Build For Rendering

U_Fig

Ok so i fixed a computer for a fella the other day and got talking to him..he's an architect and he's in the market for a new PC for rendering usually using Revit and was saying he was gonna buy..I told him to look into building so he asked me to spec one for him to see, so i want to get your opinions on it..

1. What is your budget? Basically Unlimited, being paid out of company so VAT will be claimed back and goes as a business expense..he's willing to part with up to 5000 as it's the main part of his business but he will go over if needed

2. What will be the main purpose of the computer? 3D rendering using REVIT architectural and other CAD software, image and video design using Adobe master suit. website desgn and may be used as an internal storage server.

3. Do you need a copy of Windows? No

4. Can you use any parts from an old computer? all needs to be new

5. Do you need a monitor? No

5a. If yes, what size do you need. [n/a]

5b. If no, what resolution is your current monitor and do you plan to upgrade in the near future? 1920x1080... will upgrade to higher resolution as soon as feasible maybe multi monitor

6. Do you need any of these peripherals? No

7. Are you willing to try overclocking? Yes but not to the extent of lowering the life of the system

8. How can you pay? Bank Transfer ideally

9. When are you purchasing? Within the next few Weeks

10. If you need help building it, where are you based? Dublin

Basically this needs to be top of the top...the current PC he's using cost nearly €4300 bout 5 year ago and it's getting a bit slow now..

Couple of things... he needs at least 6TB of storage min after and SSD to boot and at least 32GB ram

Skylinehead

Item|Price
Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition Retail (ohne Kühler), LGA2011|€891.89
ASUS RAMPAGE IV EXTREME, Sockel 2011, enhanced ATX, DDR3|€365.15
Corsair Hydro Series H100 (Sockel 775/1156/1366/AM2/AM2+/AM3/FM1)|€92.98
EVGA GeForce GTX 690 Signature, 4096MB DDR5, PCI-Express|€1075.12
Corsair Professional Series Gold AX1200, 1200 Watt|€234.73
Corsair Obsidian Serie 800D, ATX, ohne Netzteil|€238.67
LG BH10LS38 Blu-Ray Brenner Retail|€73.38
32GB-Kit G.Skill RipJawsZC3-17066U CL11-11-11-30 (DDR3-2133)|€286.61
2 x Hitachi Deskstar 7K4000 4TB SATA 6GB's|€576.58
Samsung SSD 830 512GB SATA II Paper Box|€544.94
Shipping|€18.99
Total|€4399.04

No idea what I'm doing, but it's pretty overkill :pac:

Eboggles

Item|Price
Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition Retail (ohne Kühler), LGA2011|€891.89
MSI X79A-GD45 (8D), Intel X79, LGA2011, ATX, DDR3|€188.62
2 x HIS HD 7970 IceQ X² Turbo GDDR5 3072MB DVI/HDMI/2xMiniDP|€881.44
32GB-Kit G.Skill RipJawsZ C3-12800U CL9-9-9-24 (DDR3-1600)|€187.27
Noctua NH-D14 SE2011, Sockel LGA 2011|€69.99
2 x WD AV-GP 3TB, 64MB Cache, SATA II (WD30EURS)|€317.20
Samsung SSD 830 256GB SATA II Paper Box|€207.89
XFX PRO850W Core Edition Full Wired Power Supply|€95.78
LiteOn iHAS124-19 schwarz SATA|€18.57
LG BH10LS38 Blu-ray bulk|€70.65
Corsair Obsidian Serie 800D, ATX, ohne Netzteil|€238.67
Shipping|€18.99
Total|€3186.96

Pretty nice build . Might make sense to wait for 7990, and then CF them? I'd say it's still in budget .

smileyj1987

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FS-093-OP&groupid=43&catid=2238&subcat=

Maybe something like this would be a good option you can also add in a second 7970 but to me an ati fire gl or nvidia quadro might make more sense .

Eboggles

smileyj1987 wrote: »

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FS-093-OP&groupid=43&catid=2238&subcat=

Maybe something like this would be a good option you can also add in a second 7970 but to me an ati fire gl or nvidia quadro might make more sense .

