http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=16837645 I need opinions on this small footprint Maya station I need four of for my dad. It needs to be tiny horizontally, but not vertically, so I chose the Fortress FT03 from Silverstone. From reviews and pictures, it looks to be fantastic and innovative, my two favorites! CPU is taken care of by the Xeon E3-1230, a cheaper lower wattage i7 sans the K and useless inbuilt graphics, which is plenty powerful enough for local renders to see how a scene is coming. GIGABYTE provides the GA-Z68MX-UD2H-B3 motherboard, a microATX array with 3 PCIe x16 slots, plenty of expandability. Storage is a Samsung Spinpoint F3 1tb and a OCZ Solid 3 60gb SSD. Displays are driven by a PNY GTX 550 ti, chosen over the MSI Cyclone version due to its rear exhaust, more conductive to the case's heat arrangement. 16gb of Corsair XMS3 DDR3 RAM is more than enough for local renders and should keep things smooth. A Silverstone Strider 500w 100% modular PSU is practically tailor made for the case. A Lite-On slimline SATA DVD burner and adapter round out the system. Opinions, comments, WTF are you doing?! all welcome
You don't need to buy a sata cable, they are included with the m/b Change the SSD out for a curcial. They seem to be alot more reliable. It would be a good idea to add another disk as a scratch disk. 1600mhz ram is only a tiny bit more http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231480 or http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233198 The gskill stuff runs at a lower voltage but it's more expensive. Personally I would swap the PSU out for something like this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817104096 If there will be four machines the extra efficiency will pay off and it's slightly cheaper to begin with. Would you not get something like a 2600k and bump the clocks up a bit?
I don't know much about maya, but doesn't them there sorts of programs benefit from the quadro range of gfx cards rather than the normie geforcey ones? Edit: All of that is supposed to have been read out in a west country accent. Thanks.
How come you added an Xeon E3 to your shopping list? If you're using a desktop motherboard, you may as well use a desktop CPU like a Core i5/i7 and save your money.
Use a 2GB 560 or 560ti card, he'll appreciate the extra VRAM and speed when navigating complex scenes. If you can pick up 16GB of 1600 or faster RAM that will also add a slight boost to render speeds (maybe only 3-5% at best, so decide if it's worth the money). Finally, that silverstone strider PSU isn't as quiet as they make it out to be, it was easily the loudest fan component in my HTPC.
Maya doesn't feature GPU acceleration for rendering, only for viewing. It's similar to Lightwave, it doesnt support GPU accelerated rendering and only needs a super fancy GPU if it's running across multiple super high resolution screens. A single 1080p will be perfectly fine on a 550 ti. CPU wise, the only real CPU power needed is to render out test visuals locally instead of adding them to the Farm's queue, and the Xeon will be completely sufficient. The E3 is about $70 cheaper than an i7 2600k and a lot cooler running due to no useless inbuilt graphics. I've researched and found out this particular E3 will run perfectly fine in any normal 1555 boards(though CPU-Z picks it up as an i7, because that's what it is, really, just sans onboard graphics). Thanks for the feedback, guys!
FSP Make some of the best PSU's in the world. They makes psus for the likes of Corsair and Corsair put their own branding on.
Oh, I thought Corsair sourced from Seasonic. Well I'll look into FSP then. I figured it was just another off-brand like Athena or Apevia or Diablotek.
I don't think they OEM for corsair. They do a couple Antec and OCZ models and few of the Zalman and Silverstone PSU's.
Corsair's top parts use Seasonic. Their mainstream usually use CWT but I haven't checked it in a while. If FSP were so great their own brand ones would be the #1 choice.
