$2000-$3000 - Motion Graphics/VFX/3D Workstation - No Gaming

magnus1225

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Approximate Purchase Date: August 2012

Budget Range: ~2000-3000

System Usage from Most to Least Important: 2D & 3D Motion Graphics (C4D, CS5), VFX (Particles, Smoke, Flame [3dsMax, Krakatoa, Softimage), Video Editing, Modeling

Parts Not Required: keyboard, mouse, monitors, speakers, OS, software

Preferred Website(s) for Parts: No preference

Country: U.S.

Parts Preferences: No Preference

Overclocking: No experience in this area. I’ll rely on the community for their advice.

SLI or Crossfire: No experience in this area. I’ll rely on the community for their advice.

Monitor Resolution: 1920x1080

Additional Comments: Would be nice if it was rather quiet. NO GAMING.

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Greetings everyone,

I’m Nathan, a recent graphic design graduate and looking to start full time freelancing by the end of August. I work with computers on a daily basis, and have for many years now but yet don’t really know anything about what goes on under the hood, but I’ve always wanted to learn the parts and eventually be able to build my own computer. I’ve been coming to this site every day for the past couple months learning as much as I can for my newest and first build. I’d definitely like to tell myself I’ve learned a lot, especially from this thread:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/300314-31-high-personal-workstation-guidance

but there are still many things that just go right over my head so I’m hoping by starting this thread a couple months before my purchase deadline, I’ll be able to have every part worked out.

A little more about myself to give some insight what I see myself using this computer for in the near and distant future. With a degree in graphic design, I’m quite familiar with the Adobe CS, especially photoshop, illustrator, indesign, etc. The final two years of my college career, I landed a gig working in an animation department specializing in sports graphics. There I was introduced to motions graphics, which I had had no prior experience with. The main program being After Effects and I eventually went on to learn C4D. I definitely enjoy motion graphics over print design, and that’s what I see myself spending the majority of my time on in the future. Learning C4D threw me into a whole new world of 3D, which is still quite new to me, but I definitely plan on pursuing 3D much more (continuing within C4D as well as starting on 3dsMax). Along with 3D, I’m a sucker for particles, physics, smoke, explosions, etc so I would definitely like to be able to do some of that type of work too. As an example:

Krakatoa Particles – I contacted the artist asking what is most important in a computer for the type of work he does, and he said “the amount of cores and also RAM, and wouldn’t get anything less than 32gb”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pXYp72dwl0&feature=autoplay&list=PL196C0077CA9AE008&lf=plcp&playnext=1
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Listed below are the system requirements for the software I’ll mainly be using.
Cinema 4d
http://www.maxon.net/en/products/general-information/general-information/system-requirements.html

CS5 Master Suite
http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/mastercollection/tech-specs.html

Thinkbox Krakatoa
http://www.thinkboxsoftware.com/krak-requirements/

Softimage
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=123112&id=13571429

Autodesk 3dsMax
http://usa.autodesk.com/3ds-max/system-requirements/

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Questions:

1. High-End Workstation or Low/Med Workstation + small render farm
What are the justifications for either one here? The high-end workstation will render faster, but I won’t be able to use it while rendering, and with a low/med workstation + small render farm I’d be able to continue working while projects render, though rendering at a slower pace? With the type of programs listed above, would I benefit from having a small render farm, or would I be better off with a single workstation?
I’m sure many of you have read about the helmer render farm. http://helmer.sfe.se/
From first glance, this seems like a very doable, cost effective solution if one wanted a render farm. Would it make more sense to start with just a high-end workstation and then in the future if I see fit, start up a farm?

2. Sandy or Ivy Bridge
If I remember correctly, Ivy Bridge will be coming out in June. So there will probably be a price drop in the sandy bridge line. What is the advice on this one? Go for the new ivy bridge? With what I’d like to accomplish with this computer benefit from Ivy Bridge?

