I’m on a Mac Pro (Late 2013)
3.5GHz 6-core Xeon E5
32Gb RAM
AMD FirePro D700 6Gb
It’s soon time to update the setup and I’m thinking of switching to pc…had it with apple .
I do a lot of product stills and need fast IPR / Vray RT
and quite a lot of heavy photo-retouch, big big files.
I work mainly in maya, photoshop, AE and Premiere.
I never play games.
what should I go for?
quadra cards just a waste of money?
titan x a better choice?
cpu?
any thoughts on what would make a solid setup much appreciated.
What are you mainly using? Vray RT cpu or gpu? Which one are you rendering your final Maya project with?
Adobe Premiere and AE won’t benefit from a cpu with more than 6-8 cores (there are scaling issues). So, the basic factor for your choice is the rendering software you mainly use. If it is Vray cpu, then the best rig you could build is a dual Xeon system with as many cores/threads your money can buy. If it is Vray RT gpu, then the logic behind your system’s setup is totally different.
For a dual socket system, I would personally wait a couple of months before deciding. Intel’s Skylake EP Xeon family is coming out soon (up to 32 cores /64 threads per chip) and AMD Naples is on its way too (up to 32c/64t too).
I’ve never even got the gpu to work to be honest. openCl says “initDevice failed, make sure you have compatible hardware” or something. there are issues with OSX and openCL according to chaos groups webpage but maybe i’ve missed something, haven’t bothered looking in to this too much so it’s always been on cpu for both ipr and final render.
I’d like to have a really fast viewport for lighting and slapping on stickers/decals on the products. I import CAD-data with nPowerTranslator and the poly-count can get a bit out of control. UVunwrapping and vray IPR are big crash-factors. maybe just max out on cores/threads then, wait for the skylake-series.
another issue is faster read/write for 10Gb+ files in photoshop. working against a thunderbolt RAID-drive now which is still pretty slow imo. On my old setup I had SSD-raid on PCIe which was ok but still not great. I don’t know what there is today, been a while since I was looking at hardware-stuff.
AE and Premiere are secondary, don’t do a ton of animation/video nowadays.
If your budget is in the in $5K range I’d look at a dual Xeon setup. Something like this will blow the doors off of the Mac Pro you’re using now. I’m using a very similar build (different GPU). It adds up to 20 cores (40 threads), 128GB of memory, 1TB SSD, etc.
If you want V-Ray RT to be faster you can throw another GPU in there. To cut the budget down a bit there’s a similar chassis without the hot swap bays and a slightly smaller power supply.
I don’t really think there is any reason to go with a heavy Xeon system anymore. For a very low cost, you could Ryzen up and just demolish the speed of that old Mac. An 8 core / 16 thread Ryzen 7 would be an amazing upgrade, along with a GTX 1070 or 1080 to round it out. That’s ten more cores than you’re used to operating at far higher calcs per second.
Or you could wait a few weeks and get a 16 core / 32 thread Ryzen 9 for still a fraction of the cost of these old-school Xeon setups.
Intel tried to respond to AMD’s obvious advantage with their “i9” binning, but AMD was already ahead of the game. It’s about time, too. Intel needed some serious competition.
interesting,
i’ll definitely look in to this.
after loads of googling i’m still none the wiser as to whether I should fork out on a quadro pascal card or get a 1080 tho. any thoughts on this wouldbe good, the prices are ridiculous but I don’t play any videogames whatsoever and I want stability more than anything, soo many crashes these last few weeks. on the other hand, 1080 kills in benchmarks, but what does that mean, high fps when you’re playing battlefield? don’t need that.
meanwhile, my cintiq 27HD has started to ghost. don’t know if it’s the monitor or the cards.
The Xeon platform is not “old school” it’s simply more of everything. More memory slots, more CPU sockets, more PCI Express lanes, etc. AMD does the same with the Opteron series (and soon to be Naples platform).
If you need more than 64GB of memory then the Ryzen offerings won’t help you. On the other hand you can get more than a terabyte of memory with Xeon and other server and workstation platforms. It all depends on what your needs and expectations are.
Every freaking time a new consumer processor comes out people say workstations and servers are old school or unnecessary which is foolish. There will always be more of everything with the server and workstation platforms which some folks either need or find value in. Whether the original poster needs the features they offer is something they’ll need to figure out. I personally need more than 64GB of memory so it’s money well spent.
I wasn’t naysaying any need for heavier workstations. Just pointing out that the modern i7 and R7 chips blow the socks off these older Xeon or Opteron configurations. 2GHz is just horrible for single-core/thread functionality, you see. And considering how non-pro the Max Pros have been for the last few years, a modern i7 or R7 would be a huge upgrade, and for the Ryzen chips, a fraction of the cost of the Xeon setups mentioned here and still faster. Most people don’t need more than 64GB of RAM, especially coming from a Mac environment.
