Poor man's Blender workstation

eestebanjjosue · Jun 24, 2013

Hi, I'm thinking of building a render rig. I'll be using it to work with Blender and the cycles engine. My main concern is budget so I want to get the best hardware at a reasonable price point, maybe 1500 usd would do the trick.

I live in Ecuador but the components in my country are really expensive... (a gtx 660 for 350usd) so I'll be buying most of the components from Amazon, since Newegg/Tiger Direct does not allow me to buy with a foreing credit card (I haven't tried for some time on those sites, maybe someone can suggest me a solution).

I want to know what would be better for rendering purposes.
Some questions that I have:

What processor should be better: i7 - 3770k, i7 4770k or i7 3820k (I think the 2011 socket is better for multiGPUs configs).

I am thinking of buying a pair of 660s now and maybe add another one later on. But how long would it take for Nvidia to release the 760 series and how much will they cost? Do you think that the CUDA performance would be significantly higher than the 660 series?

Would a 850w power supply be enough considering that (maybe) I will use 3 GPUs.

Parts that I don't need... Case, keyboard, mouse, monitor, OS.

Not sure if I'll be overclocking since the components are for rendering and maybe can kill them.

As a sidenote: the 660 would be enough to play some games on 1080p?

Thanks in advance.

legokill101 · Jun 24, 2013

i would buy a i5-3550p and the bigest amd gpu you can fine because nvidia cards have SINGIFICANT artifcail caps on there rendering preformance so assuming the render ap you using suports gpu acelartion a 7950 or somthing like that would be ideal

legokill101 · Jun 24, 2013

just checked it does so go with a 7950 and save up to add another in crossfire also for rednering the more ram the better and it only needs to be 1330

eestebanjjosue · Jun 24, 2013

Thanks the 7950 would be awesome but Blender doesnt support OpenGL/OpenCL right now, just CUDA so i have to stick to Nvidia. And not sure If AMD performs similar to what Intel does when rendering using the CPU.

jinayhvora · Jun 24, 2013

here you go http://pcpartpicker.com/p/19MeM

eestebanjjosue · Jun 24, 2013

Thanks man, that looks awesome!!, but just a silly question(maybe)... Is not better to go for a 2011 platform since they can make 2 videocards work in x16... not sure if that would make a big impact on render performance later on, cause form what I've been looking two 660s performs similar to a single Titan... (Just in Blender).
Not sure if a single 770 will perform similar to a pair of 660, but its nice to have some room for a nice upgrade later on... and will a 650W power supply be enough to run two of the 770s?

jinayhvora · Jun 24, 2013

u need around 800W to run 2 770s....also i would suggest against 2011 as it is too expensive to fit ur budget. and u will never need anything more than 2 770s

eestebanjjosue · Jun 24, 2013

For gaming... sure 770s kind of overkill...
but for rendering... ( I saw a guy with a pair of Titans).
Does the i7 3820 performs similar to the i7 3770k or 4770k?

eestebanjjosue · Jul 1, 2013

The gtx760 is out now... would it be better to go that way.... a pair of those would be around 500... (maybe 580usd for the 4gb models).

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