3. Quadro vs. GTX 680
In the ‘high personal workstation guidance’ forum I posted, it seems like the consensus is that the quadro is overpriced, and doesn’t have much if any benefits for this type of work. Would the GTX 680 suite this type of work better? Would I benefit at all by doubling my GPU or would that only matter if I were considering over 2 monitors?

What I’m hoping to gain from this post:
- Advice on parts to purchase
- Answers to the questions asked
- Advice on anything I missed which I’m sure there is much

I greatly appreciate everyone’s help

Thanks,
Nathan
 
Solution

mightymaxio

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Man after reading about that render farm, that makes me want to buy that IKEA case to make my own render farm although it would probably be more cost efficient buying a Tesla these days for some of the rendering.
 

confish21

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Since you can wait until August I would wait for Ivy Bridge. There will be much better info on gpu and cpu selection. In 1-2 months you should have a good idea of whats really available.

Frankly I think Quadro is way overpriced... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133347, but you probably know better than me on the benchmarks. Im in the dark on quadro. 680 is solid but its a gaming card...idk.

I like newegg and amazon for parts.

heres some links.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/render-farm-node,2340.html




 
I third the Ivy Bridge wait. Hopefully there will be some socket 2011 hexacore Ivy Bridge CPUs out by then.

Socket 2011 is important for you so you can get 8x 8GB RAM sticks for 64GB. But you also want to wait because TRIM support for RAID 0 SSDs is coming up. Raided 240GB SATA III drives (will soon be $200 a drive as prices are in "free fall") will give you enough capacity for using SSDs as a "scratch drive".

EDIT: $2000-$3000? Well that actually presents a challenge for working in a 2011 build. It also puts you at 32GB (4x8GB) to start on the RAM--you can upgrade on a sale come Black Friday. Hopefully that doesn't end your RAID 0 SSD hopes though.

SLI: For dual graphics cards, the application would have to support it. 3D renderings aren't typical gaming programs, meaning multi-gaming card driver support may be limited and software specific. So really investigate SLI support for your specific programs. For 3dsmax, this faq answers a lot of questions about CPU/multi-GPU and Workstation/Gamer cards: http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/shane/the_iray_faq
 

mightymaxio

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I would go for a raid 5, 6 or 10 in your situation because of the redundancy and the speed. You wouldn't want to lose your rendered file if one single drive fails since your going to be abusing the crap out of those drives since the render will read/write many times on those.
 
I was assuming 2 drive RAID 0 for SSD "scratch disks", single SSD for OS, and RAID 10 on 2TB or 3TB HDDs for data. So after working with the data on the SSD RAID Array, you'd copy it all off to the HDDs at the end of the day.

The performance of RAID 0 is a good deal better than RAID 5 and half the price of RAID 6/10. So the only thing you're risking is the data you're currently working off of, which would be on the HDDs backed up to yesterday anyways (I use FreeFileSync for backup http://download.cnet.com/FreeFileSync/3000-2248_4-75300470.html ). RAID 5 also can be very risky if you suspect drive failure as it can start to return garbage and corrupt the whole disk image. As soon as HDD prices drop, I'm getting off my RAID 5 array at home. Also, RAID 6 requires a fancy RAID controller card. I prefer Intel the ICH10R controller because it's easy to find boards that support it if something goes wrong.


I know that hardware stuff above pretty well, but I do not know about benchmarks in rendering programs or the utility of CUDA cores. OP, I want you to be aware of my limitations. But I think I still have useful information to offer.

EDIT: I usually do 1 edit to limit my total number of short posts. Here's a link (as proof) of a decent 240GB SSD for $209 w/ Mass Effect 3 for free: http://slickdeals.net/permadeal/71646
Now I'd go for something with a slightly better reliability record than an Agility 3, but I think you can expect a Crucial M4 to drop into this range in the next few months.

Magnus, btw, how far have you gotten through reading that thread you linked? It's 10 pages, so probably an hour+ reading. I would assume longer if you have to look up technical terms in it.
 

magnus1225

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I plan on waiting no matter what. I'll be purchasing this in Mid August or a little after.

