Looking for advice on 2 possible setups.

#1

So I have an i7 3770 on my farm and my workstation is an i7 950.
In order to move my workstation into the 3770 I need to make some sacrifices on the RAID 5 controller, the X77 board only has 2x PCIE slots so I cant fit my 9650SE. How much slower is onboard RAID5 and is it worth the CPU bump?
Also my old machine has 30gb 1333 and the 3770/X77 box has 8gb 1600 so there are some RAM distribution issues.

Current setup:

Machine A-
GA-X58A-UD5 with i7 950
30GB Ram 1333
Dual 660 GTX
RAID 5 using a 3ware 9650SE 3x1TB

Machine B-
X77 Extreme 4 with i7 3770
8GB Ram 1600
Old 4xx

Possible setup:
a) and b) options for ram distribution.
X58A does not take DDR3 1600

Machine A-
X77 Extreme 4 with i7 3770
a)24GB 1333 or b)8gb 1600
Dual 660 GTX
Onboard RAID 5 3x1TB

Machine B-
GA-X58A-UD5 with i7 950
a)6GB 1333 or b) 30GB 1333
Old 4xx

#2

Just a couple notes:
Dual 660 is useless, practically nothing out there uses SLI with the sole exception of SOME parts of SOME GPU rendering engines.
DCC apps simply dont.

The 9650SE is a relatively poor controller to begin with.
They offer no Raid6 AFAIK (it’s a general 3ware thing) because they are of a mind that if you can raid 10 you don’t need to raid 6, which is BS as raid 6 has a considerably higher fault tolerance in failure configuration.
Raid 5 is so software dependent, and only boosts read anyway, that a dedicated controller does little for it.

It’s also considered to perform somewhat poorly in anything but raid 0 or 10 configs, and it’s still somewhat CPU bound anyway. A fully CPU bound onboard controller these days does just as well or better with hardly any impact than most low-end hardware ones do, especially in raid 5.
Linux (for dog years) and win 7 and 8, and modern CPUs, have made consumer level raid controllers largely useless.

Rest, things such as ram and so on, depend on your use of the platform so they are hard to comment on.
It’s also not terribly clear (to me) exactly what you’re asking to compare, and in what context (rendering, animating, sculpting, GPU centric stuff? They all have radically different requirements and weak spots).

#3

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