Pretty expensive for what you're getting if you ask me. Around the same price if not more than my build which was much, much stronger.

smileyj1987

Eboggles wrote: »

Pretty expensive for what you're getting if you ask me. Around the same price if not more than my build which was much, much stronger.

I only really gave that option because to me if i was parting with 5000 i would want to abit of safety . Thats why I would rather pay to have it made because it will come with a proper warranty and you could also get it on finanace too if you didn't have the full whack of money to buy it out right .

Cuddlesworth

Eboggles wrote: »

Pretty expensive for what you're getting if you ask me. Around the same price if not more than my build which was much, much stronger.

For a real CAD machine, its pretty much as many fast cores as possible, as much ram as possible(32 is fair) and Quadro or Firepro cards(they have specific drivers that are much more efficient with CAD in comparison to the equivalent gaming card).

So for the budget dual Xeon procs, workstation/server boards and chips, workstation gfx cards and huge amounts of ram. I don't think that stuff is easy to pick up in a usual commercial sense.

Scan 3XS CAD systems are a good example of where the machines should end up.

I'd kill for this, if I had the cash.

http://3xs.scan.co.uk/ShowSystem.asp?SystemID=1423

U_Fig

Cheers Lads I passed on the information on. i think that the lack some of the parts being easily accessible commercially might be an issue for me so I think that the company are going to contact their tech support company (that lately I've been undercutting and robbing business from so i'll prob bow out at this stage) and see if they can get parts easier through the business.

Will be going for dual Xeon and Nvidia Quadro...and then 32-64 GB ram...

uberpixie

U_Fig wrote: »

Cheers Lads I passed on the information on. i think that the lack some of the parts being easily accessible commercially might be an issue for me so I think that the company are going to contact their tech support company (that lately I've been undercutting and robbing business from so i'll prob bow out at this stage) and see if they can get parts easier through the business.

Will be going for dual Xeon and Nvidia Quadro...and then 32-64 GB ram...

Scan have xeon 8 core chips, xeon dual socket motherboards and quadro cards in stock if ya look.......

I would pop up a spec with a cost and see if you can steal a little business.... :-)

U_Fig

uberpixie wrote: »

Scan have xeon 8 core chips, xeon dual socket motherboards and quadro cards in stock if ya look.......

I would pop up a spec with a cost and see if you can steal a little business.... :-)

Thanks I'll have a look and see what I can spec.

U_Fig

Lads i was talking to a mate of mine about this project and he is an architectural student looking to build a rendering machine... exactly the same`use as above but dramatically less budget of only €1000 what would you recommend in this instance.. would you still go Xeon and Quadro or go for a more comercial CPU and GPU

smileyj1987

I would say go for an Ivy bridge cpu overclock it and then get an ati fire pro or an nvidia quadro .
If you could get this for 850 to 900 it could be worth your while buying this for your mate : http://www.adverts.ie/servers/hp-proliant-ml150-g6-2-x-x5570-16gb-ram-300gb-hdd/1767201
You could add in a gpu for 100 and it might be up to the job you need it to do but it is an older core2quad machine .

Cuddlesworth

U_Fig wrote: »

Lads i was talking to a mate of mine about this project and he is an architectural student looking to build a rendering machine... exactly the same`use as above but dramatically less budget of only €1000 what would you recommend in this instance.. would you still go Xeon and Quadro or go for a more comercial CPU and GPU

For that budget I'd push more towards similar gaming systems in this forum.

Yakuza42

Im a third year architecture student and I just finished building mine the other day. I build a small form factor Lian Li PC Q08 with a 3770k, 8GB Ram and a Quadro 600. I researched for months and I havent tried rendering yet but this thing is a monster for what I need anyway. Build came in at 1200.:)

Yakuza42

U_Fig wrote: »

Lads i was talking to a mate of mine about this project and he is an architectural student looking to build a rendering machine... exactly the same`use as above but dramatically less budget of only €1000 what would you recommend in this instance.. would you still go Xeon and Quadro or go for a more comercial CPU and GPU

Sorry I forgot to quote you on this, see my above post. If you are trying to keep it under 1000 bean I wouldnt go from 3770k to 3570k as the Hyperthreading is useful, and the extra cache is good too. I would just get an SSD for the time being and when he has more money he can put in a HDD. Also sticking with stock fans for the moment should be fine. My keyboard and mouse was included in the 1200 aswell so taking all that into consideration he could get it all for around a grand. PM me if you want any more info or anything.

