Build for 3D Rendering/Modeling/Intensive Graphic Designing.

[thebeatfiend]

Hello Good Friends,

I did a good bit of research but am still not able to decide. I would love to get your guys input. I have a small new business and I am on a very tight budget.

Type of Work:
3D Rendering
Product Modeling
Intensive Graphic Designing

Programs:
Autodesk Apps i.e. MAYA
Adobe Apps i.e. Photoshop, Illustrator

Questions:
CPU 3770K (1155) vs 3820 (2011)?

Graphics Card
I know which cards to get for gaming etc.. However I am a bit unsure on what I really need for 3D rendering/modeling/graphic designing.

Memory/RAM Drive
From what I have read, the cas latency for intel doesn't matter any more due to the structure. Is this true, because like this I can grab cheap 16GB of ram and make a 10GB RAM Drive.

If you guys can advise on some black friday deals on the components i need that would be much appreciated.

Thank you so much friends.

 

[T_Yamamoto]

What is your budget?
And mods please move this to general

 

[crazymonkeyzero]

Your budget is a critical factor in making any choice.
I would definitely consider the i7 3930k if you can afford it due to it having 6 cores and 12 threads, which should help your your rendering amd modeling immensly .Lga 2011 is good for workstation use due to high memory bandwidth, so the quad core 3820 is the only other lga2011 choice, if youre on a budget. Alternatively you could consider Xeon E5s as well.

Also grab as much memory as possible since its dirt cheap these days and you will actually make good use of it. 32gb kit should be good. Low latencies and low voltages are always better, but not a huge difference. Grab some ddr3 1600 that is 1.5v and you are set to go. Good vendors are mushkin, gskill, samsung and corsair.

Im not too sure about the video card you would need, so hopefully someone else here could help answer that

 

[Denithor]

Okay, the basic question here is socket 1155 versus socket 2011.

Socket 2011 typically costs more (motherboards are priced higher) but offers a few key advantages. You can use more RAM on these boards (8 sockets allows for up to 64GB versus 32GB max for socket 1155 boards). And you can run higher core count chips (3930k has 6/12 cores/threads). In addition the RAM runs in quad-channel mode which gives much higher bandwidth (helps in some applications - not sure about Maya).

Now, however, you are basically negating both of the real advantages by what you say in your post - you are considering the 3820 (which does not offer any core/thread advantage over 3770K) and you are only looking at 16GB of memory.

If these assumptions are correct I would certainly save the bucks and go socket 1155. If you aren't planning to overclock, save yourself some bucks and get this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819117286

Regarding the video card, I believe Maya runs better on workstation cards (with OpenGL drivers enabled) so spend your extra cash on a higher model FireGL/Quadro card. I don't know which has the better performance/price ratio right now, others can fill this in for you.

 

[ShadowVVL]

Yeah 3d rendering is all about cores,ram and maybe ssd. modeling in maya and max brings up another question, gaming gpu vs professional workstation gpu?

 

[jpiniero]

I would not overclock if you are using it for like actual work. Maybe a Xeon?

 

[Idontcare]

I have a small new business and I am on a very tight budget.

If you are using this computer to make money then you really should consider not overclocking. Silent data corruption is problematic but doesn't cost you lost customers if you are just overclocking a gaming computer for home use and the install files get trashed.

Overclocking a computer that will be generating numbers and results that make you a living is playing with fire.

That said, some things in business are what I term "disposable results". I overclock some of my business computers because the data they are crunching is useful for a brief period of time and then replaced in a matter of minutes anyways. What matters in those situations is that you have safeguards in place to detect when silent corruption is occurring.

Waiting until enough silent corruption errors accumulate such that the system locks up or reboots is not sufficient detection

Type of Work:
3D Rendering
Product Modeling
Intensive Graphic Designing

Programs:
Autodesk Apps i.e. MAYA
Adobe Apps i.e. Photoshop, Illustrator

Questions:
CPU 3770K (1155) vs 3820 (2011)?

With those apps and types of work, any reason why an FX-8350 is not on the table? For a budget minded build, your workload is screaming "piledriver" to me.

Memory/RAM Drive
From what I have read, the cas latency for intel doesn't matter any more due to the structure. Is this true, because like this I can grab cheap 16GB of ram and make a 10GB RAM Drive.

Uhg, ram drives...I have used these in a business environment and they are the pinnacle of unreliable devils. I even used an expensive one that had auto-saves to disk and auto-restore on system boot and so forth and the problem was anytime the system did not perform a clean shutdown I would lose the ramdrive disk image and everything that had been on it.

I strongly encourage you to get 16GB of ram but don't allocate any of it towards a ramdrive, with your apps the apps themselves will put that ram to good use on their own.