Magnus, btw, how far have you gotten through reading that thread you linked? It's 10 pages, so probably an hour+ reading. I would assume longer if you have to look up technical terms in it.

I read the first 4 pages, (since those were written in 2010 I wanted to read up on more recent posts) so I started on pg 10 and read through the end (pg 14 now). I wish it was still active. The latest post was the first in 3 months.

Thanks for the link on SLI very helpful.
 
Sounds like you'll be in a good situation come August. For price/performance, a GTX 680 might not be worth it. Chances are the GTX 670Ti they're prepping for release will have 90% of the performance for 75% of the price. If you're planning on two cards, that may well be the best course of action. Either way, it's worth considering.

As this thread may remain active for several months, I'll probably close this tab in my browser a few times. Just send me a PM when there is a new topic worth some discussion. For now, I'll leave the tab opened and I'll let you know when I close it.
 

magnus1225

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Thanks for all the help dalauder.

I do hope this post stays reasonably active until August as I'm sure I'll keep running into questions as I research further.

Does anyone else have any opinions on the GTX 680 for this type of work? I read that it will soon be released (think it already is ) with 4gb rather than the initial 2gb. I also read that the GTX 670Ti will only be released with 2gb. I think it's tough to make a decision so early since the 670 isn't out yet, but what are some thoughts between the two cards? Are there any other GPU's to consider?

Something I need to, and plan on doing here soon, is making a spreadsheet with all the programs I'm interested in using and looking up all the different benchmarks done with CPU's and GPU, etc and record the top couple performers to get an idea of what cards to start really considering.
 
I don't know, but someone probably does, about the performance benefit of CUDA cores on your work. Like you said, you will really need to check out some benchmarks. I know that for a lot of graphics work, the extra 2GB may actually be helpful. That really is the only big advantage I can think of for the GTX 680 though.
 

magnus1225

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Alright, I think I've decided on a cpu and it's the i7-3930K. The six cores will be more useful than the four cores in the newly released ivy bridges, and it doesn't seem like 6/8 core ivy bridges won't be here for quite a while. From what I've read, when OC'd to around 4.5, the 3930k outperforms the 3960x, and with it being about 1/2 the price as the 3960x, I like that.

Thoughts on that?

Motherboard:
From what I've read and seen from some other builds with the 3930K, the ASUS P9X79 Pro seems to be a top choice.

What are your opinions on this MO? Would this be a good choice performance-wise and cost-wise now that I know a little more what I would like from this machine:
1. OC'd to around 4.5
2. 64gb ram
3. No SLI/Crossfire

Ram:
Since I'll be going with 64gb or ram, what are some good performance brands while keeping cost in mind.

Edit 1
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Someone suggested this ram
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233229

Has anyone else used this ram before?
Can someone second this suggestion?
Does anyone else have other suggestions?
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HD/SSD:

Edit 2
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In terms of harddrives, I should have/would be beneficial to have:
Bootdrive:
----------Safe to say probably at least a SSD, possibly the RevoDrive 3?
Render drive:
----------80/120gb SSD - are there benefits to rendering to a SSD over an HDD?
Storage/Content Library/Etc:
----------Seems many recommend the Seagate 2TB HDD in raid. What type of raid would -----------make the most sense here? Can you have two different types of raid in one build?
----------Is that beneficial?

I was suggest the RevoDrive 3 for my primary scratch drive. That thing is quite expensive and from what I've read about the reviews, a SSD a just slightly slower than the RevoDrive 3. Does anyone have thoughts on this issue?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...N82E16820227744
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CPU
I think the 3960X is a complete waste of money. It just doesn't really provide anything the 3930K provides, except for the rare person going for supercooled overclocking well over 5.0GHz. Since LGA 2011 has an independent FSB, even the locked i7-3820 can overclock pretty high, so that's a cheaper option if you're strapped for cash. It does have 2MB less cache though.
i7-3820 overclocking discussion: http://www.overclock.net/t/1221208/i7-3820-overclock/630
i7-3820 & i7-3930K OC'd performance: http://thessdreview.com/featured/intel-core-i7-3820-quad-core-cpu-review-get-ready-for-some-great-5-0-ghz-speeds/6/
Note the i7-3930K is better, so I think you should go that one actually.