U_Fig

Yakuza42 wrote: »

Sorry I forgot to quote you on this, see my above post. If you are trying to keep it under 1000 bean I wouldnt go from 3770k to 3570k as the Hyperthreading is useful, and the extra cache is good too. I would just get an SSD for the time being and when he has more money he can put in a HDD. Also sticking with stock fans for the moment should be fine. My keyboard and mouse was included in the 1200 aswell so taking all that into consideration he could get it all for around a grand. PM me if you want any more info or anything.

thanks ya he already has a build with a quad core AMD phenom and 8GB ram with what i think is a 5000 series HD Radeon GPU that's a good few years old...and wants something faster for the rendering process.. so some parts may be recycled from that.. let me know how it does for rendering.... i assume that after the CPU GPU the rest wouldn't need anything special.

toastedpickles

Lads half of them specs are for gaming pc's :pac: and is he has an amd processor? Surprised the thing hasn't caught fire, tell him to get a xeon processor and there's no need to get a really expensive graphics card, it doesn't really matter about graphics in rendering

Cuddlesworth

toastedpickles wrote: »

Lads half of them specs are for gaming pc's :pac: and is he has an amd processor? Surprised the thing hasn't caught fire, tell him to get a xeon processor and there's no need to get a really expensive graphics card, it doesn't really matter about graphics in rendering

Having dealt with proper 3d CAD users in the past, the hardware equivalent Firepro and Quadro cards have a noticeable improvement in terms of speed and quality. Its all in the drivers, nothing to do with the hardware itself.

If you are a low or medium CAD user you probably won't notice the difference.

A lot of professional hardware reviewers would agree with me.

U_Fig

toastedpickles wrote: »

Lads half of them specs are for gaming pc's :pac: and is he has an amd processor? Surprised the thing hasn't caught fire, tell him to get a xeon processor and there's no need to get a really expensive graphics card, it doesn't really matter about graphics in rendering

at the time of build it as a gaming machine but it works ok for the render but a bit slow..now after getting qualified and having projects he needs to get work done faster...the case, ram, HDD and PSU will do will do fine for the new build with upgrades to these maybe at a later stage allowing more cash to be put into the CPU and GPU..

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Having dealt with proper 3d CAD users in the past, the hardware equivalent Firepro and Quadro cards have a noticeable improvement in terms of speed and quality. Its all in the drivers, nothing to do with the hardware itself.

If you are a low or medium CAD user you probably won't notice the difference.

A lot of professional hardware reviewers would agree with me.

i'm getting mixed reactions about the level of importance of the GPU in Rendering..some say a good Quadro will help others say get a low end and beef up the CPU more..

Sarz91

If he's using 3D programs for his work and creating 3D models in model space then a Quadro or Firepro is recommended by most software developers, ie: ptc. CPU's are important but recommended speeds (again I'm only going on what is recommended by the developers behind the software) are somewhere (generally) between 2.4 GHz and 2.8 GHz. Again, though, this would all come down to what GPU is recommended and certified by the software developers and what CPU speeds they recommend you run their program on.

Sarz91

Double post I know but after looking into it get him to use this site : http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/syscert?siteID=123112&id=18844534&results=1&stype=graphic&suite_group=121&release=2013&edition=2&os=8192&manuf=2&opt=1

I am unsure of what package he actually uses. I know it's Revit but apart from that I can't tell.

joconnell

Okay here's a few clarifications:

If you're looking for a machine for pure rendering and nothing else, as in the drawing of final pictures and not viewport drawing then the best way to go is CPU and ram. There are some gpu based renderers such as Vray RT that run on the graphics card but they're generally used as a way to tweak lighting and material setups interactively to get a look, then you use the cpu based renderer for final output. Graphics cards would need a lot more memory than current specs to render a lot of the scenes people make these days.

So as a simple rule for final output GPU makes NO difference to your render speed.

