CPU for heavy rendering + 3D Design

[Chaoss]

Hi I would like some help choosing a CPU for 3D rendering 2048,2048 images, one that can be left on 24/7, while idle will be left rendering and while in use will be used mostly for 3D level design (i do this for work). I do some gaming as well from time to time, along with general use.

for my new build I already have the following componants

Lian-Li PC-C34FB Aluminium Black

Zalman ZM-MFC3 Multi Fan Controller

LG Blu-Ray Writer

OCZ 240GB Revo Drive 3 SSD - This is used for Windows and important applications (3dsmax, photoshop cs5, hero engine etc)

OCZ 120GB RevoDrive 3 SSD - This will be used soley for storing my project & resource files

Hazro HZ27WC LED IPS Pro 8Bit Monitor

2 x in RAID 1 Samsung HD204UI 2TB Spinpoint F4 - To store downloads, Steam, games, and other general none-essential stuff

2GB EVGA GTX 560 Ti - This is just to tide me over until the GTX 600 series gets released


I am stuck on what motherboard and cpu to get, I will need AT LEAST 16GB of RAM (and yes, before you ask I currently use up all of my 18gb of ddr2 and often run out - I like to have 3dsmax, Photoshop CS5 and what ever engine I'm in at the time) but in an ideal world be able to have 24GB, I was looking at the DDR3 1866Mhz Speed, either dual and tripple channel. the CPU really needs to be a workhorse. I'd like the motherboard to be futureproof and easily upgradable in the future (say to a 12 core cpu when they come down the line in the future).

I've looked at a few of the Xeons, I saw an 8 core socket 1157 I nearly went for, but it's only running at 2.2Ghz. I was going to wait for Bulldozer but i've heard some bad things about AMD

 

[Cyberdemon]

Whats your budget like? Bang for the buck would be the 2600K overclocked, because once you start talking Xeons or extreme edition chips your performance plateus pretty quickly. In fact, I would almost suggest a render farm of cheaper machines before I'd suggest jumping up to a high end Xeon system (Unless you're like me and someone pays for it for you). 8 fast cores from a 2600K will do a whole lot of damage in Max.

Most motherboards will support up to 32 gigs these days.

Whats your budget like?

 

[DejaWiz]

Depending on your budget, a good P67 or Z68 mobo, a 2600K, and either 4x4GB or 4x8GB RAM.

 

[Chaoss]

Budget is currently £350 every 2 weeks (leaves me with £50 a week to live on and the rest for bills+rent). there isn't really a fixed budget, & I am pretty crappy at saving money.

I forgot to post my current specs, I do wish to replace the entire computer for personal reasons (ex bought it for me, don't want anything around reminding me) and sell this one on. Might take the 256GB drive and use it as a backup drive or something though.

Operating System
MS Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1
CPU
Intel Xeon W3570 @ 3.20GHz 109 °C
Bloomfield 45nm Technology
RAM
18.0 GB Triple-Channel DDR3 @ 668MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard
ASUSTeK Computer INC. P6X58D-E (LGA1366) 79 °C
Graphics
DELL U2711 (1920x1080@60Hz)
DELL E178FP (1280x1024@60Hz)
1280MB GeForce GTX 470 (Undefined) 98 °C
Hard Drives
250GB CRUCIAL_CT256M225 ATA Device (SATA)
977GB Western Digital WDC WD1002FAEX-00Y9A0 ATA Device (SATA) 53 °C
977GB Western Digital WDC WD1002FAEX-00Y9A0 ATA Device (SATA) 54 °C
Optical Drives
ATAPI iHAS124 B ATA Device
Audio
SB X-Fi Xtreme Audio

 

[avddreamr]

If you can't wait for sandybridge-e, your best would be to get a i7-970 for 500 dollars or so on ebay.. you maybe able to score a i7-980x/W3680 550-650 if you get lucky.
Pick up a good cooler (silver arrow), and get a bunch of low profile ram... g,skill sniper would work .. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231460
Pick up 3 sets, for 210.
Sell your ram (90), and cpu (150).

Since you are doing heavy cpu based rendering then you actually need a hex core. If you upgrade to sandybridge.... it will cost you less money (250-300)... but you'll get 2 extra cores.
Going by cinebench benchmarks... the 2600k is 20 percent slower at 4.8 ghz than the i7 980x is at 4.4 ghz. If you normalized the clocks.. you're looking at 30 percent speed difference.

http://techgage.com/article/intels_sandy_bridge_revealed_core_i5-2500k_i7-2600k_reviewed/6
This shows the 2600k taking 32 percent longer to complete a bench mark.
With overclocking you can get the difference down 20 percent.
Is that difference and the ability to have 24gb of affordable ram worth 250 - 300 dollars for you?

