Hi all, need some advise with a new workstation build Budget: Around £900 Main uses of intended build: 3DSmax, Maya, Zbrush, After Effects, Photoshop, General pc tasks. Parts required: Everything but the monitor. Monitor resolution: 1680x1050 Storage requirements: 1TB is fine Will you be overclocking: No Any motherboard requirements (no. of USB, Xfire/SLI, fan headers):none Summary I need a pc which will mainly be used for 3D work and rending, video editing/ encoding, general pc use, internet etc. So guess I will mainly need a good cpu and a lot of ram. I won't rule out playing games on it but that's not going to be the main function of the pc nor am I bothered about max settings. I'm well aware I've picked a bad time for this what with the sandy bridge recall! I was however thinking of going down the xeon route...but not really sure. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
I recently put together a new 3d workstation that was based around an 980x which is not going to fit into your budget I know, but before I had been using a Q6600 so the jump in rendering speed was fairly amazing (about three times as quick on a Maya scene I had). I was initially looking into dual Xeon's but decided on the i7 for price/performance as the dual Xeon was too expensive and the brute force of the 980 was very quick. I think in terms of bang for buck/peformance you'd have to go with a quad i7 over a Xeon which will give you pretty decent processing grunt. I don't know anything about Sandybridge mind, so can't really help there. I'd definately go with more storage if you can stretch? - the Samsung F3 1 TB Spinpoints are excellent, fast and cheap and if your doing lots of work then more storage is always handy. I guess you can always add later though. I don't know what you'll be doing but I'd say go for at least 6GB ram too which would probably do you fine unless you start doing heavy stuff. Sorry If I've just told you exactly what you knew already edit: Just had a look at the i7 950 (good price/power)/i5 2500. The i5 2500 is quite a bit cheaper than the 950 and in 3ds Max, rendering performance is pretty much on a par with an i7 975 - very nice! I guess there isn't alot of point then going for i7 at this point then?
Thanks for the advice, yeah decided to scrap the xeon idea the price vs. performance just doesn't seem to match up. I do quite a bit of After Effects post work so I think ram is key for that. Yeah I plan on adding more storage later but at the moment I can make do with 1TB. I've put together a list on scan, think the ram is overkill? Any bad parts? Thanks.
You don't want a tri-channel RAM kit for socket 1155, it uses dual channel RAM, so 2*4GB or 2*8GB is what you want.
Just bear in mind that motherboard uses the faulty Intel chipset, which is being recalled. The fixed chips (i.e. the next revision) should be with us in March sometime.
And you can pick up second hand quadro's from a couple of generations ago for a snip I picked up a FX4600 for £250 a couple of years ago, haven't looked recently but it's certainly worth your time picking up a quadro over a geforce.
I gave up on the Quadro's years ago, as they were always more expensive than the 'mainstream' cards, and nine times out of ten, were no better, and in some cases, even worse for 3-D CAD work (I use CAD 8-12 hours a day, and design products for a living). This is why I have always chose the best mainstream cards available (In my case, a [faulty] GTX 580) - but I am sure, for the resolution of the OP's monitor, a 460 or 470 would do fine.
I've only owned one quadro card and now just use desktop cards, which like you say do the job just fine. I think back in the day there were problems with some of the overlays not working in Maya (not sure about other apps) but all is good now. Not too sure about the new gpu rendering options - As far as I know it's not up and running in Maya yet (iray) but I believe Max has it now (?). I know there are lots of other third party apps out there too that are Cuda based rendering solutions. Maybe the Quadro cards add more functionality in this regard but I'm not too down with this really. I guess if you were doing big renders than you would need a big chunk of video ram. Last time I briefly looked into this was with Nvidia Gelato solution which I believe is dead now... edit: I'm on 12GB ram too which is great for the 3d side and haven't got over 8GB really. Like you say After effects does eat up ram likes a crazy thing and I find it quickly uses up all the ram available (depending on what your doing of course) which is a good thing as it's getting used properly..Being new to After effects CS5, I was pretty impressed in terms of multi core support and the various caching options for footage to speed up previews..
it all depends whether you want to wait till march for the recall really, if not i would get an i7 system, which will be just as fast and ?possibly faster in some situations due to wider bandwidth? (correct me if i'm wrong) I run Max, composite, After Effects, PS and mudbox and i've found i7 to be pretty amazing in all instances, even when running a couple of apps at once. Render times are excellent, not as good as if you spend £5000 on server grade gear obviously but great for the price. I would suggest you buy a cooler and overclock a little bit too, its really not that difficult and you could get to 3.8ghz quite easily.
Ah thanks for the advice on the triple channel! Yeah I do realise the quatro cards can benefit but for £140 I'm not going to get a decent quatro, besides when gpu rending comes around I can always upgrade. Yeah obviously the recall in April is a pain but the trouble is I've got a deadline to meet on the 31st of march! So I really do need the extra power now! I'm not bothered if I have to RMA the board in April. Although it is a pain to RMA the board from looking at all of the bench marks surely it's worth getting the 2600 over the 950? Thanks for all the advice so far, much appreciated.
If you're not worried about the RMA, get the P67 board now and then RMA it in April. Just make sure you plug in the hard drives on the SATA 6GB connections (to avoid the bug).
If you are only using two sata ports there is no reason not to go for the sandy bridge system. You are one of the rare cases when the 2600k will benefit over the 2500K aswell.
So I'm almost there. Just one last question... I think I'm right in saying windows 7 home supports up to 16gb of ram. So if I do go for 16gb of ram is it worth me getting professional or will home be ok with 16gb? Also do you think it's worth the extra £70 to go from 8gb to 16gb? I know AE eats ram but 16gb!! Thanks again.
Yup - If you can stretch to it, I'd get the 16 GB for sure. If your doing comps in After effects with lots of frames then you'll be so glad you went for more ram..It just gives you the headroom to do so much more and work alot quicker...
yeah especially if you have Photoshop open too and you're working between the two, ram becomes well worth it
If you want to use XP mode or join a domain (probably only useful if you're using it on a work network) or use more than 16GB of RAM then go for professional. Otherwise there's little difference.
ok, I just wondered if home would have trouble with 16gb considering that's the maximum it supports and thought maybe professional would be able to deal better with 16gb. But I have no idea what I'm talking about. Thanks for all the advice I'll get on with the order tonight.
