Building a Box

#1

I need help chosing a graphics card. the programs i will be using are maya zbrush nuke after effects painter mari mudbox motionbuilder. whats is most important to isnt rendering speed its playback speed, so i can actually see what im doing. the cards i been thinking are the Titan Black, Quadro K4000, or a 780 ti.

#2

Well all of those applications have different needs and most of them demand alot. Pretty much all of them will want to use as much ram as possible. Some will need very fast disk access and RAM (like AE and Nuke). Others will need lots of texture memory and GPU support.

What you need to do is to look at each product’s support pages and see if there is a common card that they say they support.

My gut reaction is to say to go with the Quadro K4000 because the drivers are usually better tuned for programs like Maya and Mari.

Mudbox:
http://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/mudbox/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/System-requirements-for-Autodesk-Mudbox.html
Mari:
http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/mari/system-requirements/
After Effects:
http://www.adobe.com/products/aftereffects/tech-specs.html
Maya:
http://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/System-requirements-for-Autodesk-Maya.html
Zbrush:
http://pixologic.com/zbrush/system/
Painter:
http://apps.corel.com/ms/px/reminder_seg5/nittygritty_sys_req.html
Nuke:
http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/nuke-product-family/nuke/sys-reqs/

So after glancing over these system requirements I’d say you need the K4000, you need 16-32 GBs of ram 8 is bare minimum, You need a i7 Quad core CPU (minimum) and you’ll want an SSD boot drive and possibly a RAID storage system or an additional 1 TB SSD drive.

#3

im running a dual cpu i have

supermicro x9dax-if
2630 e5 xeon ivy bridge
nxzt 810 switch
32 gbs kingston hyper 2133mhz

#4

Okay then get the Quadro and consider and SSD drive… it will improve the load times of applications and especially for compositing and texturing applications since they are disk intensive.