Looking to build a PovRay/Sage workstation for under $1500

[Chaotic42]

For whatever reason I really enjoy the heck out of rendering isosurfaces in PovRay. I've been thinking about throwing together a system to render them because some of the renders take days on my main system and that prevents me from gaming and whatnot.

I also enjoy tinkering with things like Sage (mathematics software), and who doesn't want an excuse to build a new system?

I can't find any good benchmarks on Opterons for PovRay, but it does take advantage of multiple cores, so I figure there's no harm in going AMD since their 12-core Opteron is fairly cheap. I just need the CPU, motherboard, memory, and a power supply. I've got everything else. My thinking is that I'll go with a dual Socket G34 board, but only one CPU. That way I can throw another one in later if I feel that I need it. What do you all think about this build?

ASUS KGPE-D16 SSI EEB Server Motherboard
Dual Socket G34 AMD SR5690
$410

Kingston 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR3 1600 ECC Registered
KVR16R11S4K4/32
$387

AMD Opteron 6344 Abu Dhabi 2.6GHz Socket G34 115W
OS6344WKTCGHKWOF
$450

SeaSonic G-750 SSR-750RM 750W
$115

Total: $1362

I've already got a case and hard drives. My concerns are that the motherboard, and in fact the whole concept of a second CPU, is just overkill and that I may be able to get better performance out of a single-socket Intel solution for a similar price.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Any PovRay users out there?

Thanks

 

[Ken g6]

Here's a POVRay Bench. No Opterons, but similar desktop processors. I see that the FX-8350, which has twice the processors of the FX-4300 with about the same clock speed, is about twice as fast. So I'd expect the Opteron, with its slower clock speed, to be about as fast as the FX-8350. Two such chips might be worth considering, but probably not at that price.

This is just for personal use, right? So you don't care about ECC RAM, and you might be interested in overclocking?

I notice Haswell had a significant impact on desktop processor speeds. Simple math suggests the 4790k (which is significantly cheaper than your price) should be faster than the 3930k (which is similar to your price) at stock, though not faster than the 4930k (which is also similar to your price). Though I guess two out of three reviews aren't done yet. Would you be interested in waiting for Haswell-E, which ought to be significantly faster still?

 

[Chaotic42]

This is just for personal use, right? So you don't care about ECC RAM, and you might be interested in overclocking?

Correct, but no overclocking. I've never been able to overclock anything ever.

I notice Haswell had a significant impact on desktop processor speeds. Simple math suggests the 4790k (which is significantly cheaper than your price) should be faster than the 3930k (which is similar to your price) at stock, though not faster than the 4930k (which is also similar to your price). Though I guess two out of three reviews aren't done yet. Would you be interested in waiting for Haswell-E, which ought to be significantly faster still?

I'd like to go ahead and get the order going soon. Render time isn't super critical since this will just be for fun and will be headless in a closed somewhere. Obviously I want bang for my buck, but there's not really any reason to wait just to get a little more performance.

 

[DominionSeraph]

The sad thing is this would be just as fast as that 12-core opteron for $165.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Proliant...638151?pt=COMP_EN_Servers&hash=item4d1ee27047

 

[Ken g6]

Then I guess the question is, what price performance?

If you don't want to overclock, I'd just get a 4790k (The k is important even if you don't overclock!) Then you could get a Z97 if you might someday overclock, or an H97 if you absolutely never will. A bare minimum 4790k build would be almost half the cost of what you proposed:

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i7-4790K 4.0GHz Quad-Core Processor ($334.99 @ NCIX US)
Motherboard: ASRock H97 PRO4 ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($76.66 @ Newegg)
Memory: PNY XLR8 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($134.00 @ Amazon)
Memory: PNY XLR8 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($134.00 @ Amazon)
Power Supply: Corsair Builder 430W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply ($19.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $699.64
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available

Note that without a discrete video card you don't need a powerful PSU.

Edit: Got it below $700 by getting a pair of 2x8GB sets.

 

[Chaotic42]

Then I guess the question is, what price performance?

If you don't want to overclock, I'd just get a 4790k (The k is important even if you don't overclock!) Then you could get a Z97 if you might someday overclock, or an H97 if you absolutely never will. A bare minimum 4790k build would be almost half the cost of what you proposed:

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i7-4790K 4.0GHz Quad-Core Processor ($334.99 @ NCIX US)
Motherboard: ASRock H97 PRO4 ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($76.66 @ Newegg)
Memory: PNY XLR8 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($134.00 @ Amazon)
Memory: PNY XLR8 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($134.00 @ Amazon)
Power Supply: Corsair Builder 430W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply ($19.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $699.64
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available

Note that without a discrete video card you don't need a powerful PSU.

Edit: Got it below $700 by getting a pair of 2x8GB sets.

Wow, thanks for going to all that trouble, I appreciate it. I'm really shocked that the Opteron's performance is going to be that bad. I know the PS was overkill, but I needed the 2x8-pin connectors for the motherboard and I like Seasonic.

