Fast but economic workstation needed

Common Common :: Hardware
1

Beside my official work i sometimes get external render jobs from architects. Meanwhile i was still able to use my 7 year old dell xps notebook for this, it has a dualcore pentium with 2,33ghz overclockable to 3ghz and it did the job really well, but my computer at work which is a dual xeon E5-2630 with 12 cores is about 20 times faster on particular renderings, which makes me quite sad. i cannot wait 12 hours for a single rendering anymore if i could have it in 30 minutes.
I am not interested in cloud-rendering services, but would like an own machine that is still affordable but also quite quick.

What made me think was when I tested some other computers at our office for speed and noticed that their quadcore single CPU was rendering nearly as fast as my dual hexa core. A i7-3770K @3.5 Ghz was maybe 10-15% slower than my machine.

Is there a way to speed up the whole thing even more without spending a fortune? Ca a i7-3770-type cpu be used in dual mode, or are the Xeons rather meant for this?

I am no hardware expert, but some tips for particular CPUs that really do well with Vray are welcome!

btw. i would be willing to spend about 2000€ for a new workstation (german prices, not sure how much those translate to US-prices where everything seems much cheaper)
max. for the whole computer 3000€ including GFX card and harddisks etc, but I am mainly interested which motherboard and which CPUs are best regarding my needs.

Thanks a lot to anyone who can help!

Best regards, Olaf

2

Have a look at http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
It should give you a rough idea of the comparative speed of processors.

And yes, only Xeons can be used in multiprocessor configurations.

3

I dug this site the last time I looked:

Granted, most of it is oriented towards the gaming community.
Please post your findings!

4

thanks for this list, which is interesting.
according to this list, indeed my E5-2630 xeon has only 8,907 points, while the i7-3770K reaches 9,650 points. but i don’t understand why even 2 xeons seem to be hardly faster than a single core i7.

5

I think these benchmarks are only on a single chip? not using dual Xeons.

Someone correct me if Im wrong. Im also using these graphs to help pick a new home workstation

6

Yes, that is correct. There is another chart for multiprocessor systems here - http://www.cpubenchmark.net/multi_cpu.html

7

For your budget you could get a overclockable 6-core (12 with hyperthreading) i7 cpu such as 4930k on the x79 platform. For a cheaper option go for Haswell 4770k on z87 motherboard. Check out www.pcfoo.com for some workstation configurations.

8

I have just bought my new workstation few dasys ago, spending ca 2200 euro. I have been searching for the best solution for really long time and this is what I came out with:

CPU: Intel Core i7-3930K 3,2 GHz s. 2011 Box or i7-4930K they perform pretty much the same (I know - it is dissapointing)
cooling: Noctua NH-D14 SE2011
MB: MSI X79A-GD65 (8D)
GPU:GeForce GTX 780 EVGA 3GB 2xDVI&HDMI&DP (PCI-E) Superclocked ACX Cooler z NVIDIA GeForce Experience™
RAM: Corsair DDR3 2x 8GB 1600MHz CL10 Vengeance LP x4 (64GB in total)
SSD: Intel 2.5’’ SSD/530 MLC 240 GB (Serial ATA 3) 7mm Single Pack

Did you already buy your machine?