New workstation........(help).........

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

GPU is out ^_^ Not u have to decide what will suit u better... It all depends from your scenes and textures... so consider that when u will go for better CPU or GPU...

[glyph]

just for your info I got a fast i7 860 Vostro from Dell for £450 - all their offers seemed to converge at once so I got multiple reductions -
-ok no overclock and psu is not high power but so far very solid and fast
at that price you could get three more for a farm -
though not sure how the end result in render time would be!

[tarontis]

£450? Did that include shipping and VAT?

If so that not bad, but from what I can see on the Dell website it only ship with 3 gb of RAM, unless you upgraded? That would not be able to handle really heavy scenes very well at all

[glyph]

yes the 450 included shipping -may have been more like 465 - it was around January this year and I think they wanted to do some promotion on it - but it was weird how I could get three discounts at once - got it with 4Gb so that total cost was over 'xxx', which triggered the other discount
I dont do many heavy scenes so havent upped the ram yet
I agree its not a heavy duty monster though ...

[jujubee]

Motherboard - Asus P6X58D-E Intel X58 1366 Motherboard
CPU - Intel CPU i7 930 Quad Core Processor
RAM - 12GB (3x4GB) Corsair Dominator, DDR3
GPU - 1GB EVGA GTX 460 SC, 3800MHz GDDR5
HD1 - 80GB Corsair Force Series, 2.5" SSD
HD2 - 1TB Samsung HD103SJ Spinpoint F3, SATA 3Gb/s
Windows 7 (home edition)

I love ASUS. They've been pretty solid these past few years - both their graphics cards and their motherboards. I'd choose them any day over the competition (including Intel's own motherboards.) From what I've been reading, it seems like a fairly solid build but I would go with DADAL's suggestion of getting a 2GB card instead.

Also, if I recall correctly, Windows Home edition is not 64 bit.

Xeons were NEVER overclocked in dual set up. There was simply no motherboard for it.

This was true. I personally stopped overclocking manually many years ago. There's some motherboards that ship with utilities to make it "dummy proof", and I've seen some that work quite well. But to me, it hasn't been worth "squeezing out" 2% performance increase if you're computer is going to randomly hang, crash, worst case scenario fry, etc. Occasionally, a chip does get released that has phenomenal overclocking performance that may be worth investigating (and I don't know what that would be right now), but I've always found overclocking more work than actually building a computer itself for such little performance gain.

[mike_kennedy]

Just to throw a Spanner in the works...for the price the ATI 5850 is kind of hard to beat..I have thrown stuff at my 1 Gig that has choked Quadros..and it's very stable..a lot of people are having issues with the latest 480's and so on so it's another option to consider.
There is a lot of AT vs Nvidia stuff...but this latest ATI generation is rock solid with my config...and super fast...
I am not a fanboy..I have had Quadro's (Dual 4600 2 gigs in my last gig) Nvidia 8800 GT and 8600 GT's..it's what working best for the price...
Mine ATI 5850 has been flawless so far...for less the $300 CDN.....

Core i7 rocks and I have the 12 Gig Corsair...so fast....

[Morne]

Core i7 rocks and I have the 12 Gig Corsair...so fast....

Hi Mike
Could you please list your complete system spec? Yours sounds interesting.

[sjmoir]

There is some great advice on this thread. £2.5k is quite a lot of your own money to spend on a computer, but if that's your budget, great. I bought my computer at home for about £1k, but the performance isn't wildly off the £5k computer at the office which was bought less than a year earlier. The computer at the office is certainly not five times faster! £1800 from Scan sounds better, but I bet you could knock another £300 off and not notice too much difference... I’ve got tired of the dual processor (xeon) machines at work; they just seem to be having problems all the time. I don’t know if it’s the extra heat generated (one went back after melting 16GB of memory for example) or the extra level of complexity, but we are going to avoid them from now on. The i7 seems the way to go, plus there is the advantage of having a wider choice of motherboard, it’s cheaper etc... Not sure what graphics cards are doing at the moment, but £130 for a 460 sounds good to me! I doubt we’ll buy another professional card at work, I don’t think we’ve benefited in any discernable way. Let us know what you decide on!

[Donald2B]

What the hell, I wanna play too!