Mobo
Honestly, I'd be satisfied with any Asus, Gigabyte, or ASRock 8+ phase 2011 board. You'll want 12 phases, if you OC harder, btw. I mean, you'll need to double check them for features you want, like the number and direction of various ports, but I personally would pick on color scheme. But I'm not a stickler for a 4% performance difference. If you are, then go with the best (not worth it on price/performance in my book). Like I can't tell you a reason the $250 ASRock X79 Extreme6 LGA 2011 Intel X79 is in any way insufficient: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157289

RAM
I'd go with 4x8GB if I were you. I guess you're kind of decided on 8x8GB already though. What speed you go with depends on your CPU. If the CPU multiplier is unlocked, the 1600CL9 is good enough unless you see a good sale on 1866CL9 (which tends to benchmark better than 1600CL7). I've seen decreasing performance benefits beyond this speed so I very much don't recommend 2000MHz or faster mostly as a price issue.
Brands I'd consider: G. Skill, Corsair, Kingston, Mushkin, Geil, and, maybe, Crucial
After combing through the RAM on Newegg.com, the only XMP 1.3 (X79) certified kit that's faster than 1333MHz and less than $800 for 64GB is these $310 G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) 1866CL10: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231529
 
Solution
Edit 1
I can't recommend that RAM because 1600CL10 is [unusually] slow. It's probably around 1333CL8 speed. Here's some reviews that run RAM benchmarks comparing various speed and latency settings:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4503/sandy-bridge-memory-scaling-choosing-the-best-ddr3/5
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/memory/display/sandy-bridge-ddr3_6.html#sect0
Only you can decide what's good enough for you. I say 1600CL9 or better.

Edit 2
SSD - Honestly, I don't expect the price/performance of RevoDrive 3 to be worth it compared to a standard SATA III SSD. So it might be twice as fast in perfect situations--but it might give you boot drive incompatibility problems. A normal SATA III SSD will only cost a bit more than an HDD (I'm comparing a 120GB for $90 to a 1TB HDD for $100, so you know where I'm coming from), while giving you a speed benefit of orders of magnitude--much greater than twice the performance.

Size: At your price range and considering the fact that 240GB SSDs are dropping to the $200 range, I can't justify recommending anything less. 240GB is big enough for you to install your 6 most commonly used programs and do work off of.

Render Drive: For a lot of rendering that uses ray tracing where you leave the computer rendering overnight, you'll be doing most your work in the RAM and off the CPU, so the HDD shouldn't bottleneck, especially if it's a 240GB SSD. I think you should just include this with your boot drive.

Storage/RAID: I've used multiple types of RAID in the same build with Intel's ICHR10. You may want to buy yourself a third party RAID controller, but I like Intel's because I'm comfortable assuming that I'll be able to find the same controller if this motherboard burns up.

Stick to RAID 1, 10, or 0 (in the right circumstances). If you read up on RAID 5, you'll find out about some drawbacks. The 1 in 12TB write error issue isn't nearly THAT much of an issue since new drives have 10x higher fault tolerance (so it's more like 1 in 120TB), but RAID 10 is better than 5. I'd go with a RAID 1 or 10 (2 or 4 drives, respectively), depending on how many drives you can afford to get and an external backup that you use monthly or so to backup the most critical data and then hide in closet somewhere (I'm not that prudent myself with backups).

2TB drives seem smart to me because 3TB and 4TB drives come with too big of a price premium for my taste. I don't know which model is best right now as I bought all my HDDs in the 1TB era (4x Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB). I'll be upgrading my data storage in roughly 2014.

Make sure your motherboard has enough SATA ports.
 

magnus1225

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As I had never heard of a ram disk before I did some research and from what I've read they can be quite a bit faster than SSD depending on the use listing video editing, CAD, audio. I looked around on a ton of forums and almost everyone was talking about using a ram disk for increasing their browser speed, and couldn't find a single thing on using it as a render drive. One forum said they used it as a scratch for photoshop and there was a big performance increase, which makes me think After Effects would benefit from something like that.

