for gaming and everything else I've needed with little complaints.
I think the desiding factor is 'what are you going to be using this for most?'
You can buy these units without graphics cards as you won't be wanting a Quadro card for gaming and coding tasks won't care. However, depending on the design programs, the Quadro card may be what you want. (Quadro cards can be put into "game developer mode" which allows them to funciton as GForce cards... but Quadro's cost a lot more.)
That being said, GForce cards cannot be SLi'd in Workstations.
Have you looked into the Omen X if gaming is more your focus?
Its an interesting point you made that GForce cards will not run in SLI in the Z workstations. I was not aware of this, but some very quick research seems to validate this - even though with a 40 lane Xeon E5 processor there are more than enough PCIe lanes to run full speed SLI it seems that the technology was not licenced from Nvidia and GTX SLI will simply not work. As you mentioned Quadro SLI will work fine.
As for the GTX SLI, I do not really think it is such a big loss. Games are rarely optimised for SLI and the result is a lot of microstutter etc. One is much better of with a single more powerful graphics card, especially since with e.g. the Z420 with the 600W PSU two more powerful graphics cards would probably be close or exceed the power limit of the PSU. Granted, there are the adapters allowing the use of a more powerful generic PSU but it all seems like an unnecessary complication.
As for gaming my present Z420 config is:
- E5-1650 v1 (hoping to upgrade to a v2 1650 or 1660 when prices drop)
- 64GB RAM
- GTX 1070
- AOC 144hz G-sync 1080p monitor
- Samsung 950 Pro NVMe 256GB boot drive + WD Blue 1TB HDD
- Asus Xonar DG soundcard (incoming)
I can safely say that the above config easily outperforms a Z170 Core i7- 6700k build running at stock which I was previously using with the same SSD and GPU. WIth the i7 6700k on CPU intensive games I found that the frame rates were at times higher than with the E5-1650 however they were subject to much larger variations - sometimes they would dip a lot lower than I would have liked. WIth the E5-1650 they are generally a lot more stable. Plus, more and more games are now making use of more than 4 cores. The i7 6700k and i7 7700k with the hyperthreading and much higher clock speeds go some way to compensate this, but you can't really go wrong with 6 real cores, especially since from what I see even with all cores utilised, my E5-1650 seems to be running more or less at a constant 3.5Ghz which even by todays standards is still more than enough for the vast majority of games.