Here is my rule of thumb, it still holds true today. If you render a LOT, you want more CPU cores. Period. GPU stuff is great and is nice, but is still in the novelty stage (at least for my work). If you don't do a lot of rendering than you can get away with fewer cores.

In your case, I would go with an iCore7 as mentioned in your quote, my reasoning is listed above.

I don't think you will get any benefit out of the Quadro card like many others have stated. I still think your best bet is going to be a nVidia based 400 series (Fermi) video card with as much memory as you can afford. This will give you the flexibility to utilize the GPU rendering a little more than those of us with the 1.5GB 480. Sorry Mike_Kennedy, ATi is a waste of money right now if you plan to do anything with GPU. I can't recommend a product that currently doesn't properly support OpenCL and only has 1GB of RAM. Until they can show solid drivers with OpenCL, they are off my recommendation list.

Those are the two most import factors you have to deal with right now. CPU & GPU. I wouldn't worry about overclocking or any of that stuff unless you really want to mess around with that stuff, or you are a serious tweak head! RAM is pretty cheap, if don't work and very large scenes I would try to stick with the 12GB mark(Triple Channel Memory). A good solid PSU unit around 800W is usually what I recommend and should handle most multiple 400 series card rigs.

Isn't buying new hardware fun! LOL

I am currently in the process of testing/evaluating a ton of hardware configs and running cost/performance analysis. If it's any consolation, the current recommended workstation for me is sitting around $10k US. UGH!

[Morne]

What the hell, I wanna play too!

ATi is a waste of money right now if you plan to do anything with GPU. I can't recommend a product that currently doesn't properly support OpenCL and only has 1GB of RAM. Until they can show solid drivers with OpenCL, they are off my recommendation list.

Funny you should mention that:
ATI Just released their new card with 4GB Ram and full OpenCL Support
Look here: http://www.cgchannel.com/2010/09/ati...firepro-v9800/

[Donald2B]

Sweet! Another new card with great specs, let's hope the first couple round of drivers are better than those for the 480! Look forward to seeing this thing in action.

[Alan Iglesias]

Yeah, it does sound interesting indeed, especially with the 4gigs of display memory. I'm trying to figure out how many cores on the board. The spec sheet PDF (http://www.amd.com/us/Documents/ATI_..._DataSheet.pdf) says 1600 "Stream Processors" - could they be talking about cores here? If so and if the OpenCL implementaion is something Vlado can work with, then I'd love to see this thing rock.

-Alan

[dlparisi]

The ATI HD5970 actually has 3200 stream processors, albeit with 2gb of RAM though. According to their website they say it has OpenCL support with a "OpenCL compliant driver and SDK release scheduled for later in 2010". Hopefully they can get their act together.

[pskdude]

lets not forget it has a pricetag of 3499.00......O_O

[Saulman]

I'd like to thank everyone once again for their help in this thread. I'm amazed at the response and wish a thread like this existed when I was searching a few weeks ago. I'm sure many people like myself will find the knowlege in here very useful indeed. I've learned a lot and also learned that I don't know a lot.

Having decided against building my own, I've been to SCAN, pcspecialist and various others for quotes.

Here's what I'm now leaning towards following what I've learned from this thread.............

Overclocked CPU
OverClocked Intel® Core™i7 Six Core Processor i7-980X (3.33GHz @ max 4.00GHz)
Motherboard
ASUS® P6X58D-E: DDR3, USB 3.0, SATA 6.0GB/s, 3-Way SLI
Memory (RAM)
12GB KINGSTON HYPER-X TRI-DDR3 1600MHz, X.M.P (6 x 2GB KIT)
Graphics Card
1GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX460 GDDR5 PCI EXPRESS - DirectX® 11
2nd Graphics Card
1GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX460 GDDR5 PCI EXPRESS - DirectX® 11
Memory - 1st Hard Disk
80GB Intel® X25-M 2.5" SSD (34nm / upto 250MB/sR | 70MB/sW)***SPECIAL***
2nd Hard Disk
1TB WD CAVIAR BLACK WD1002FAEX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)

There are other things included here, like sound card, card readers, wireless card, etc. + a 24" monitor which is £149.... (everything I need)

Total price - £2430 inc VAT and Delivery.


This is from pcspecialist. I've asked SCAN if they can match it and they can't get near.


Your thoughts would again be greatly apreciated.

I also have a question........in laymans terms, what's the point of two graphics cards?