Hi, I've got a friend who does a lot of rendering in After Effects and wants a new PC that will speed up this whole process. He doesn't have a budget, he just wants the best build for the job. The only thing he has is the Windows 7 License and a very nice 30" Dell Monitor. Please let me know your thoughts!
CPU rendering or GPU based? Makes a difference where you go with this. I would suggest socket 2011 either way, single or dual socket if budget allows. Something like a SuperMicro X9DAi could be considered if you want to go CPU heavy.
Oh yes ! Some rendering engine does use GPU rendering (CUDA / openCL). That could make a BIG difference. I second the Supermicro suggestion. They are rock solid motherboards.
CPU rendering is duel socket at this budget, Gpu rendering depends on program's your using. Probably x79 4960k with 12-18gb ram and a quadro 4000 can be had for aprox £2000. K6000 can be had for double the money like £1500 for the card and it's hugely powerful.
The choice of a professionnal GPU (firepro or quadro) really depends on the software. I wouldn't suggest a firepro or a quadro unless the software and rendering engine is clearly stated. If you need openGL, then it is AMD (radeon or firepro) or nvidia quadro. Forget about nvidia geForce as nvidia crippled openGL performance on non-quadro cards. If you need CUDA, then it is nvidia only. If you need openCL, then AMD leads the game. I second my other BT fellows, an X79 cpu with plenty of fast RAM is a must have. Firepro / Quadro are basically Radeon / geforce with drivers optimised for some softwares. On a selection of softs, Firepros will be faster, on others Quadros will be ahead .... and in all other situation they won't add anything. Pro GPU have a 30bit pixel pipeline, and high end models have ECC memory and quad buffering (for stereoscopy), but that's it.
As stated above by Rollo and GuilleAcoustic I would go with a Intel 2011 CPU, if you are doing CPU rendering or not. If you are doing CPU rendering I would tend to go for the xeon e5 processors if you want dual cpus or the 4960k overclocked if you want to go only with one cpu, Then your GPU does not really matter. GPU rendering does depend on what you are doing. As stated above. If you would like a quote on the system we at Yoyotech can help you with that. We try offer good value for money.
Well Affter effects now supports Cuda and Opencl. So this makes things easier I would say you can then go with the Intel 4930K, 32GB - 64GB 1866Mhz - 2133Mhz memory and either the Quadro K4000 or the Firepro W8000. Both are very capable of doing the job fantastically fast
Among professionnal cards, quadro K4000 and Firepro W7000 are the best bang for bucks. Very impressive performance for their price. I have an important question : Does your friend live from this activity ?
I'm asking because the main advantage of Xeon over end-user cpu, is the support of ECC memory. While it has close to no value added for an end-user, it will prevents error related to memory during intensive computing ... and de-facto save both time and $$$. An example of a single CPU xeon (10 cores / 20 thread / 3.0GHz) Intel E2-2690V2:£1483.26 Supermicro X9SRA: £267.61 Kingston 4x 8GB ECC 1600MHz: £279.98 Nvidia Quadro K4000: £749.28 Total: £2780.13 (without SSD/HDD, case, psu and cpu heatsink) scan links below: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/3gb-...it-gddr5-2xdisplayport-dual-link-dvi-i-retail http://www.scan.co.uk/products/supe...hz-sata-iii-6gb-s-sata-raid-pcie-30-(x16)-atx http://www.scan.co.uk/products/inte...-core-30ghz-80gt-s-qpi-25mb-cache-130w-retail http://www.scan.co.uk/products/32gb...600-mhz)-ecc-cas-11-11-11-15v-intel-certified A dual xeon seams hard to fit the budget. The motherboard will cost you £100 more, then even the smallest 6core xeon cost around $800 (and you'll need more ram stick). You'll be better with a 10/12 cores single xeon. i7 will cost you less as they don't go past 6-cores. But remember that "The more core you have, the slower they run". i7 4930K (6 cores / 12 thread / 3.4GHZ with 3.9GHz turbo) : £439 E5-2697V2 (12 cores / 24 thread / 2.7GHZ with 3.5GHz turbo) : £1884.35 Edit : I don't know much about after effect rendering engine, but for softwares that support computing offloading the best is to build a rendering farm using several GPU (when GPU computing is supported) or several i7 with ITX mobo on a network (when CPU only is possible) This is an interesting projet based on an Ikea furniture : http://www.finalmethod.com/blog/formula-5-is-alive/ That's probably what I'd do. A "working" computer with a quadro / firepron single 6 core-xeon for modeling / animation .... and a separated farm for offloaded rendering. Thus my workstation will remain usable even if rendering takes several days to perform.