On the Quadro / FireGL thing it very much depends on your application. The main benefit of these cards is the quality of the viewport it gives you - there's less flaws / drawing errors than you'd get with a gaming card so if you're doing product designs or medical stuff you'll spend less time thinking is something a flaw in your model or just a redraw error. The cards themselves aren't that much faster than the Geforce cards though, especially when you take into account the cost difference. You'll also find that some applications take less advantage of the supposed speed of the cards. For example I bought a FireGL 1 back around 2000 for use with 3dsmax, and I found it inflexible for view playback, admittedly gaming too, and ended up replacing the 1000 euro card with a geforce GTS 2 instead.

So the best thing to do is check benchmarks / feedback from users of the application you're going to be using to see what the real benefits of the card is, rather than going on to the software makers recommended page - a lot of it is nonsense.

So the main thing is the machine going to be used for actual day to day work or just sit in the background and render? If only rendering then ditch the graphics card, on board will be fine. Get a nice 3930k machine with tonnes of ram. If it's a workstation then check with other users to see can you benchmark in program FPS to see if your program gets the benefit of a quadro over a geforce. If not then go for a high spec cpu, lots of ram and a decent geforce. You could probably make a small second machine for rendering with the left over cash from the geforce.

U_Fig

joconnell wrote: »

Okay here's a few clarifications:

If you're looking for a machine for pure rendering and nothing else, as in the drawing of final pictures and not viewport drawing then the best way to go is CPU and ram. There are some gpu based renderers such as Vray RT that run on the graphics card but they're generally used as a way to tweak lighting and material setups interactively to get a look, then you use the cpu based renderer for final output. Graphics cards would need a lot more memory than current specs to render a lot of the scenes people make these days.

So as a simple rule for final output GPU makes NO difference to your render speed.

On the Quadro / FireGL thing it very much depends on your application. The main benefit of these cards is the quality of the viewport it gives you - there's less flaws / drawing errors than you'd get with a gaming card so if you're doing product designs or medical stuff you'll spend less time thinking is something a flaw in your model or just a redraw error. The cards themselves aren't that much faster than the Geforce cards though, especially when you take into account the cost difference. You'll also find that some applications take less advantage of the supposed speed of the cards. For example I bought a FireGL 1 back around 2000 for use with 3dsmax, and I found it inflexible for view playback, admittedly gaming too, and ended up replacing the 1000 euro card with a geforce GTS 2 instead.

So the best thing to do is check benchmarks / feedback from users of the application you're going to be using to see what the real benefits of the card is, rather than going on to the software makers recommended page - a lot of it is nonsense.

So the main thing is the machine going to be used for actual day to day work or just sit in the background and render? If only rendering then ditch the graphics card, on board will be fine. Get a nice 3930k machine with tonnes of ram. If it's a workstation then check with other users to see can you benchmark in program FPS to see if your program gets the benefit of a quadro over a geforce. If not then go for a high spec cpu, lots of ram and a decent geforce. You could probably make a small second machine for rendering with the left over cash from the geforce.

thanks this helped alot..

U_Fig

Ok so for the first build the budget went up to €6000 euro as the person sold some assets so i'm looking at the above to draft to him...all i need is a compatible case bearing in mind that noise is not exactly an issue but keeping the components as cool as possible is ..or would you change anything?

Item|Price
2 x Intel Xeon E5-2687W, S2011, Sandy Bridge, 8 Core, 3.1GHz, 20MB Cache, 150W, Retail|£2,971.63
2GB PNY Nvidia Quadro 4000 MAC, PCIe 2.0 (x16), 256Bit GDDR5, DisplayPort/ Dual Link DVI-I/ Stereo Graphics port, Retail|£730.00
2 x 3TB Seagate ST33000650NS Constellation.2, 3.5" HDD, SATA III - 6Gb/s, 7200rpm, 64MB Cache|£667.92
256GB Samsung 830 Series, SSD Notebook Kit, SATA III, 3-core MCX, NAND-Flash, Read 520Mb/s, Write 400Mb/s, 256MB Cache|£143.10
EVGA Classified SR-X, Intel Dual Xeon S2011, DDR3, 4 Way SLi + CrossfireX, SATA3/USB3, HPTX|£563.12
1200W Antec High Current Pro 80Plus Gold, 135mm Quiet Fan, ATX12V 2.3 EPS12V V2.91 PSU|£159.74
2 x 32GB (4x8GB) Corsair DDR3 XMS3, PC3-10666 (1333), Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 9-9-9-24, 1.5V|£327.22
Shipping|£8.49
Total|£5,572.92

