Your Advices about my System?

#1

First,i want to say “Hi” to all masters here…

I’ve been working for a long time,and i wasn’t interested in new technological advancements…I work with my old computer for a long time,now i wanna build a strong computer.

I use 3ds max,zbrush and maya user… I like to work with high-polygons on perspective view…

So,i saw many discussions about GPU’s and CPU’s in forum pages…

I will pay big price of Money,and wanna use it for many years,so I need your Professional advices…

GPU : I wanted to buy a quadro 2000 or 4000… but somebody says it’s waste of Money… so what must i buy?

CPU : i wanted to buy double xeon proccessors,but their clock speed is slower than powerful i7’s… so what must i choice?

I want to buy a powerful case,but i don’t want to waste my money unnecessary…

So what’re your advices about my system? I can spend 3000 USD for case or less…

#2

For what you indicate you want to do, yeah, it’s likely to be.
An nVIDIA 680 is great value for Money in the high-end range, otherwise, if you care about double precision, the Titan will still cost less than a 4k, and outperform it by a long shot. You do pay a pointless premium for it though unless you need those double precision operations, but still better value even than a k5000.

CPU : i wanted to buy double xeon proccessors,but their clock speed is slower than powerful i7’s… so what must i choice?

Unless you run efficiently multithreaded operations, it’s a waste of money.
Only some parts of rendering and SOME simulations (very little in Maya in these regards) are multithreaded.
I’d go with the best value for money i7 you can buy. High polycounts in viewports, modelling, rigging, animation, most of the simulation in MAX or Maya are not going to be multithreaded at all, or not efficiently most of the time.

Dual Xeons are fine and great on a farm when you have concurrent jobs in the same blade, they largely amount to a waste of money for a personal workstation for most people.

I want to buy a powerful case,but i don’t want to waste my money unnecessary…

I suspect there might be a language barrier here…
Get a decent, non-noisy case with a decent PSU (say 700W) and that’s it. Don’t blow money unnecessarily on the case itself.

So what’re your advices about my system? I can spend 3000 USD for case or less…

I recommend you don’t spend as much as you might plan to do, and save some money to upgrade later on.

If you want a budget for a PC to last you a long time, the best thing to do is spend half of it and keep the other half for upgrades two years later.
We’re also not too far from intel’s next generational jump, so buying the absolute top-end in CPU would be money wasted right now, they will plummet in price in a few months.

#3

Dear ThE_JacO;

Thank you very much for your interest!

I really tired to hear different advices about my new pc which i wanna build…

I agree with you. I want to use my PC for a long time, in time i want to upgrade its parts…

In my mind,my configuration was like this:

GPU: Quadro 4000
CPU: Xeon E5-1650 (in time,i wanted to buy the second (same) cpu for dual usage)
RAM : 8GB + 8GB DDR3 1600mhz
HARDDISC: 120 GB SSD Sata3
MONITOR : 24" Dell u2412m Ultrasharp LED Screen (i also need advices about it)
Windows7 - 64 bit
TOTAL COST : 3600 USD

GPU:
I understand about your comments that no need to buy 4000, buying gtx 680 or a titan is better than it…
How a gaming card might be successful than quadro? can it work well like 4000 in high-polygoned scenes in viewport? I was used a gtx 570 and it does not work well…
Because of electricity saving,i don’t want to buy second GPU…GPU will be alone and must be strong…

CPU:
For a personal Workstation, i agree with you…I choose this: i7 3930k 3.2ghz (it will use a good cooler on it)

I wanna 2 CPU’s and 1 GPU…is it a good choice?

#4

As I said before, dual CPUs, in most cases, are a waste of time and money. When you consider the additional cost of the mobo and CPUs, it’s a fair chunk of money. Buying a single CPU with the upgrade path of adding the second in mind isn’t sound future proofing.

Same for the GPU, despite advice to the countrary, you still outline the same config you outlined initially (quadro 4k and xeon CPU). So you seem set on that, go ahead and buy it, but my advice remains the same of before :slight_smile:

Oh, and if you buy an SSD for the system drive, buy a 250, not a 130. 130 is livable (I use one), but with 250s dropping in price as they did they are much more comfortable.

