When building a 3d rendering / architect machine whats the importants parts im led to believe its pure CPU power (ie i would need a clocked i7.930) and then as much RAM as possibly(the more the better?) GFX are specifically needed for this am i right? thanks for replies in advance.
An i7 950 would be better for the few ponds more that it costs and you are right about the Ram, lots will be better than going foe the faster stuff. The AMD 1055 or the 1090 hex core CPU's would be worth a look especially if the PCs primary use won't be gaming. Overclocking is not the most important consideration, it's more about how many threads can be processed , e.g six full on cores with AMD and * threads with an i7 950 with hyper threading.
i didnt realise how cheap the 950 was compared to the 930, i think i would go for that for the price, does ghz not matter atall, surely the quicker you can process on each thread the better? i7 950 in theory has 8 cores also right? i will find out which applications i will be using
The 950 has 4 physical cores but can run 2 threads per core. Overclocking will help but it's about shear crunching power. More speed will help, but not as much as some people would have you believe. I'm talking taking seconds off a big render as opposed to minutes . it could turn into minutes with a DVD though.
right thats brilliant, would you see a massive difference with RAM lets say with 6gig in versus 12gig in for instance? minutes or seconds?
12 would definitely help for rendering work and that type of thing. At the moment ram prices are so good it would be worth doing it any way. like I said before you won't need ultra fast stuff just lots so there's savings to be had that way. I don't need 12gb but the way prices are I'm going to get some any way. The G Skill trident I use has dropped by over £40 from a year ago. And I think the answer to your question comes back to the size of the file.
ok so a 950 w/c at 4ghz with 12gb of ram would be 'good' or 'ok' at rendering? base on rendering time for the pound? and to finalise is a high end gfx needed to help in anyway? Cheers
Obviously the the better graphics card the better the rendering. When you are moving round large models you need a graphics card that can handle the massive amount of data making up the rendered image.
You dont have to go mad, you won't need monster FPS like a gaming rig, a GTX 460 or an ATI 5870 will be more than enough, but if you are doing a bit of gaming either will crunch through anything you throw at them.
i get what your saying - not quaddro cards then (made for cad) apprently... would help with 3d ? or jsut gfx to take work off the mobo?
Thats pretty much it, If you wanted a full on rig you'd be looking at dual Xenon mobo's quadro cards and 24gb plus of ram, but for the way you're building up a rig it'll be a good compromise and it'll work out about 3 grand cheaper.
Quatro cards are good since they have larger ram and generally are better binned components. Tho paying full price isn't worth it in my eyes. Check out toms hardware, they've done a few articles on the quatro/firepro cards. Check the software your using benefits from it. If you feel you need a professional card quite a few people go 2nd hand which saves quite a few pennies.
You've still not said what applications you're using, so that still makes a difference. Some rendering applications will harness the power of video card, but only certain ones (manufactures often pay for programs to be optimized for only the high-end graphics cards or one manufacturer over the other), so it's important to say which applications you're using.
Ok, Ram won't speed up render times for still image rendering, only pure GHz will do that as its math based number crunching, where an Intel i7 920,930 and 950 really shine. Depending on the software your using depends on what graphical hardware acceleration you require. AutoDesk the company behind AutoCAD, 3DS Max, Maya and Inventor to name a few did a lot of people a big favour and allowed directX acceleration with that viewports of the application (at least in 3DS Max), which means a simple 8800GT could really spank along and speed up the rotation, zooming and panning of the 3D model. Also like to mention and highlight that workstation graphics cards like Quadro's and FireGL's don't render your work, the CPU is used to render currently. Software Dev's have been working on GPU enabled rendering, but you'll find a lot of it is still done via the CPU.
Almost all of what's said above is correct. One hiccup in the way things work... Most drawing programs only use one core for the drawing and those that use more are just offloading minor tasks, so for creating models pure single core grunt is what will get the job done, after dual core (so that the second core can do everything else) adding more cores makes a minimal difference to performance. A decent amount of memory and a decent GPU will help, as Burnout says many (but not all) applications are now DirectX accelerated, if you're lucky enough to be using one of those applications then any GPU will speed things up, if not then it will make a minimal improvement, compared to a Quadro/FireGL Whereas, for rendering consider the combined speed of all cores. That's it. GPGPU hasn't made much of an inroads into professional rendering programs, but if the program you have supports it, then GPU's may be the way to go to maximise rendering speed. If I had my time over (or unlimited funds) I'd have one of these for my working system, and buffer rendering off to a farm of unlocked AMD chips to get the best GHZ/£ for image creation.
GPGPU is starting to come via Vray, but that's a massive additional cost, same with bunkspeed shot and i believe a few others but its pretty thin on the ground. Also as far as i know only Vray and maxwell support render farm features so bumping to a farm isn't the easiest of options. If the original poster returns to us with the actually programs he/she plans to use, then i would be more than happy to spec the best value machine, but right now they car basically asked 'i want a workstation' which ranks in the same league as asking 'i want a car' Specification of purpose is needed, sorry to say but you won't be a very architect if you can't get the spec right. From one professional to an aspiring professional.
I've just built three PCS at exactly the same spec at the part time job I do (engineering) for CAD/FEA. Key specs are: i7 950 12GB 1600MHz RAM GTX 460 They also have two 1TB F3s each. I would've RAID 0'd them but the systems need to be dual boot. If the budget was a little more, I'd probably invested in an SSD for each as well. SolidWorks runs like a charm and some of the assemblies are pretty large. Not only that, the Nvidia control panel lets us use 16xAA .
Hi, I've just put together a new build for Maya work/rendering - I took the plunge from a Q6600 up to a 980x - quite a jump! Did a few tests today (only finished the build today) and it certainly flies when rendering. I would say i7 is the only way to go for some serious rendering grunt (if thats what your after) In terms of Quadro cards - personally I wouldn't bother and have been using off the shelf cards for years now. I think there used to be issues with some screen overlays but I've been fine. I think the Quadro cards are really accurate if your doing hardware rendering where if you had several machines rendering on the Quadro cards, then the results would be consistent. Nvidia were pushing their Gelato GPU rendering stuff for years I think which probably benefitted from such a card - not too sure about that but I think Gelato is dead now. I think Max 2011 has iray which is a gpu friendly renderer to help offload things from the cpu. I believe maya is still waiting for this (it's in the software but not supported I believe) Q.