Do you recall where you heard/read that?
 
It was just airdeano's post here: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/103662-8-sale-stuff
He gave some links to software to try when I PM'd him, but as far as copying caches--he mostly just uses it like a small HDD for small installs that you want to be quick.

It's easy to find software to create a RAM disk, but for anything with a persistent disk, it seems to require either manual mounting of the image each restart (and saving before shutdown) or $15+ software that automates the process. Softperfect RAMdisk has a 30-day trial that works without limitations: http://www.softperfect.com/products/ramdisk/

I only have 11GB or so to give up to a RAM disk, so I can't install a ton to it. But if you've got 64GB of RAM, you can really afford 30GB+ to play around. As far as what to do with it though, it seems more like a novelty than that useful. But you can get the 30 day trial and decide for yourself.

You could simply use it as a scratch disk--copy the files you're working on to it and then copy them off when you're done. That could be accomplished with the <4GB free versions though.

EDIT: I haven't found the most cost-efficient RAM disk software yet.
 

serialkiller

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hello op

for rendering and graphic machine you should consider a 2P system.

the ive bridge xeons will be out soon. it will have some improvement in it and more energy efficient so less power consumption and a quiter system.

for that you need to sort out what case you want what type of cooling and can you affort those higher 6-8 core as well as the upcomming 10 core xeons.

for a stable platform you need a stable motherboard.

the evga sr-x is the best motherboard for that purpose.

if you dont game then dont buy geforce. but if you do heavy renders which are huge you need a gpu with lots of vram. for that a gtx 580 3gb or the upcomming gtx 690 4gb will be suitable.

i wont recommend the 600 series for rendering as they prove to be weak at that point.

also nvidia cuda will be speeding up the process so i wont recommend amd gpu.

quadro 5000 and 6000 are too costly and will not fit in your budget with the 2 x xeons.

quadro 4000 has less memory and still costly.


the most money invisted for a rendering machine is the cpu then motherboard and gpu.


my suggestion

intel xeons 8 core x2

evga sr-x motherboard

corsair dominator ram

evga gtx 580 3gb

cordsair h80 cooler x 2

seasonic x-850 w 80+ gold psu

mountain mods hptx case or any other case that support hptx and you like it

and your raid setup.(i aint expert in raid so no suggestions but a simple setup would do like 1 ssd for os 2 ssd in raid 0 as scratch disc and some 1-3tb hdd in raid 1-5-6-10 for the rest)


also the render farm idea is nice you can make it by few i7 3930k or 2500k and oc it and might run fasster than a 2p setup which i enlist before.



hope this helps :hello:
 

magnus1225

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Thanks for the advice serialkiller

I don't think I'll be going with duo xeons though. I've been reading up on a bunch of benchmarks for 2x Xeons, compared to say the 3930K or 3960X and yes they are quite a bit faster, but the price-speed ratio is just too far out of reach of my budget. I would love to have a duo xeon workstation, maybe in the future after I establish myself. I see that they just released the ivy bridge xeons but from what I've gathered, they are introducing the low end versions first 4 cores, and releasing the enthusiast/workstation versions quite a bit later? And i have to have everything purchased by August. I think the 3930k will suite my needs for a couple years at least.

The GPU is giving me some trouble. I love the idea of the recently released nvidia maximus configuration but the lowest version of that will cost me close to 2500k and thats gpu alone. With C4D I know that the GPU helps 0% for the rendering, but can help the preview window, especially with simulations I would assume, and I would like to get more into simulations with other programs such as krakatoa. I've read that more vram is better, so I'm looking at trying to get something with 4gb, and right now my options are for a gtx 690, but damn 1k for that thing. And since it was just released, there hasn't been too much testing with various 3D apps for compatibility. I think I may hold out purchasing the GPU as long as possible, hoping the prices will drop for the 6xx series and more benchmarks will start surfacing.