Should I consider S940 and ECC for a graphics workstation?

[screw3d]

The budget isn't monstrous - just about $2000-$2500 for a rig I'm building for a friend. He'll be mainly using Maya, and here's an example of his work, which he rates as his "average" complexity.

So far, I'm think about going for the (a lot more expensive) S940 route for ECC support, because I'm spec-ing 4GBs of RAM, and the renders can take a day or more.

I think I will forego SCSI because of cost, and also mainly because renders are not disk-intensive.

Also, considering everything else equal, would any of the single dual-core Opterons outperform dual Xeon 3.6GHzs?

 

[DrMrLordX]

Um, correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you use ECC RAM on s939 too? I was under the impression that s940 chips supported/required registered RAM while s939 doesn't support or require it. Yep! here we go:

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:FfS...html+s939+ECC&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1

Getting ECC support is just a matter of finding a board that supports it. That would probably be easier in s940, granted. Anyway, with that much RAM and with renders that take that much time, ECC sure as heck wouldn't hurt. I think it's more useful for mission-critical stuff like high-performance databases, webservers, etc.

As far as a single-core Opteron outperforming dual Xeons at 3.6 ghz, I would say no unless it's overclocked to absurd speeds. A dual-core Opteron, however, would definitely do the job as long as you're talking about single-core Xeons. The 180 or 185 would do ya.

 

[screw3d]

Thanks DrMrLordX. That'll actually make things much easier for me. I guess at this point, the only real advantage going for S940 on a workstation is multiple CPUs? I know I'm oversimplifying this

 

[snoturtle]

I think I remember someone saying that Maya supports network rendering
If it does why not get 2 dual core single socket setups?

 

[screw3d]

Originally posted by: snoturtle
I think I remember someone saying that Maya supports network rendering
If it does why not get 2 dual core single socket setups?

Yeah it does, but no way doing that with $2500.

 

[screw3d]

Inputs?

 

[snoturtle]

Originally posted by: screw3d

Originally posted by: snoturtle
I think I remember someone saying that Maya supports network rendering
If it does why not get 2 dual core single socket setups?

Yeah it does, but no way doing that with $2500.

Why not?

The second one doesn't need much behind cpu and ram
don't need a big hard drive or a fancy vid card

Shouldn't cost more than 600-800 for the render node


Heres an example
ASUS Vintage-AH1 barebone socket 939 ~140 shipped
x2 3800 ~300 shipped
2x 1 gig memory sticks ~130 shipped
80 gig drive ~ 40 shipped

Little over 600 and you have a render node
could build 2 like that and still have enough left over for a nice workstation that would still be usable while you were rendering