joconnell

I'd be tempted for the price of the xeons and the motherboard alone to split this into a workstation and a render node - there's a lot to be said for productivity to be able to offload a test frame to a slave machine and continue working rather than having a single machine cabbaged. Also if your main machine goes down for whatever reason, you've got a spare.

There's a lot of discussions about this on the vray forum which is a renderer I use day to day about the benefits of a dual xeon vs one single cpu machines, and a lot of it comes down to how well multi threaded your application is - you might get less benefit with the more cores you're working with.

frozenfrozen

The SR-X got a horrible review here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0qVZz-ot6k

Slower than the asus counterpart is the consensus and it costs almost twice the price!

It's pretty easy to tell that the EVGA SR-X isn't remotely as impressive as the SR2 was. As always with motherboards you're balancing outright performance with usability, and the performance you can extract from the SR-X just isn't good enough to overcome the many little niggles that we have with it. Rather than overlooking minor annoyances, those become further damning evidence.

Firstly it's incredibly expensive. We've seen it around for £550-ish, a whopping £170 more than the ASUS equivalent. Then the layout is just a swathe of problems. The CPU power connector is miles from the edge. Next to it is the PCI-e power, which you have to use if you want more than two PCIe slots. We've tested loads of motherboards that have extra power input, but you really never need it. Not here. It's not even very stable when you have got two GPUs installed. This is no "fill it full of cards and break records" motherboard.

The first CPU socket has only 4 DIMMs next to it, lending the whole affair an unbalanced look. The SATA connectors are vertical which is unforgivable on a board costing this much. Behind that is the heatsink, which covers the CMOS battery. Yes there is a CMOS clear switch, but if you want to take the battery out you need to dismantle the heatsinks. The plastics aren't a gorgeous red on a black PCB affair, but clearly salmon pink. Pink.

Finally the BIOS is pretty woeful. You can't overclock the CPUs. You can only change the RAM timings on the latest BIOS, but still can't change the RAM speed so you're stuck at 1333MHz. The whole thing just feels so unfinished.

In fact if we didn't know better we'd think this was a pre-production, proof-of-concept sample rather than the best part of £600, high-end uber motherboard. Yes the overclocking is down to Intel, but the rest of the problems are all EVGAs. It's as if the moment they discovered that Intel had ripped the potential out of the dual-CPU option they just gave up and left the board where it was in development.

The performance is okay. With this much expensive hardware installed it would struggle to be poor. But it's beaten throughout our testing by the ASUS, which is better looking, has more features, and is massively cheaper.

You're also going to need two cpu coolers. And I would say more ram and at least 1600mhz. What about getting 7 1tb drives and raid them. you would lose 1tb of storage but you would have the safety net incase one dies. One 3tb drive giving up could ruin a lot of work. You would also get the increased speed of running in raid5 or whatever configuration you would need.

This would be a better storage solution actually:
Item|Price
5 x WD Caviar Black 2TB SATA 6Gb/s|€838.20
Shipping|€18.99
Total|€857.19

You would get great speed and the raid array could rebuild it's self if a single drive dies.

U_Fig

joconnell wrote: »

I'd be tempted for the price of the xeons and the motherboard alone to split this into a workstation and a render node - there's a lot to be said for productivity to be able to offload a test frame to a slave machine and continue working rather than having a single machine cabbaged. Also if your main machine goes down for whatever reason, you've got a spare.