Personally I’d get the second to top non extreme i7 cpu and a titan with your budget range and apparent want to buy top end gear.

Multiple CPUs and multiple GPUs, for anything but rendering or specific simulation tasks (outside of Maya that is, as there’s hardly anything in it that scales well in width), are a waste of time for CG apps.

#5

For a single 6 core CPU, you’d get faster perfomance and more bang of your bucks with i7-3930k.

#6

Thanks for your comments and interest,the jaco…

Panupat, which is the more important for you? Cores or clock speed?

#7

Sorry man, but in all honesty it feels like you’re hardly reading the comments, or not doing your own homework about it.

Cores or clock speed is not a black and white comparison.
What you do with that CPU and how you manage how it’s tasked make the difference.

For the average task where you sit in front of the monitor, day in and day out, most of the cores will be left unused except when you render.

#8

As Jaco said - more cores will benefit mostly simulations and rendering. It will not help Zbrush.

#9

Even in the case of simulation, in Maya, that is seldom the case.
More items than not are not multithreaded, or are so only partially or poorly (often enough simply because some of the operations are just hard to impossible to scale well horizontally).

CPU Rendering is probably the only thing that, as a general category, these days is reliably efficiently and conveniently well scaling across multiple cores.

#10

Jaco - is Nuke rendering multi-thread ?

#11

Panupat, for the most part both Nuke and Zbrush will use as many cores as they’re given.

#12

The Jacko, i may not doing my homework well :wink:

Panupat, i know it will not help to zbrush…

my only wish is a strong computer system which i can render fast and work in viewport easily…so i don’t want to waste my Money for an unnecessary computer system…

everybody also advises here different things,and i’m confused…because of this, thanks for your understanding…

#13

cpu : i7 3930k (overclock to 4.3ghz - 4.5ghz)
cooler : Noctua NH-D14 or Corsair H80 hydro
mobo : Asus P9X79 WS
ram : Corsair Vengeance LP DDR3 1600, 4 x 8gb
SSD : Crucial M4 256gb
PSU : Corsair HX750 750w
GPU : EVGA geforce 670gtx 2gb
case : Corsair Obsidian 550D ATX mid-tower

Around 2200$ usd

There you go.

#14

Xeons are the best, they are scalable, run fast, and are excellent for working long hours in heavy 3d.
i7’s are nice and quiet and pack a punch but they couldn’t compare with how Xeons are meant to hold up.

The biggest consideration you should have for your pc is:

-motherboard, (for adding or replacing ram, video cards (and an extra proc if necessary))
an example is the ‘Supermicro® Intel® C602 C.S’, it can hold a lot of memory and extra units.

-for power and cost look for The Xeon® E5-2620 it’s affordable and can be dualed up.

-a few big quiet fan add ons to your Xeons (Xeons can get loud without the proper fan)

with a 720watt and a dualed 6xcore, builders can do this without the gfx card and extra memory for around $2k .

#15

I honestly don’t know, I very rarely open nuke up, when I do it’s at work like twice a year, and it’s just to occasionally check pre-comps or for mock-ups.

ZBrush though has quite a few operations that are threaded very well, it’s just its nature that makes it so, so “not using multiple cores at all” isn’t quite accurate, but there is a point where it becomes a waste as the limit is usually its ram cap and the point count, and even with an i7 920 the ease and feeling of sculpting is the same of the dual xeons we have at work.

If you care for the occasional longer op to be shorter, sure it’ll be faster, but I’d consider it a waste of money to be honest given that what you do 99% of the time in it is capped way earlier than a daul xeon

huh?
Unless you go for some of the inanely priced ones there is hardly any difference between a xeon and an i7 in actual end results/speed.
There are actually many cases where the super pumped i7 ex will outpace even the 30MB, 10 cores xeons, because tons of stuff just doesn’t thread that well.

The long hours part I have no idea what you refer to. i7 CPUs are extremely durable and per Mhz the same power consumption and heat release of xeons in a home use scenario.
Both CPUs are in the 90-130 range distributed over the same coolable area, and both at this point have been made for so long that the distinction is artificial and not a matter of trickling the batches down anymore.