Scratch the silver arrow, I don't think it will fit in your case, you'll have to take measurements. If it does fit.. take it and don't look back, otherwise buy a 240 mm rad grill, or fan filter... hack the top of your case, and install an h100 or a rasa 240 kit (better option at the same price but more work).

 

[Dan_D]

Whats your budget like? Bang for the buck would be the 2600K overclocked, because once you start talking Xeons or extreme edition chips your performance plateus pretty quickly. In fact, I would almost suggest a render farm of cheaper machines before I'd suggest jumping up to a high end Xeon system (Unless you're like me and someone pays for it for you). 8 fast cores from a 2600K will do a whole lot of damage in Max.

Most motherboards will support up to 32 gigs these days.

Whats your budget like?

That's four cores with Hyperthreading. Not 8 actual CPU cores. Big difference.

 

[aviat72]

I noticed that you are quite short on storage.

I would go easy on the SSD based storage (one is enough) but instead put a 4-5 disk RAID using the onboard Intel controller.

I have a 4 disk RAID which I have I partitioned into two volumes. A RAID 0 and a RAID 10 (for archiving). You can get insane through puts. A 4 disk 1GB array will give you 1.3GB of RAID 0 and 1.3 of redundant RAID 10. It theoretically gives you 4x (on RAID 0) and 2 x (on RAID 1) write speeds of a single disk.

While the access time for SSDs is great, when it comes to writing, the RAM based caching techniques provide near identical performance for smaller blocks. Your apps are CPU bound and you will be writing to the disk in bursts so the real-world performance will not be dramatically different.

Further with the Z68 boards, you can use the SSD cache (Intel has a special name for it) which allows you to store the commonly used blocks on the SSD. After you it a few times, you get near SSD performance.

Also since your applications are likely going to be multi-threaded, it might be worth it to wait for the 6-core Sandy Bridge - E which is going to be out in a few weeks. It is less than $600 but will give you a lot more cores to work with. You often see near linear performance increases. This will use the LGA2011 (X79) based motherboards. These have quad channel RAM so you can plug in 4x4GB RAM sticks to get 16GB for less than $100.
There is a very detailed review of the new platform here.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-3960x-x79-performance,3026.html

In general Xeon based systems are going to be a lot more expensive, while not over clock easily and will provide limited and expensive motherboard options.

 

[Dan_D]

If you can't wait for sandybridge-e, your best would be to get a i7-970 for 500 dollars or so on ebay.. you maybe able to score a i7-980x/W3680 550-650 if you get lucky.
Pick up a good cooler (silver arrow), and get a bunch of low profile ram... g,skill sniper would work .. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231460
Pick up 3 sets, for 210.
Sell your ram (90), and cpu (150).

Since you are doing heavy cpu based rendering then you actually need a hex core. If you upgrade to sandybridge.... it will cost you less money (250-300)... but you'll get 2 extra cores.
Going by cinebench benchmarks... the 2600k is 20 percent slower at 4.8 ghz than the i7 980x is at 4.4 ghz. If you normalized the clocks.. you're looking at 30 percent speed difference.

http://techgage.com/article/intels_sandy_bridge_revealed_core_i5-2500k_i7-2600k_reviewed/6
This shows the 2600k taking 32 percent longer to complete a bench mark.
With overclocking you can get the difference down 20 percent.
Is that difference and the ability to have 24gb of ram worth 250 - 300 dollars for you?

Agreed. If you can't wait now the Core i7 970, 980X and 990X are the best single CPU options out there. Equivalent Xeons tend to go for a bit more money, but you might look into an Ebay deal on one of those as well. Depending on your budget you might be able to look into getting some lower clocked Xeons and a dual processor motherboard. This will give you up to 12 physical cores and 24 threads depending on how much you are willing to spend.

Lots of options but all of them cost a fair amount of money once you go beyond 4 cores into 6 or more than one physical CPU.

 

[avddreamr]

You can get 8gb dimms for about 80 dollars, I'm uncertain that if they would work if you put them with a 2600k.. since I don't think that the 2600k supports ecc. I'm uncertain if it will simply just work without using ecc. You may wish to investigate further.

Alternatively you can pick up a corsair 8gb dimm... for 270!!! dollars.

