help building up workstation

V-Ray for SketchUp V-Ray for SketchUp :: General
1

hi there i have 3500$ to spend for this new machine but i know nothing about this subject
i have been told it has to have a motherboard that supports 2 xeon processors! lots of ram at least 10gb and a cool gaphic card (1gb minimun)
could u advise me and give me some names so i can surf the web n try to find the items i need ..pls..thanks

below u can see what my current pc setting is

sketchup 7.0.8657.0 vray1.48.66
Windows Vista Business
Intel(R) Core™2 Quad
CPU Q8200 @ 2.33GHz 2.33 GHz
4GB de RAM
Nvidia Quadro FX 4500

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Re: help building up workstation

$3500 is an insane amount of money for a PC. But if you have it to spend, then go for it.

I just bought a Dell XPS 9100 with the

-Intel Core i7-930-
-12GB DDR3 SDRAM-
-ATI Radeon HD5970-
-1TB Hard Drive-

for less then half of 3500$

and it its a fantastic piece of equipment. Will you be using V-RAY for sketchup only? What other programs will you be using.

to be honest what you have now is pretty good!

Be wise about what you want and what you need.

3

Re: help building up workstation

I recommend investing in other machines to use as render nodes, so you can have a small render farm.

4

Re: help building up workstation

thanks dkendig and gallystops for the reply
well ill be using skethup with vray, c4d, maya and premier
and some of the adobe cs4 programs at the moment
i am working on bigger projects so that means heavier files so
i just want it to get a sort of mac pro but built up pc like
hey i say 3500 cos 8 core mac pro cost roughly that 3499
but if i can get a similar pc cheapper recommendations are welcome

5

Re: help building up workstation

i7 8xx (4cores,8threads and that’s an LGA 1156 platform which is way cheaper that the i7 9xx LGA 1366 platform) would be good for a workstation. mine roughly costs about 1300. two or three of those would be 24render buckets. about the graphic card, find one that suitable for your need because some GPU rendering programs only accepts NVIDIA for processing.

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Re: help building up workstation

spending over 2,000 on a computer is a total waste.

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Re: help building up workstation

I just bought a new computer…

Specs-

I7 950 OC to 4.2 ghz
12 Gb ram
2- GTX 460 1 Gb video
40 Gb solid state for OS
1.5 Tb 10,000 rpm hard disk
Blue Ray Drive
Liquid cooled CPU and GPU
Cooler Master Case
MSI 3 way SLI mobo

Just a little over 2000 shipped.

Justin

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Re: help building up workstation

I agree. my current setup costs less. but its only at 32bit mode

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Re: help building up workstation

“I recommend investing in other machines to use as render nodes, so you can have a small render farm.” - WHY? The spawner doesnt work for your software so what is the use of a renderfarm??

- and regarding your purchase. I would buy a top I7 with 12 or 24 gb of ram and if you wanna spend big - go for a CUDA-graphiccard like the fx1800 or even fx3800/fx5800. I have fx1800 and working in 3D is SO smooth…

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Re: help building up workstation

“I recommend investing in other machines to use as render nodes, so you can have a small render farm.” - WHY? The spawner doesnt work for your software so what is the use of a renderfarm??

It should be fixed soon, and updating to newer versions is free. DR is a feature we will have working soon. GPU rendering is something that won’t happen until way after DR works again.

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Re: help building up workstation

…unless you need a professional graphics card.
2k are spent quickly on a high end QuadroFX or FirePro 8)

We’re running on FX4600, which is about 1,5k.
IMHO, it does make sense investing in that kind of stuff.

Cheers,
Matt

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Re: help building up workstation

Yeah, if SketchUp isn’t the most power hungry app on your computer, then yes, you’re right. I was thinking from a standard SketchUp user standpoint.

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Re: help building up workstation

Hi Devin.

Thx for the message. I would love to help betatest. I work with vray4su everyday at my firm and I encounter new bugs/problems everyday…
I tried to answer your PM but the image that I was surposed to type in did not load.

Best Regards
Erik Nord