Instead I recommend looking for a good 240/256GB SSD...something like the Samsung 830 or OCZ Vertex 3. Both are one generation behind the leading edge which makes them silly cheap but price/performance is amazing.

 

[moonbogg]

I would second the suggestion to consider the FX-8350 due to budget constraints. That chip actually makes sense for you. Watch out on the prices for current generation Quadro Cards or FireGL cards. There is nothing wrong with buying a slightly older generation card.

 

[T_Yamamoto]

Ssd+8320

 

[ShadowVVL]

I would not overclock if you are using it for like actual work. Maybe a Xeon?

max,maya and adobe are fine with OCing. I think when working in Auto CAD and Plasma CAD programs that OC causes issues because the math is more critical.



edit: never mind, I didn't know about Silent data corruption until after reading IDC's Post.

 

[SammichPG]

Ssd+8320

I agree, piledriver gives competitive performance when you have software that uses 8 threads.
The money saved in the cpu+motherboard can go towards more ram, a bigger ssd or a faster video card.

3D rendering scales nicely with network rendering afaik, if you have other computers why not use their CPUs?

A bunch of cheap dual cores might be faster than a very expensive workstation.

 

[beginner99]

I would second the suggestion to consider the FX-8350 due to budget constraints. That chip actually makes sense for you. Watch out on the prices for current generation Quadro Cards or FireGL cards. There is nothing wrong with buying a slightly older generation card.

And AFAIK you can get ECC RAM with FX-8350 which you can't with the 3770.

On the other hand, the price difference between hardware is pretty small compared to the price of the software (and wages of course ). So for commercial use, were it can matter a lot if you can render even just 10% more a day, it would make sense to go for a 3930k (which is more like 50% faster than FX-8350). Yes it's much more expensive but whole Workstation cost difference will still be less than $500 more for being able (pessimistically) of getting 20% more work done every single day. It is well worth it because you either get more work done in total and every job finished faster!!!

So IMHO, the money is well invested in a more expensive 3930k.

 

[phenomkid7]

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product...82E16819116502

 

[sgrinavi]

Type of Work:
3D Rendering
Product Modeling
Intensive Graphic Designing

Programs:
Autodesk Apps i.e. MAYA
Adobe Apps i.e. Photoshop, Illustrator
.

I do all that stuff - 80 hours a week, give or take and have tried all sorts of workstation solutions - at the end of the day my Dell M6600 laptop has proven to be the most cost effective and productive machine. You can get them on the business outlet with all the high end parts for $4k....

 

[thebeatfiend]

Thank you everyone for your excellent responses.

Budget: Not too important, as someone mentioned relative to overall cost it isn't much. That said, I would still like to get a better bang for the buck.

OC: I agree, I won't overclock this since it is for work. I will however run this on turbo.

CPU: i7 3770K. I want to stay in the intel family since all my other pcs are intel, it is easier for me to swap cpus. I have a 2600K on hand do you think it is still worth getting the 3770k.

RAM: **16GB DDR3 2133 $89 vs 32 GB 1600 $109**???
I'll drop the RAM drive due to unreliability issue you guys mention.

GPU: I have a Radeon 6870, do you think this will do.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-pla-_-NA-_-NA

 

[Idontcare]

I have a 2600K on hand do you think it is still worth getting the 3770k.

I have both the 2600k and 3770k, if you have a 2600k already then don't waste your time/money getting a 3770k if you are thinking of it as an upgrade because it really isn't.

If you need yet-another-rig to complement your existing 2600k rig then yes, by all means, get the 3770k instead of getting another 2600k and benefit from the lower power usage.

RAM: **16GB DDR3 2133 $89 vs 32 GB 1600 $109**???

For your apps, if it were me I'd get the 32GB of DDR3-1600 ram over the 16GB of DDR3-2133 ram. There will be nearly no performance benefit in terms of DDR3-1600 vs DDR3-2133, but the apps themselves will put that extra ram to work.

 

[Ferzerp]

consider an E5-2660 dual socket workstation. If you need to double your processing power, drop a second in.

That will give you 8 actual cores (and 16 logical cores) with the ability to step up to 16C/32T.

 

[ShadowVVL]

GPU: I have a Radeon 6870, do you think this will do. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-pla-_-NA-_-NA

the radeon hd 6870 will work fine but workstation gpus are supposed to be alot faster in 3d apps.I think you should stick with the 6870 for now and upgrade when or if you need to.I think it is worth doing some research on quadros or fire pros for max and maya .

 

[thebeatfiend]

You guys are freaking Awesome. Excellent advice, I will sleep on it and then buy on BF.

Again thank you.