 

[Ken g6]

The sad thing is this would be just as fast as that 12-core opteron for $165.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Proliant...638151?pt=COMP_EN_Servers&hash=item4d1ee27047

I'm really shocked that the Opteron's performance is going to be that bad.

I took another look at that ebay-linked server. It's 8 Core 2 cores, which provides about the same level of POVRay performance as that single Opteron or the FX-8350. (Which sorta means AMD hasn't moved beyond Core 2 performance! 😛)

Anyway, one isn't faster than a 4790k. But two could be, if you could use them together as a cluster. POVRay appears to be able to do that. Sage sort of can too, but...

MPI programming is difficult.

It would at least be cheap and interesting. 😀

 

[mfenn]

Here's a POVRay Bench. No Opterons, but similar desktop processors. I see that the FX-8350, which has twice the processors of the FX-4300 with about the same clock speed, is about twice as fast. So I'd expect the Opteron, with its slower clock speed, to be about as fast as the FX-8350. Two such chips might be worth considering, but probably not at that price.

Notice that the 8350 is right around the same performance as an i5 4670K. This is because POV-Ray rendering is almost entirely FLOPS based and each AMD Bulldozer (and derivatives) module has two integer units but only one floating point unit. AMD of course advertizes the number of integer units (because more cores is better right?), but in an FP-heavy workload, you need to divide the core count by two when comparing to Intel.

Now, the FX-8350 does in fact beat the i5 4670K, and that's because it has a clock speed advantage. POV-Ray is very straightforward linear algebra (just a lot of it), so Intel's traditional bad-code-hiding IPC advantages don't come into play becasue this code is avoid as efficient as it can be.

So looking at the benchmarks, we can roughly say that running at a given clock speed, 1 Intel core is worth 1 Bulldozer module (2 cores). If we say that a theoretical single-core Haswell running at 1GHz has a performance of 1, then:

i5 4670 = 14
FX-8350 = 16
Opteron 6344 = 15.6
i6 4930K = 20.4
Dual Opteron 6344 = 31.2

So you can say that "no", the Opteron isn't worth the platform cost cost ($860) when a normal i7 4930K + X79 system will perform better for the same price (actually less when you account for the difference in RAM price).

If you go up to $1310 platform cost by filling both sockets, then you can get more absolute performance. Intel doesn't offer a ~$450 processor that can really match the 6344 in terms of price/performance, the closes being dual E5-2620 v2's, which would score 25.2.

 

[DominionSeraph]

So looking at the benchmarks, we can roughly say that running at a given clock speed, 1 Intel core is worth 1 Bulldozer module (2 cores). If we say that a theoretical single-core Haswell running at 1GHz has a performance of 1, then:

i5 4670 = 14
FX-8350 = 16
Opteron 6344 = 15.6
i6 4930K = 20.4
Dual Opteron 6344 = 31.2

And then a Xeon E5450 would = 7.5
2x E5450 would = 15
And to go up to 2P 6344 platform cost in HP DL360's would = 120. :biggrin:

 

[Chaotic42]

So I ended up going with the 4790K as suggested, but with a different motherboard and power supply. Here's how it compares to my 3770K in the benchmark:

3770K:

Render Time:
  Photon Time:      0 hours  0 minutes  1 seconds (1.975 seconds)
              using 11 thread(s) with 2.311 CPU-seconds total
  Radiosity Time:   No radiosity
  Trace Time:       0 hours  3 minutes 13 seconds (193.775 seconds)
              using 8 thread(s) with 1531.855 CPU-seconds total
POV-Ray finished

PPS: 1352.82673203

4790K:

Render Time:
  Photon Time:      0 hours  0 minutes  1 seconds (1.200 seconds)
              using 11 thread(s) with 1.403 CPU-seconds total
  Radiosity Time:   No radiosity
  Trace Time:       0 hours  2 minutes 14 seconds (134.586 seconds)
              using 8 thread(s) with 1070.566 CPU-seconds total
POV-Ray finished

PPS: 1947.78060125

Thanks again for all of the responses.

 

[mfenn]

That's a nice improvement from Haswell and the high clock speed!

 

[DominionSeraph]

Darn, I really wanted to see what sixteen C2Q's could do.

 

[Chaotic42]

Darn, I really wanted to see what sixteen C2Q's could do.

Hah, yeah. Don't think I wasn't tempted. There's some crazy stuff out there on eBay. I like my nice silent i7 though. It's plowing away as we speak:

top - 14:42:05 up 1 day, 18:31,  3 users,  load average: 8.00, 8.01, 7.97
Tasks: 158 total,   1 running, 157 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):100.0 us,  0.0 sy,  0.0 ni,  0.0 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem:  32894216 total, 13623400 used, 19270816 free,   343560 buffers
KiB Swap:  7347196 total,        0 used,  7347196 free, 11964652 cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S  %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
15777 abcdefg  20   0  552m  93m 3648 S 799.3  0.3   9029:43 povray