New PC

[eyepiz]

Well, perhaps. But it will depend upon a lot of factors. With Xeons you need ECC RAM and the price of the board goes up too. And of course you will probably be going for 2 x processors. Overall i think the 5960X will still work out well in terms of value for money over a similar budget Xeon setup. But we'll see once they hit the market.

Asus boards don't need ECC RAM with Xeons and you could always start with one CPU and add other one later.

[alexyork]

Asus boards don't need ECC RAM with Xeons and you could always start with one CPU and add other one later.

But then to get the equivalent render power from a single xeon you'd need something truly high-end to match an overclocked i7 5960X, which I would imagine would cost more than the 5960X, making it more or less a bad idea. Except that you can later add that second xeon to the same board...

[eyepiz]

But then to get the equivalent render power from a single xeon you'd need something truly high-end to match an overclocked i7 5960X, which I would imagine would cost more than the 5960X, making it more or less a bad idea. Except that you can later add that second xeon to the same board...

Overclocking is the luck of the draw, you may get a good chip you may not or it may have issues after a few months of heave use. I would not compare an overclocked CPU to a non OC'd one...You always sacrifice satiability for speed, and when your batch of renders freezes during the middle of the night because of something that could of had to do with your OC it's not vary fast after all.

[peterguthrie]

I've had loads of i7 based machines, maybe I was just unlucky but I used to suffer from hardware related crashes quite often. With xeon and ecc memory all that is a thing of the past thankfully. how do all you people using non xeon machines get on in that regard? just curious.

[Pixelcon]

never had a crash on my i7 machine...


edit: Peter, I think I need to change my avatar :/ We wore the same dress to the party...

[peterguthrie]

OK, must just be my home made machines.

Excellent style, we should do a MIR/PG collaboration sometime

[eyepiz]

I frequently crashed on i7 and older machines...I used the high end gaming rigs for over 10 years. now I'm on Xeons and ECC it has made a big difference in terms of stability.

[peakyfreak80]

Personally, I went with the dual Xeon setup because its a lot of power in one box. You can definitely get more speed per core out of a nice i7, but to equal the number of cores in a dual xeon setup, you'd have to get 3 computers. To me, that means 3x the problems, and 3x less space. While I love my setup, it is very hot (as someone else mentioned) so I upgraded my case/cooling setup. And, as Dadal mentioned, the Supermicro boards are great, but will require a special case/PSU (if you don't get their pre-built barebones setups). If you can afford to drop the extra $$$, I'd definitely go for the dual xeon setup, but if you're looking for a bang for your buck option, I'd go with a nice i7, or wait for the new processors to come out.

[Neilg]

Our i7's never crash, i've not even seen a hardware related crash in over 5 years.
I dont think the slight speed increase from xeons is worth it for what we do either - i'd rather have a couple more boxes for animations.

[Pixelcon]

Totally A handful of us will see you at SOA!

My i7 is a home-made too... Wonder whats going on there with yours then...

OK, must just be my home made machines.

Excellent style, we should do a MIR/PG collaboration sometime

[Morbid Angel]

I love the i7, I have a mix of xeons and i7, ranging from i7 2600k and i7 3930k to xeon x5650. Though xeons suppose to have double the cores i7 under overclock performs just as well. Even today, with my old 2600k and overclock of 4.5 ghz, they still rock during rendering, and they are only 4 physical cores! 4 physical cores vs 12 physical cores in xeon! yes, of course 12 cores is faster. But its not faster by a huge factor, and the price...well xeons are just way too overpriced.
What I do nowadays though is I look through ebay and find slightly older models of dell workstations and you can get some great deals that way. I recently bought 2 dells xeons 5650 with 38 gb of ram for $1000 usd with quadro 4000 in one of them. Now I think thats a good value for money But buying a brand new xeons like e2695 or 2697 is just crazily overpriced.

[alexyork]

This talk of stability is interesting. My hunch is that those of you with stability issues on your overclocked i7 machines it's coming down to too aggressive overclocking, dodgy settings or dodgy hardware. I have had something like 6 or more overclocked high-end i7 machines over the years, all built by myself but I bought a pre-overclocked mobo/cpu/ram bundle from OCUK - they know what they're doing and the overclocks have been 100% rock-solid stable during 24/7 rendering. Literally zero BSOD or stability issues. My current 3930k workstation is overclocked to 4ghz with 32GB RAM and renders happily for days on end with zero issues.

I think you have to rule out stability from the equation because if it's done right, an i7 is just as reliable as a xeon rig, but costs far less for a similar performance. That money saving means you can spend more on additional machines for a network, resulting in greater net power, or more money on other components like screens and cards and storage etc.

But this is just my experience.

[tricky]

We are generally moving over to XEONs for workstations these days. i7s do make good cheap render boxes.

[Companioncube]

This talk of stability is interesting. My hunch is that those of you with stability issues on your overclocked i7 machines it's coming down to too aggressive overclocking, dodgy settings or dodgy hardware. I have had something like 6 or more overclocked high-end i7 machines over the years, all built by myself but I bought a pre-overclocked mobo/cpu/ram bundle from OCUK - they know what they're doing and the overclocks have been 100% rock-solid stable during 24/7 rendering. Literally zero BSOD or stability issues. My current 3930k workstation is overclocked to 4ghz with 32GB RAM and renders happily for days on end with zero issues.

I think you have to rule out stability from the equation because if it's done right, an i7 is just as reliable as a xeon rig, but costs far less for a similar performance. That money saving means you can spend more on additional machines for a network, resulting in greater net power, or more money on other components like screens and cards and storage etc.

But this is just my experience.

my experience is the same. if you choose good parts and don't go crazy with the overclocking then stability isn't an issue. i generally stick with asus motherboards as they are really good at doing regular bios updates for the enthusiast boards.
For me there is no better bang for buck as the i7 extreme range.

[alexyork]

my experience is the same. if you choose good parts and don't go crazy with the overclocking then stability isn't an issue. i generally stick with asus motherboards as they are really good at doing regular bios updates for the enthusiast boards.
For me there is no better bang for buck as the i7 extreme range.

My thoughts too. Frankly if money is no object then obviously Xeon systems are the way to go. But I'd still rather buy a small farm of i7s. The parts are cheaper so if something needs replacing it's much less of a hassle. The question will be, how well will the 5960X overclock. If it can get to 4ghz then it's going to be a killer chip.