Max, mudbox, gaming, psu, graphic card dispplay ports

[sebastien]

Hello,

I want a new rig within a couple of months.
I play games but no FPS and I work a lot on max2010 64 bits, mudbox2009 64 bits, a bit of after effect and photoshop CS4.
For the sake of max and mudbox, is a Intel 955 extreme Edition something to get rather the amd 6 core? what scares me is the 512kb/core on L2 or L3 memory on the AMD! It reminds me of old cpus with 512 kb on L2 which was a bit limit for everything an 256kb on celeron meant death of eternal slow down everything.
Is mudbox a memory ram hungry cannibal? Is 24 gigs of PC 12800 advised for mudbox2009?
Will need a graphic card as well but it has to have 3 display ports of some kind to run 2 screen+1 wacom 21UX.
I do not render in Vray usually but I must admit when time comes with a 8800gtx then I better let my PC on at night because a vray render can last several hours.
Although I primarily to garage 3d games so Vray is not a primary choice for graphic card. I would like some sweetness on top of the cake and have a graphic card 3D ready...
would a 9800 firepro 4 gigs be ideal or should I stick with nvidia 980 series or perhaps a lower end quadro around 4500 series?
To run a config within the rim of this system, would a 1000 watts psu be a waste of money and electricity or would it just about right?
Thanks for your time and help!!

 

[Griffolion]

You will want to wait for Sandybridge to come out next year. They will have some good 6 core processors that you will be interested in. 24 GB of RAM is feasible of you feel it is needed, i have no exp with mudbox so thats a decision you're going to have to make yourself. But 24 GB of RAM generally shouts out dual CPU socket motherboards, are you after a dual socket build? If you are wanting to go over three screens then you will need either an ATI 5970, two GTX 580's or two ATI 6870/6850's to get good render performance for your other programs. The 68xx series by ATI and 5xx series by Nvidia are 3D ready however the 5970 isn't.

At the level i am discussing above, a 1KW PSU will be a minimum requirement, perhaps 1.1-1.2KW will be more appropriate if you're looking at a dual socket CPU setup.

 

[sebastien]

Hi Griff,
first and foremost. Thanks a bunch for the quick reply, it is much appreciated.
Look at the asus rampage III or the eva 58X (I think). They both allow up to 24 gigs of ram.
Now, I have only 6 gigs of ram on my pc and run on vista 64 pro. I cannotgo beyond 5 million polygons on screen when I work on mudbox or the PC seriously slows down. Imagine you paint a picasso of some sorts in real but when you move your arm then your arm is sluggish so in order to paint, you do not focus painting but you start focusing on wheere your arm and hand should precisely be.
That is a no-no situation and it is not suitable so well I am looking at spending around 5 to 6K.
If I can plug in 3 or more screen with 580 gtx then I will go with nvidia for 2 reasons. I always had nvidia in the past since it came out, geee it goes back to voodoo card, that was the card I had prior a nvidia...
The second reason is I think it will have more ergonomy and stability on autodesk and adobe products. I do not like it too much when you have to tweak through a control panel like eyefinity thing so your game or perhaps software becomes stable. I do not want to waste time on this, even if it means the 580 gtx is slightly behind 68xx series. At this point, and I guess we can agree that what is behind and in front is only a marginal score that does not affect or effect on human perception unless the dude wants 100 frame per seconds and rejoyce of scoring highest fps.

 

[sebastien]

Forgot to state that the asus rampage III and evga 58x (I think) are only single socket MBs.

 

[sebastien]

Sandybridge is interesting. Unfortunately, I do not understand or know what is the gain of waiting for sandybridge over a 955 extreme edition beside perhaps the price?
Wiki talked about graphic core on the cpu. Does that mean the cpu will be handling some of the gpu's work?
Sounds like conflicts and stability are coming ahead between intel, AIT, and Nvidia, no?

 

[Griffolion]

The integrated GPU of the Sandybridge cores is nothing compared to ATI and Nvidia, completely disregard it. I suggested Sandybridge because they will be significantly better than the current Nehalem architecture I series chips you see currently, and therefore it's worth the wait. Saying that, the I7 980x is still a beast of a chip.

I recommend a dual socket CPU setup for the type of work you're doing, it sounds like its very demanding work and two CPU's will be better than one in this, it will also allow you to install 24 GB of RAM without having to take the memory controller out of triple channel mode as you will be installing two sets of 3x4GB sticks in the memory slots next to each CPU. You will see significant performance benefits of having the memory in dual channel rather than single channel if you were to fill all six slots of a single CPU motherboard.

If you want to go with Nvidia then thats fine, the GTX 580 are awesome cards, very powerful, two in SLI will do anything you can throw at it. They will also support three screens, both in 2D and 3D. Two of the monitors will plug into the DVI ports on one card and the remaining monitor will plug into one of the DVI ports on the other card. I think Nvidia cards may also benefit you if the programs you use support CUDA, Nvidia's proprietary API for render peformance. Some high performance applications take advantage of CUDA for extra performance, so that may be worth investigating.

Lastly, two GTX 580's will rip through any game you throw at it, especially with a dual hex-core CPU setup. And 60FPS is the absolute maximum limit of human perception. Any FPS higher than that and it is wasted as the human eye can't process images quicker than 60FPS.