Advice Building VFX Workstation

[joeym4130]

New here...been building PCs since I was about 12, I'm now 25

I'm starting work on a small-ish indie film but with decent amount of VFX work for one person to direct. Part of the deal is I get to build a new rig for home use.

Let me start by answering the FAQ:

1. What YOUR PC will be used for.
HEAVY 3D Rendering, particle/fluid simulations, and compositing. Video editing as well, but secondary. Final Outputs for film will be full 2K-4K resolution so lots of data will be moved around

2. What YOUR budget is.
max $4500 USD for PC only. Monitors, TVs, etc separate budget.

3. What country YOU will be buying YOUR parts from.
USA

5. If YOU intend on using any of YOUR current parts, and if so, what those parts are.
Yes,
Nvidia Quadro GFX card
(3) WD 1TB SATA drives

7. IF YOU plan on overclocking or run the system at default speeds.
Default

8. WHEN do you plan to build it?
Within the next 3 months

Boxx is selling one of their stations with the AMD 6 core dual socket setup, something I thought about, but also still have to think about value. i.e. I dont want to spend an extra $500 for a negligible performance gain. The renders I use can split the jobs up into many threads (mental ray renderer mostly)

I am really looking for a dual socket mobo setup. I don't have a render farm, so I need to use this and my other system for rendering, and it needs muscle. Fortunately I have the graphics cards already. RAM I was thinking 32gb, our mac pro station has that and it seems to move along good with that

Only thing I was hoping to get, if there was some left over cash after the build was 1 or 2 SSD disks to put certain projects on while they're in production then move them to the other disks after completion. And then use the other SSD to put the OS and critical apps on

Opinions, thoughts? Mostly what I'm stuck is on the processor. AMD, Intel doesnt matter to me, just best bang for the buck at pushing the numbers..my curent rig is about 4.5 years old so she is getting to that point.....

 

[Denithor]

Welcome to the forums!

You want to look into the dual processor Xeon 5570 chip systems. Benchmarked here in 3ds Max 2008 against a quad (4 processor) Xeon 7350 setup and a quad Opteron 8384 setup with interesting results. The main thing is a dual quad-core Nehalem with HT beats out a quad quad-core processor AMD setup (and will therefore destroy a single six-core AMD processor). (Just to clarify - this is two quad-core Nehalem chips with HT beating four AMD quad-core chips.)

You should also take a spin around the whole it.anandtech.com site.

I think you can get preconfigured systems from Apple and maybe Dell/HP with these processors.

Plenty of memory goes without saying and one (or more) of the Intel SSDs would be icing. Actually - there are rumors Intel will launch a newer generation of 34nm SSDs in a few weeks so if you're looking at 2-3 months before buying/building this setup those should be available.

 

[joeym4130]

Thanks for the advice!
I'm going to price out some dual Nehalem builds and check out the options then. They sound fantastic!

I was trying to decide if it was better value to get a preconfig then building my own. I never have bought a PC in my life, always built..have to do some name brand shopping perhaps.

And no apple for me haha....a few of the applications i use are PC only. We have dual socket intels in our mac pro stations at work, and they are very nice, but even with windows thru boot camp there are a lot of issues trying to run the software stable, so I need a equally impressive PC

I think i will wait the 2-3 months then before finalizing, even if the SSDs still arent perfect, I kind of want to throw it in just to have it