leasing or not, your opinions????

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

If u lease u always lose.

For 6000-7000$ I can get such an monster that it will last for years... ud save a lot more if u spend 1 week learning about building pcs and then making ur own. EVGA is the way for dual xeons.

16 gb per 16 cores? Nice joke, ud be bottlenecked most of the time... Are they even OC to 4/5 ghz?

I read somewhere that intel released 10 core xeons. Just gotta see if EVGA can handle it and 20core/40threads 5ghz here I come =D

But if u want a render node then only single cpu socket.

[voltron7]

DADAL, I clearly still need some schooling in the hardware department! Thanks for the reply, too.
So, for the 16 cores to not be bottle necked, you'd have to go with a lot more RAM? Like 32BG?
I don;t think they were overclocked at all...
About building PCs, I am going to start learning now, I guess!

I'd really like to make this affordable, so I really appreciate all these comments/questions folks are bringing up...
I just want to build a single machine for use as the primary workstation and rendering machine...
I think anything will blow my current Q9550 out of the water, lol.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Yea, just think of it u have 16 CPU and 16 gb of ram, thats 1gb per core and 8 gb per CPU. Now this is quite complicated but I'll try to simplyfy it. U have 2x CPU and 16gb ram, each cpu got 4/8/12/16 banks of ram depending on motherboard. So each cpu has its own sets of ram that he fill with data. Now everytime u go above ur 50% of ram u spread the data unevenly throught the ram, there fore CPU1 has to ask CPU2 for ram data if he runs out of info from his ram data, at this moment CPU 2 has to deal with his own calculations as well as to send data from his ram banks to CPU1 for calculations... more or less. with 16gb of ram once u go past 7-8gb of ram this will start happening and all hell brak lose. I never did tested how much slower renders get (quite hard I run 48gb of ram) but they should get a little bit slower. 3 years ago when I was building my PC I had a nice diagram about how CPU's works and how they distribute rams etc etc, I'll look for it.

In any nace that was 3 years ago maybe something changed not sure... but still I'd get 64gb ram in ur place... After all 32 gb cost like 200£ so pffffffff

[Franx]

...I used to be a big believer in going for super maxed out machines - buying the best I could get at the time - but I've really come to change my tune on that. Boxx probably builds great machines, but I am pretty sure you could have one built for close to half that and it would be far more than 1/2 the machine. The actual dollar payoff for higher end machines just doesn't seem to be there in my experience. YMMV

/b

I'm in the same boat. Built a dual quad about 5 years ago and paid over 4500$, and that was with mid-end 2.3ghz cpus and 8gb of ECC ram. The higher clocked cpu were just out of my reach. So 5 years down the road, needles to say that it badbly fell behind performance wise. Cant even get that type of ram anymore (found some on Ebay, 600$ for 8gb). So as of now, I think I'm just going to go for a single socket build, problably the 3930K, overclock it to 4.8ghz, stuff 32 gb of ram inside, with a top tier geforce, all of this for around 2000$. Abuse it for 2 years, then retire it to the render queue, and build another top performing, consumer system. So about the same investment, but taking better advantage of the latest tech.

[glorybound]

well, it is a E5-2650 dual eight core Xeon system and 16GB Ram...I think that is most of the cost...They also supposedly put them through series of tests before shipping out.
hoping to replace my current 2 weak systems, lol.

I couldn't say whether it could out-process 5 i7s you built...
-just wondering, how long did you have in labour per machine?
-did any of them give you any problems within the first couple of years of service?
-ever get any BSOD on any of those?

Thanks for any input, Bobby, since building my own could definatley save some money, but I would need to do more research on PC building first, I guess.

Mine are pretty much stock, with nothing special, and no issues. I don't know what BSOD is. I think I built all 5 in one day.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

As far as I remember the only systems that has BSOD are Dell, HP and box haha =D, Funny how well tested they are =D

[Franx]

I don't know what BSOD is.

Blue Screen Of Death

[glorybound]

no BSOD on my machines

Blue Screen Of Death
[ATTACH=CONFIG]9375[/ATTACH]

[Pixelcon]

I get plenty of them on Dell machines...

edit: is everyone using geforce cards as opposed to quadros these days?

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Quadro dont give us anny benefits on max/maya as far as I remember...

[Pixelcon]

interesting. Was about to purchase a quadro for my machine @ home. Maybe it'll be nice to get some better value for money with a geforce. I was under the impression that Quadros can handle longer periods of stress better than a geforce but if I'm getting BSOD at work with quadros then I dont care for that claim :P

Cheers!

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

The idea of quadros handling longer periods of stress is a joke... Just think of it when kids play gforce they jank them 24/7 for years, where as Quadros in CGI is used how much, up to 20%? And they slower in viewport and in GPU rendering anyway.

[voltron7]

I have had quadros and geforces, and the geforces were always better IMO...
My Polywell has been throwing BSOD lately and it turned out to be the power supply.
I fixed it myself, but maybe I got lucky (lots of cables/wires!)

[voltron7]

Blue Screen Of Death
[ATTACH=CONFIG]9375[/ATTACH]

HAHA funny shirt

[voltron7]

Mine are pretty much stock, with nothing special, and no issues. I don't know what BSOD is. I think I built all 5 in one day.

So, did you have to research a lot of components and buy from a bunch of different resellers?
So all 5 built in one day and hardware was only 4000 total, or 4000 each machine?

Thanks