Processor Comparisons

[motoxpress]

Your budget is a big factor here. THe mentioned CPUs will alrequire different budgets to support them, the Xeon and the Opteron beign the more expensive of course.

What ya got to spend?

gl

[coltraIN]

Well i could probably come up with close to 3k if I wanted to, but this exemplifies my whole value question. I'm a little wary of dropping a whole lot on top of the line, because I'm not the type that has the budget to do a major upgrade every year or so. For instance I could get a refurbished Athlon 64 3400 for about 400 bucks, slap some more RAM and my video card in it, and get away pretty cheap, but I only would want to do that if it represented a significant boost over what I've got now (So it would be Athlon 64 3400, 2GB vs. Athlon XP 2600 1GB) I could also link the two together in a render network.

On the otherhand, if there's not much distance between those systems, or if the Opterons and HT's and all these other things represent a dramatic speed increase over my cheap option, than I might go for that in the name of efficiency.

I know this is confusing, but so is the issue. I guess basicly I'm just looking for the best bang per buck on a upgrade with the primary purpose of cutting render times. This means I would never spend $3k instead of $1.5k to get 7 more frames a second or something in the viewport.

Thanks for your reply!

[motoxpress]

I find that in most cases you are talking about productivity - how long you wait for things and how many things can you do at once. An athlon64 setup will be a great upgrade from your current provided you upgrade more than just the CPU. If you add a 6800gt, more ram and faster HDs you will be probably 50% faster and have a much more interactive expereince in the viewports.

A dual setup will benefit you in two major ways. The render time for threaded apps will decrease significantly and you can actually have more apps running at full speed concurrently. THis is more of a productivity thing in my mind. If you are wanting to save your $ then I would look at an Athlon with the other mentioned upgrades. If you are looking to build a system with the most productivity then get a dual. Just know that dual setups currently require more $ due to registered ram requirements, more expensive MBs and the fact that you have two buy two cooling devices instead of one.

The apps that will be most benefited from dual cpus would be most 3D tools, AE, and Photoshop. The os itself will also be snappier provided you are on WinXP pro or Linux of some flavor.

gl

[maX_Andrews]

http://www.barefeats.com/macvpc.html

and http://www.barefeats.com/mac2pc.html

[MadMax]

A64 is going to represent a substantial boost in performance.
if I were you I would do this.....

Get a decent A64 socket 939 motherboard, nForce4 based. Asus A8N is a nice board.

get an Athlon64, 90nm 3500+ E revision (they start shipping tomorrow, it is a core upgrade) 272.00 at Monarch.

get some decent OCZ or similar PC3200 DDR Ram.

Price wise you won't be spending much. In June AMD begins shipping the X2 processors, these are a socket 939 dual core CPU. (it'll be the same as having a dual CPU system.) Wait for a couple of releases to come out and the initial prices drop, then upgrade to one of these CPU's.

There won't be anything out there that will even be able to remotely touch it.



Well i could probably come up with close to 3k if I wanted to, but this exemplifies my whole value question. I'm a little wary of dropping a whole lot on top of the line, because I'm not the type that has the budget to do a major upgrade every year or so. For instance I could get a refurbished Athlon 64 3400 for about 400 bucks, slap some more RAM and my video card in it, and get away pretty cheap, but I only would want to do that if it represented a significant boost over what I've got now (So it would be Athlon 64 3400, 2GB vs. Athlon XP 2600 1GB) I could also link the two together in a render network.

On the otherhand, if there's not much distance between those systems, or if the Opterons and HT's and all these other things represent a dramatic speed increase over my cheap option, than I might go for that in the name of efficiency.

I know this is confusing, but so is the issue. I guess basicly I'm just looking for the best bang per buck on a upgrade with the primary purpose of cutting render times. This means I would never spend $3k instead of $1.5k to get 7 more frames a second or something in the viewport.

Thanks for your reply!

[Fritz3D]

occasionally on ebay one can find dual xeon used machines for ~$500, pretty good deal for a render node.

[tfortier]

cause you said rendering is your first priority, i will suggest a dual cpu system... the best deal for the money is probably a dual xeon 2.8 or 3.0... i can get one of those for 1800$...im sure you will not notice difference in viewport compare with more powerfull system (with nice amount of RAM) (2gig please!) and dual will give you a lot faster render...

if i wanna do a cheap render farm, i will not hesitate place my money in those...

I dont know about opteron... maybe they have similar power for the price...

Like other said, Dual core are coming very fast! waiting will probably be rewarding at the moment. Me im waiting for a Dual Dualcore Opteron by the end of summer...

haaaa... right now, for speed my render, I just buy another cheap p4 3.0ghz (500$)... Connected in network, all my cheap p4s give me all the speed i want and I can continu working on my workstation... compositing all those render! That's an economic way to improve my workflow! (im using lightwave=free render node!) Its the best value I found! with a switch for use the same monitor and keybord for all of them! for the price of a Xeon i can get 4 p4... they give me kinda 230% more power for less money! (you dont need a good graphic card or lot of ram for your render nodes... a cheap built-in card is enough!)

good luck!

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