Yo! Welcome @kia! Okay that’s a juicy post. I know a little but not all, so here are some big picture thoughts.
Thought 0.
Damn! You’ve done your homework!
Thought 1.
Damn! That’s a ton of stuff to fit in one case! Are you sure that’s all gonna fit? The 4090 is 3 slots, right? Double check space and slots and all that. The x2 8TB drives? For archiving what? Project files and stuff? I’d rather small NAS then archive on the same box.
Thought 2.
Your friend is right and wrong. Autodesk certifies workstations but that does not mean those are the only ones that work. If you look at the Flame benchmark you’ll see all the sortsa stuff that does run Flame. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean the installs were easy but I’d reckon that the overall amount of Linux black belt people in the world who are willing to troubleshoot all kindsa driver issues and all that are the absolute minority. So you absolutely do NOT need to match the Autodesk specs. Its just what some OEM partner sent to them that guarantees awesome performance but doesn’t mean you need to buy that much (or that little!) performance.
Thought 3.
There are a few 3080 and 3090 owners out there and yes, they outperform the RTX A5000 but maybe not the A6000. There are a few random bugs/issues with some of those cards that I think perhaps @friendlyape or @Sinan could share because I know they are using these configs. Autodesk is pretty adamant that they do not support ‘gamer cards’ and rightfully so. There are other issues and for example HP Z Anywhere, a big part of our business, I think requires Ampere or Quadro cards. BUT the good news with all this cloud computing fun stuff happening is that slowly the supported hardware is increasing and hopefully that means graphics cards as well.
Thought 4. I dunno about Intels anymore. They are soooo expensive and their Threadripper Pro counterparts are crushing them in benchmark performance. Plus cost! Currently the Threadripper Pros are available from Lenovo in the P620 and the new Dell (Dell has entered the chat). I have a bunch of P620s but I’m ‘just a Flame guy’ with the occasional SynthEyes/Blender/PFTrack deal, so local 3d rendering is a secondary concern. But the P620 and Dell are smaller chassis so you won’t be able to cram everything in there.
Thought 5. Having everything in one box for me doesn’t make sense. At least for me. I do dual boot into Windows occasionally but at that scale you may rather use a NAS. I use a couple Synologys cuz if I have to share between partitions you might as well share between computers. I think.
Thought 6.
I love the Highpoints. I’ve got a 4 and 8 banger and they’ve been solid for me. @finnjaeger has had some bad luck but for me and @andymilkis they’ve been great.
Thought 7.
Flame’s framestore does not need or have a special filesystem. I use either mdadm linux with an xfs file system which is a software raid0 or zfs with good results. The Highpoint just presents all the nvme sticks to the OS as available drives so you could theoretically make two separate 4 sticks software raids, one in Linux, one in Windows, and off ya go. The Flame framestore is a managed framestore which will be in a subfolder on your drive and you’ll never need to go into that folder, but you can absolutely use that same disk for whatever else you want. Not sure about the Linux to Windows or vice versa though with data moving back and forth.
Thought 8.
You ready for this box to be $50 a month in electricity and heat up your office by 4-5 degrees Fahrenheit, right?
Thought 9.
If you’re in New Zealand @friendlyape might be selling a box, no idea if its what you want or where you are.
Thought 10.
Wanna build one yourself? I’m thinking about building a Threadripper Pro on top of this. Threadripper Pro Motherboard | ASUS Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WIFI .
And Nuke isn’t a bad word here as long as you publicly admit that its both pricier and inferior to Flame. I kid, I kid. It’s an amazing tool and a lot of us here use it daily.