Rendering Station Advice

[joeyg2391]

i was thinking of building a multimedia and graphics station. i was planning on buying these product. Top of the line MSI SLI mobo, Geforce 6800 GT, 1 Gig CAS2 memory, 300GIG 8mb hard drive, and athlon 3500 64 bit. Would having two GPU's really show a significant boost in rendering compared to one. I use sketchup a lot and need to rendering drawings fast. is this a good setup? If not what do u reccomend i purchase? I have a 1100 budget. No pentium please. Also what's the difference between cores on the 3500+. Which one is better?
Thanks for all the help guys.

 

[ionoxx]

For your budget, it sounds like a good machine, i would suggest 1 application drive and a data drive though. It would run a lot smoother. The dual processor option would help but you would have to nearly double your budget.

 

[Matthias99]

I'm not familiar with 'Sketchup', and their website is pretty vague with hardware requirements:

Recommended:

* 800 MHz Pentium¨ III processor or higher
* 256 MB RAM
* 3-button, scroll-wheel mouse
* Video card that is 100% OpenGL compliant

Thanks, guys, that covers about every video card made in the last decade. :disgust: They do recommend using an NVIDIA card, and most OpenGL rendering-type programs run better on their 'Quadro' line of professional workstation cards, which are optimized for OpenGL use. I would ask other people who use the program (maybe on their message boards?) and see what they recommend.

Using SLI might provide a noticeable boost in 3D preview framerates if that is your bottleneck. Note that most "rendering" programs (e.g. Maya or Renderman) use true raytracing and other sophisticated techniqes for producing CGI or high-quality stills and do not use the GPU at all, so it won't help there. I don't know if this program does that as well, or if it just 'renders' things on-screen via your videocard.

 

[joeyg2391]

so is it based on cpu performance?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: joeyg2391
so is it based on cpu performance?

The realtime modelling uses your 3D card. I'm not sure if it also offers the ability to do CPU-based rendering/raytracing to produce high-quality 2D stills. You're the one using the software; you tell me!

 

[Duvie]

You could get 6800's and then softmod them to quadro cards...the opengl performance is a big boost....Do a search on SLI setups of quadro cards...I am not sure how many rendering apps will take advanatge of them...

 

[Zucarita9000]

High-end video card accelerate real time graphics, but wont do much when rendering the final comp. CPU and RAM is the important thing here (remember, professional render farms do not have high end graphics, but have multiple CPUs and lots of RAM)

You don't need SLI, neither a 6800 GT. Get an Nvidia Quadro, ATI FireGL or Wildcat Realizm. Get at least 2GB of RAM and two or three hard drives.

What sodtware are you using?

 

[joeyg2391]

I'm using 3d max, Viz, sketchup