Also... regarding cpu rendering... rendering on quadro.. as long as you keep the scene in memory (6gb).. is so much faster. But it's also so much more expensive.

Only do this upgrade if you are going to overclock... sandy bridge in cpu based rendering only holds about an 8 percent ipc advantage over nehalem.
To ensure 24/7 stability also means a much longer certification process than most of us use in our gaming rigs. When i have sold overclocked workstations in the past, I find the maximum overclock, stability test with 32 passes (takes forever), and then I back down about 5 percent on the overclock. So for instance if i determine that 5.0 is stable, I back down to 4.75-4.8. Then I stability test for 48 hours. If it passes with no errors, then I know my work is done. I built one system that could pass initial stability at 4.9 ghz, but wouldn't pass the 48 hours stability test until I brought it down to 4.5 ghz. For safety I then had it run prime 95 for 1 week straight, without errors. I was fortunate that my client was understanding of the delays.

 

[Chaoss]

Great feedback guys, I can wait for the 6-core Sandy Bridge, I was quite close to going for sandy bridge but was put off by it only having 4 cores. How long will it be until release, and are there any motherboards you can reccomend buying in the next 2 - 4 weeks?

I already have the componants I have listed, so I have the SSD's. I wanted a 120GB super fast drive for storing my 2 - 3GB photoshop texture atlases, and didn't want to store my work files on the same physical drive.

 

[Dan_D]

Great feedback guys, I can wait for the 6-core Sandy Bridge, I was quite close to going for sandy bridge but was put off by it only having 4 cores. How long will it be until release, and are there any motherboards you can reccomend buying in the next 2 - 4 weeks?

I already have the componants I have listed, so I have the SSD's. I wanted a 120GB super fast drive for storing my 2 - 3GB photoshop texture atlases, and didn't want to store my work files on the same physical drive.

You are looking for Sandy Bridge-E which will offer more than 4 cores. As for board recommendations, I've not seen or worked with any X79 boards yet so I don't know what to tell yout. Many of them look pretty good in pictures, but that's about all I can say at this point. I won't know anything more until I get my hands on some actual hardware. Not sure when that will be.

 

[bwang]

If you have lots of budget, you can get a SR-2, a pair of Xeon E5645's, and a pair of Hydros for ~$1700. The Xeons will OC to 4 GHz a piece, giving you 12 glorious Westmere cores each at 4 GHz.
Not the best bang for the buck, but it'll out-run everything including the 6C SB-E.

 

[iconiK]

You can get 8gb dimms for about 80 dollars, I'm uncertain that if they would work if you put them with a 2600k.. since I don't think that the 2600k supports ecc. I'm uncertain if it will simply just work without using ecc. You may wish to investigate further.

Those are ECC Registered DIMMs, which only works on server motherboards, sockets 1156, 1366 and 1536. 8GB unbuffered DIMMs cost a WHOLE LOT of cash.

 

[Nathan_P]

If you have lots of budget, you can get a SR-2, a pair of Xeon E5645's, and a pair of Hydros for ~$1700. The Xeons will OC to 4 GHz a piece, giving you 12 glorious Westmere cores each at 4 GHz.
Not the best bang for the buck, but it'll out-run everything including the 6C SB-E.

Nice but not only is it expensive but most of the parts are extremely hard to find here in the UK.

 

[defaultluser]

Most Sandy motherboards will support up to 32 gigs these days.

Except that the price of 8GB sticks is around 4-5x that of 4GB sticks. And they're also very rare to find on dealer shelves and are constantly out of stock.

If the OP absolutely needs 24GB instead of 16GB for now, then X58 is his only option. He would pay a few hundred more for the CPU and motherboard, but save about $500 on memory.

 

[ND40oz]

You definitely don't want to go with 1155 with 2 PCIe based SSDs, there's just not enough lanes to support your video card and those 2 SSDs. Like everyone else said, it's either stick with the 2-3 year old x58 platform or wait for the SB-E.

 

[Psi*]

What software are you using? What it recognizes defines the limits.

 

[iconiK]

You definitely don't want to go with 1155 with 2 PCIe based SSDs, there's just not enough lanes to support your video card and those 2 SSDs. Like everyone else said, it's either stick with the 2-3 year old x58 platform or wait for the SB-E.

What? You have 16 off the CPU (20 on Xeon C204/C206) and 4 off the southbridge. That's plenty

 

[ND40oz]

What? You have 16 off the CPU (20 on Xeon C204/C206) and 4 off the southbridge. That's plenty

NM, I was thinking the Revo's were x8, they're only x4.