C4d rendering upgrade/replacment

sivan

June 9, 2010 11:59:00 AM

My brother in law is an architect. He designs using Cinema4d on a Q6600 based PC, and looking to improve its rendering speed. He does still images - no animations - but as a tool of design work - so it's not a shoot n' comeback tomorrow work-flow...
The Q6600 at stock speeds just takes too long to render a preview image.
My mission is to help by finding an effective yet cheap solution.
So I wonder ,would adding a second unit with, say, i7-860 as a render farm will do the trick? (or will it be helpful only in case of an image sequence?)
If not, what would you recommend?
Many Thanks

More about : c4d rendering upgrade replacment

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Alvin Smith

June 9, 2010 7:39:26 PM

Problem
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Minimum / Recommended System Requirements of current MAXON products
Solution

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Minimum System Requirements:
Mac OS X 10.4 or Windows XP / Vista
1024 MB RAM
2 GHz CPU

Recommended System Requirements:
Mac OS X 10.4 or Windows XP/Vista
2048 MB RAM
Dual Core CPU CPU
OpenGL compatible graphics card.
Additional Requirements:
DVD ROM drive
Quicktime 7
Depending on your license Windows or Macintosh only. For continued use of the program, registration with MAXON is necessary.

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sivan

June 9, 2010 11:27:31 PM

Thanks Alvin. Maybe I wasn't clear enough...
Minimum requirements are not the issue. It's more about:
1. What is the best way to improve c4d rendering performance. budget is around 1000$ (flexible though).
2. Should the money be invested in a new station (replacing a Q6600 based pc) OR in an external render farm?

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Alvin Smith

June 10, 2010 2:58:42 AM

As the SW is CPU/Compute-Intensive (GPU is less critical), about the best and only (worthy) upgrade, to the current system, would be to ...

(1) Max-out the RAM
(2) Add An 80GB INTEL G2 SSD (Boot Apps)
(3) Add two $55 Samsung F3 1TB drives ("render to" and "render from")

(the F3s wuld each use a 128GB "fast-primary" partition for active renders)

Ideally (money no object) ...

80GB G2 SSD #1 = Boot (OS, Browser, Network-Comm, Utilities, lesser apps).
80GB G2 SSD #2 = Apps (Critical/Executive Render Engines, Project admin data).
80GB G2 SSD #3 = "Read From" render drive
80GB G2 SSD #4 = "Write-To" Ouput Destination drive.
1.5TB 7200.12 (384GB "fast primary") ... the rest for archives, content, non critical.
This setup provides dedicated caching and pipelining of all render and OS ops and ALL render data-flow is in one direction ... the caches and buffers REMAIN PRIMED AND ARE ALMOST NEVER FLUSHED ... ZERO LATENCY ... MAX DATA RATES.

= Hmmm ? = (regardless of "where" the render occurs)

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Alvin Smith

June 10, 2010 3:40:07 AM

I did not see any mention of CUDA or GPU acceleration but it would behoove one to find out just exactly the GPU may contribute, to render times.

What graphics engine does the current config employ ?

= ? =

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sivan

June 19, 2010 9:51:19 AM

Alvin Smith said:

As the SW is CPU/Compute-Intensive (GPU is less critical), about the best and only (worthy) upgrade, to the current system, would be to ...

(1) Max-out the RAM
(2) Add An 80GB INTEL G2 SSD (Boot Apps)
(3) Add two $55 Samsung F3 1TB drives ("render to" and "render from")

(the F3s wuld each use a 128GB "fast-primary" partition for active renders)

Ideally (money no object) ...

80GB G2 SSD #1 = Boot (OS, Browser, Network-Comm, Utilities, lesser apps).
80GB G2 SSD #2 = Apps (Critical/Executive Render Engines, Project admin data).
80GB G2 SSD #3 = "Read From" render drive
80GB G2 SSD #4 = "Write-To" Ouput Destination drive.
1.5TB 7200.12 (384GB "fast primary") ... the rest for archives, content, non critical.
This setup provides dedicated caching and pipelining of all render and OS ops and ALL render data-flow is in one direction ... the caches and buffers REMAIN PRIMED AND ARE ALMOST NEVER FLUSHED ... ZERO LATENCY ... MAX DATA RATES.

= Hmmm ? = (regardless of "where" the render occurs)

Thanks
Anyone else think hard drives are the bottleneck in such a case?

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