Modest system for rendering

[nimajalali@aol.com]

Hi everyone,,

I'm about to buy a PC for modeling and rendering purposes with sketchup.
I'm looking for the following system:
CPU: Intel 2700K - I7
MainBoard: Intel P67BG
RAM: Kingston - Hyperx - DDR3 1600 - 8GB - 192bit
VGA: 3D CLUB - GTX 550Ti - 1.5GB
HDD: Seagate 1terra
Power: Super Flower 750W

I want to know your opinions about this, does this system perform well both in rendering speed and number of threads?

what if I replace the VGA with AMD sapphire HD6950 2GB 256bit DDR5. (with some extra money of course!) will it be better?

How can I know the number of rendering buckets which these system provide?

PLZ help,, your comments are welcome

[Jackson_cg]

As it's a 4 core multi-threaded (2 per core) CPU you'll see 8 buckets in V-Ray. 3.5GHz is fast, so it's a pretty powerful rendering machine.

That said, I compared rendering an identical file on my laptop (W7 Intel i7 Q740 1.73GHz) and my desktop (W7 Intel Xeon W3565 3.2GHz) and the desktop was only 50% faster despite having a theoretical 97% performance advantage. There are several factors which can affect actual rendering times, for example parsing is limited to one core so a higher turbo frequency can result in a faster render compared with an overall-faster CPU with a lower turbo frequency or no turbo function at all.

Graphics cards have NO effect whatsoever on V-Ray rendering times, only on modelling performance. Historically nVIdia drivers support OpenGL/SketchUp much better than ATI, but I have no idea how good AMD's support is.

/Jackson

[MoonDoggie]

General thoughts:

HDD: 1TB. Too low. For +$20 you can double your space
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...20and%20higher

I wouldn't go below 2TB, you won't be upset.

If you can upgrade to 16GB of ram, that'd help if you're getting close to your memory ceiling when rendering, it won't help if you don't use more than 8gb of ram at any time, but it never hurts.

[dkendig]

unfortunately V-Ray for SketchUp currently caps out at about 4gb of ram though, so the additional ram won't do anything useful with the current version. We plan on fixing that in the future, so the ram spec all depends on how long you are planning on using that computer with our product, and whether or not you have a need for additional ram for other apps.

[nimajalali@aol.com]

Thanks for your responses friends,,
I finally bought it!
I'm not quite sure but I think the best solution is to wait for the new vray with support of more than 4Gbs!

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

I would not that that 750w PSU I would take something more "known"...

Also I would take 1-2TB hdd+ External one for back up... U do need backup !

[andybot_cg]

I would not that that 750w PSU I would take something more "known"...

excellent point - (from personal experience ) having an unreliable PSU can wreak havoc on a system.