Which upgrade path to take?

[[XC] Oj101]

Hey guys, just a quick question, I'm looking at replacing my PC for Photoshop, Lightroom, 3ds Max, Premier and After Effects. Which would be the better route? Dual 8 core Xeon with a GTX 780 Ti (which I already have), single 8 core Xeon plus midrange Quadro, or faster (clockspeed) single 6 core plus high end Quadro? Google sucks for this.

 

[Vario]

What Xeon model do you have? Whats current system?

 

[[XC] Oj101]

Here we go:

2x Xeon E5645 at 3.6 GHz
EVGA Classified SR-2
64 GB DDR3-1600
GeForce GTX 780 Ti
Intel 530 Series 240 GB SSD
Intel 320 Series 120 GB SSD (scratch drive)
8 TB spread across a few mechanical drives
Corsair Obsidian 800D
Be Quiet Dark Power Pro 10 1200w

I can go up to the X series Xeons with a bit more cache, but it's going to cost me close to $1500 for that little bit of cache and a slightly higher clock speed. I'm more keen to swap to LGA2011. I'm quite excited by the rumours of the 18 core unlocked Xeons, but should I rather look at an 18 core, 2.3 GHz processor or something with half or even just a third of the core count at 4.5 GHz or more?

 

[Bucho]

I think you have to find out what brings the most performance for your applications. I cannot really imagine that you are CPU bottlenecked since you already have two pretty fast six core CPUs, and the Gulftown cores are not bad at all.

If your applications do scale very good with more threads two eight cores or a 15 or even 18 core CPU would be great, yes. But I doubt that the programs you mentioned benefit of more than your 12 cores / 24 threads.
If your programs only use some cores/threads but benefit of higher frequencies you may want a i7-5960X or i7-5930K that should come later that year and overclock it. You could already go with a Ivy-E 10 or 12 core Xeon but I don't know about overclocking these. So maybe a i7-4930K would do fine.
If your programs can make good use of a Quadro or Fire GPU then you may just go with that, although these are quite expensive but have optimized drivers. Or maybe a Titan or Titan Black if double precision counts.

Sorry I can't help more.
Is there some way you can find out what is limiting? Maybe with monitoring tools that show the usage of the GPU and it's memory, and the CPU cores. You could also try to disable you second Xeon to see if it makes a difference (in threads).

Maybe some other people here have some experience with your programs and GPU acceleration and CPU benefits.