Looking for CPU buying advice for render jobs

[Chrishuff1]

I have a client who's an architect / design firm. A year or so ago we build a pretty beefy PC to just sit there and render their CAD projects. Specs are:

i7-5930K Haswell-E 6 Core @ 3.5 Ghz
Asus Sabertooth X99 Mobo
32GB DDR4 Ballistix Sport RAM
250GB MX200 SSD
GTX Titan Z

Recently they had a power surge that took out the mobo and power supply. As we are rebuilding they are thinking of upgrading the CPU or going dual CPU. We've been toying with doing a i7-6950x 10 Core vs doing Dual Xeon E5-2680 V3's...or should I look at getting a 2nd Titan Z and running SLI? I'm pretty n00bish when it comes to SLI and dual CPU's.

Thanks for any advice you can offer!

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Sounds more like the Boss's Gaming Rig that also rendered CAD projects.

1) Is it possible to farm out their projects to multiple systems?
2) Are their projects dependent on CPU or GPU performance?
2a) What is the performance improvement from GPGPU?
3) How multithreaded?

If you have a heavily threaded workload, like Blender rendering or something, a used 1U or 2U multisocket server like a Dell R620 is usually a good buy, in terms of performance/$. If your workload can be cut into smaller jobs and distributed to multiple systems, getting more than one server is a better way to get more performance. (linear price/performance scaling instead of the typical law-of-diminishing-returns cost curve.)

Example: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-PowerE...Z-Six-Core-CPU-128GB-RAM-Server-/182387844236

The larger systems like the 720 or 820 can hold and power full-height GPUs, if needed. But you tend to pay a pretty hefty premium for the quad-socket 8xx series. I'd rather HAVE an quad-socket than two dualies, but I'd rather PAY for the two dualies.

Obviously HP et al have similar systems available - you owe it to your clients to be a good shopper. But I'm mostly familiar with recent Dell servers.

Also, get a freakin' power filter and UPS. Yikes.

 

[Chrishuff1]

1. Not really. They built this specifically so they wouldn't have to do that. It takes all night to render a job on their workstations but a few hours on the "farm" as they call it.
2. Based on what they've told me, it's more GPU. Not sure about your 2a...?
3. Could you clarify this? Not sure I or they would know...

Unfortunately they don't have space for a rackmount server or we for sure would have gone down that road. We did have a UPS

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Without more knowledge about the nature of the workload, it's really not easy to make a good hardware recommendation. Can you find out what program(s) they're running?

rackmount servers don't need a huge amount of space, and one or two don't even really need to be in a rack - although you generally want them somewhere else, because they're loud.

 

[Phynaz]

What software are they running?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

https://www.servethehome.com/gigabyte-r280-g2o-gpugpgpu-rackmount-server-review/

 

[SandInMyShoes]

A surprising amount of CAD software is only single threaded! I would spend some on site time watching Task Manager to see if it's actually utilizing more than one CPU core. GPU rendering is much faster, but hardware and engine support can be spotty, so again you should confirm the GPU is actually being utilized. Design the hardware around what the software can actually utilize, or you may end up with lots of cores that sit around idle.