#16

yeah i suppose the performance shouldn’t be much difference especially if your into unlocking and overclocking but that’s still a gaming thing imo.
And with ECC memory and dual socket multi-processing I don’t have to worry much about doing heavy 3d work, especcially with software that can utilize the workstation, I’ll stick with Xeon.

#17

Well if overclocking is good for gaming, it should be good for everything else, dont you think? If you can get a 25-30% free speed increase per core, I think that’s a pretty substancial benefit for anything you might be doing with your computer.

Those Xeons you mentioned earlier are 2.0 ghz which, even at 2.5 on turbo is pretty lame by all accounts. So let’s see : a pair of those would add up to around 850$ + 450$ for a dual socket mobo + the extra cost of a e-atx tower case. This would give you 30ghz for around 1400$. Conversely, a 3930k with a decent mobo will cost around 900$ and give you 27ghz when oc’ed to 4.5ghz (which has been proven a stable clock for a while now).

So the single socket build gives up a couple of ghz of multi threaded power vs the dual socket but is roughly twice as fast for single threaded applications, which still represents the vast majority of computing tasks. And this at 500$ cheaper.

I work with a oc’ed 3930k now, which replaced a dual 2.3 ghz Xeon workstation (now used as render slave). I personally think it’s much more efficient to have a higher clocked workstation and add cheap self built render nodes when you feel the need for more rendering power than to work with an slower clocked system, whatever number of cores it might have.

#18

the major difference is the desktop is more susceptible to crashing while the workstation is specifically built not to crash…especially for simulation and heavy particles counts, to have the cpu caching of the Xeons and scaling high as the sky with RIMMS. Although I could see a overclocked desktop running rather well with rendering.
If I had to choose between a desktop or a workstation (and I could afford both), i don’t think I would lose any sleep having picked the workstation.

edit: You failed to mention the cost of cooling your souped up desktop. I’ll have to those $500 now…

#19

IMO the E5-2620 isn’t a good choice for a processor for CG work as a main production computer for most people.

A stock i7 3930k will be faster in both rendering and single-threaded functions. Sure you can get a dual 2620, but you can also overclock a 3930k.

If you’re going to go xeon, go big and get a dual 2690 or dual 2687, otherwise I’d run an overclocked 3930k unless you have a very specific reason you’d rather have a low-end xeon.

xeons work well for renderfarms if you’re buying rackmounts and need a bunch of machines in a small area. Overclocked 3930k’s can sometimes crash during long renders. The flipside is you can buy a lot more of them, but depending on your rendering software more machines can get expensive from a licensing standpoint.

cost of cooling an overclocked 3930k is around $100 for a decent heatsink and some fans. The overclocking process can take some time to dial in. Each CPU is a little different and it’s immediately obvious if you’re setting up a lot of overclocked 3930k’s which CPU’s are the good ones. since their voltage and temperatures are so much lower with the exact same settings. I’ve found that motherboards can have similar variances.

After I dialed in the overclock settings for our render farm, I chose one of the better machines to be my production computer - 4.9ghz at 1.39 vcore and it’s among the most rock solid of the bunch. Out of 10 machines, only 2 systems were able to run like that. The other render machines typically range from 4.5-4.7ghz. I’m still fine tuning some settings and them. There’s a couple render nodes that lock up or reboot in the middle of the night of rendering, but they’ll be ironed out. I could always have just set them all up at 4.4-4.5ghz and call it a day if I didn’t want to mess with spending 2 minutes fine tuning settings every morning after I see which ones crashed.

For all of us who are not loaded with infinite cash, we have to make a compromise and choose what you think is the lesser evil for your particular situation.

#20

Good points

Concerning lifetime and care:
I’d imagine an overclocked i7 would need to be cared for more, you’ll have to be more sure it’s free of too much dust, monitor it’s temperature more often, and refill it’s coolant to keep parts from melting: I’m sure the overclocked owners have a lot to say about that or not.
I’ve had an overclocked machine with water pipes inside of it with people suspicious as if I was growing narcotics in my computer. Well, It stopped overclocking just after a few days because the cooling system couldn’t sustain it. After that I just returned the entire thing and got a stable Dual Xeon which would last me a long time without having to worry about a single crash or a file being unable to open and I could max out all threads to 100% when rendering.