There's a lot of discussions about this on the vray forum which is a renderer I use day to day about the benefits of a dual xeon vs one single cpu machines, and a lot of it comes down to how well multi threaded your application is - you might get less benefit with the more cores you're working with.

so you're saying that have one machine for just rendering and one for the design process..as far as i know and have been told REVIT 2011 on wards which is the program used 90% of the time is able to use all available cores that a system has so therefore the more the better.. i know he has a PC at the moment so basically this will it'll be used for rendering mainly with the other being used for design when it's unavailable as it's a bit slow at rendering the final image..

but i can see where you're coming from..maybe build one with IB CPU with Quadro card for design then one with SBE CPU or xeon for rendring.. but would that not just result in spending more buying double the case ram hdd psu ect..

frozenfrozen wrote: »

The SR-X got a horrible review here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0qVZz-ot6k

Slower than the asus counterpart is the consensus and it costs almost twice the price!




You're also going to need two cpu coolers. And I would say more ram and at least 1600mhz. What about getting 7 1tb drives and raid them. you would lose 1tb of storage but you would have the safety net incase one dies. One 3tb drive giving up could ruin a lot of work. You would also get the increased speed of running in raid5 or whatever configuration you would need.

This would be a better storage solution actually:
Item|Price
5 x WD Caviar Black 2TB SATA 6Gb/s|€838.20
Shipping|€18.99
Total|€857.19

You would get great speed and the raid array could rebuild it's self if a single drive dies.

ya at the time i never though of raid...ya prob will go for something like that...there's 64 GB of ram included in the build.. also i'll look into that asus..

frozenfrozen

U_Fig wrote: »

so you're saying that have one machine for just rendering and one for the design process..as far as i know and have been told REVIT 2011 on wards which is the program used 90% of the time is able to use all available cores that a system has so therefore the more the better.. i know he has a PC at the moment so basically this will it'll be used for rendering mainly with the other being used for design when it's unavailable as it's a bit slow at rendering the final image..

but i can see where you're coming from..maybe build one with IB CPU with Quadro card for design then one with SBE CPU or xeon for rendring.. but would that not just result in spending more buying double the case ram hdd psu ect..



ya at the time i never though of raid...ya prob will go for something like that...there's 64 GB of ram included in the build.. also i'll look into that asus..

Raid is very important for something like this. Make sure it isn't an after-thought if they're spending 6k!

I see the amount of ram, but make sure you choose ram which runs at at least 1600mhz. The asus board is a lot better, there's really not one single reason to choose the SR-X, except for the extra ram slots, but you don't need those. With the price difference of 200 quid you can afford to use 8gb dims of memory. More slots = less stable. Look at getting EEC registered ram. No idea what it's actual use is but it's used in pretty much every work station build.

Seriously don't forget the raid setup. If they're spending 6k on a computer and need 6tb of storage, you want to make sure it's safe and quick.

joconnell

Just as another relevant point this was just posted on the vray forum in another discussion on the best machine to build:

"rig no1. I have build one based on 3930k (OC to 4.5)few months ago and if I have to say that is much faster on daily basis than 2xxeon 2.6 I have been using in my previous work.
"

Cuddlesworth

joconnell wrote: »

Just as another relevant point this was just posted on the vray forum in another discussion on the best machine to build:

"rig no1. I have build one based on 3930k (OC to 4.5)few months ago and if I have to say that is much faster on daily basis than 2xxeon 2.6 I have been using in my previous work.
"

I have two Xeon 2.6ghz procs in a workstation at home. Of course they are around six years old. Do you think I should compare them to a I7 too?

frozenfrozen

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

I have two Xeon 2.6ghz procs in a workstation at home. Of course they are around six years old. Do you think I should compare them to a I7 too?

I was about to say the same thing about a Powerpc G5 I have collecting dust from 2004.

Apples and apples.

However there may be a point that although the program uses all cores, it may favour fewer greatly higher speed cores. This is the case for sony vegas I know for sure. Rendering times with a 3960x/3930k are at least 20% faster than that of 2 Xeon cpus of this generation (citing overclock3d for this, but generally Tom does do very fair reviews).

maybe 6 cores of 4.7 Ghz OCed 3960x would pull ahead for the tasks this computer will be used for? There's a saving of like 2k? Maybe two similar pcs, like a render farm would be better? It would also allow double the work to be done simultaneously. Because waiting for renders to complete aside, waiting for a computer to be free would be completely dead money in a company.