Platform Suggestions for Rendering Machine

C

Cyberdemon

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 7, 2003
Messages
358
I'm looking to build a machine purely for 3D rendering.

Obviously speed and stability are the two main goals. No point in having something render fast if it's going to crash halfway through.

Budget would probably be between 5-10k, but value is (IE spending an extra $1000 per CPU to get a few extra clocks that barely increase the speed) where is the sweet spot right now?

Obviously there's a couple options in my mind:
-Dual Socket E5 Xeons
-3960X Overclocked

I saw the EVGA SR-X announced, but if the Xeons are all locked, then any CPU overclocking is basically screwed on that front - so the question is would I get almost as much out of the cheapest 8 core as I would the top of the line.

Any thoughts on where the sweet spot is right now on bang for the bucks?
 
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Cyberdemon said:
I'm looking to build a machine purely for 3D rendering.

Obviously speed and stability are the two main goals. No point in having something render fast if it's going to crash halfway through.

Budget would probably be between 5-10k, but value is (IE spending an extra $1000 per CPU to get a few extra clocks that barely increase the speed) where is the sweet spot right now?

Obviously there's a couple options in my mind:
-Dual Socket E5 Xeons
-3960X Overclocked

I saw the EVGA SR-X announced, but if the Xeons are all locked, then any CPU overclocking is basically screwed on that front - and the range from the low end ($300) to the high end ($2k) gets pretty serious.

Any thoughts on where the sweet spot is right now on bang for the bucks?
Click to expand...

IMHO, the best bang for your buck machine, 3930K overclocked.

Now if you want to spend more you'll get more. You won't be able to overclock the current Xeons, but they will be faster, and cost A LOT more.

What software do you plan to use?
 
I would suggest the Xeons as any non-Xeon CPU does not support ECC memory and that is critical to stability if your renders last overnight. Plus Xeons are all only partially locked - with a motherboard that supports it, they can be overclocked 4 bins above their turbo boost speed which is plenty enough if you overclock the base clock as well.
 
Software will be Keyshot and Autodesk Showcase.

ECC is a good point. Overnight is probably less of an issue. Right now our main workflow is all happening on mobile i7 chips, which take about 1-2 hours for a medium quality render. We want to cut that down so we can do more renderings as well as offloading the work onto a dedicated box rather than local machines.

It's looking like the E5-2687 may be a good choice.
 
Dual Xeons, imo. You can start with single or twin 4c/8t models and upgrade to more overall cores later, or just get single or dual 6 or 8 core now. Whichever route you choose, you'll have some serious upgradability with the platform.
 
Cyberdemon said:
Software will be Keyshot and Autodesk Showcase.

ECC is a good point. Overnight is probably less of an issue. Right now our main workflow is all happening on mobile i7 chips, which take about 1-2 hours for a medium quality render. We want to cut that down so we can do more renderings as well as offloading the work onto a dedicated box rather than local machines.

It's looking like the E5-2687 may be a good choice.
Click to expand...

E5-2687 is a great choice. You might want to look at the Asus Z9 PE-D8 WS.
 
Yea, if you go desktop there's really no reason to go 3960 over the 3930. However, if you go for server class you can actually get some pretty decent xeon's for not as much as you'd think. The base 6-core xeon for 2011 (the 2620) is only a little over 400; its clocked slower, but gives you a very low barrier to be able to build a 2p system. Just a thought. I'm also not so sure about evga's new boards...in general, they're just not getting the same respect that they used to command because of a lot of critical personnel losses.
 
Cyberdemon said:
Software will be Keyshot and Autodesk Showcase.

ECC is a good point. Overnight is probably less of an issue. Right now our main workflow is all happening on mobile i7 chips, which take about 1-2 hours for a medium quality render. We want to cut that down so we can do more renderings as well as offloading the work onto a dedicated box rather than local machines.

It's looking like the E5-2687 may be a good choice.
Click to expand...

Are you looking at doing a 2p build with the 2687, or just a single. It definitely is a beast of a processor, but cost-wise, as long as you can effectively scale across threads, there's some interesting things to consider, such as the 2650 which is still 8 core, but costs a little over half of the 2687. Yes its clocked slower, but being able to get twice as many cores for a minor price increase (2 2650's vs 1 2687) could be a better path.
 
Xeth said:
I would suggest the Xeons as any non-Xeon CPU does not support ECC memory and that is critical to stability if your renders last overnight. Plus Xeons are all only partially locked - with a motherboard that supports it, they can be overclocked 4 bins above their turbo boost speed which is plenty enough if you overclock the base clock as well.
Click to expand...

You cannot increase the base clock on 2011 Xeons. Maybe 5 or 6 mhz at best, which with a 30 multiplier will net you only 150 mhz.

OP, is your rendering highly parallel? Then the 4p Opteron systems with 16-core processors might give you better bang/buck. The guys over in the Distributed Computing subforum would probably be able to give you better insight in this than here.
 
@Cyberdemon: Are you rendering out large print stills or animation? Does Keyshot work in buckets (meaning that a single frame can be divided and rendered by multiple machines)?

Normally, I would be all for a 2P system w/ ECC but the E5-2687W costs $1,899.99 each. If you're a small shop rendering animation, wouldn't it be more cost effective and safer to build two or three single socket hex core SB-E machines and do a network render? That way if one machine dies during a job you'll still have 60% capacity in reserve? Additionally, if one frame contains an error you could always just re-render or fix it in post.

Are the slave licenses free with Keyshot or do you need to pay for them?
 
Mostly stills, some animations. Both tools will be able to use all the cores, so more cores is where the investment will go.

It's for a corporate environment, so I'll put together my best suggestion and go to my boss and say "I want to spend X" so a dual 2687 is certainly within the realm of possibility, especially since this will be a shared resource.

Keyshot uses a per/core network rendering model, so it may be as effective to just use our existing floating licenses on the machine. Setup a render, walk back to your desk - or put the tower on a cart on wheels so people can bring it to their workspace when needed.
 
Cyberdemon said:
Setup a render, walk back to your desk - or put the tower on a cart on wheels so people can bring it to their workspace when needed.
Click to expand...
Putting an expensive machine on a cart with wheels sounds unnecessary and like a recipe for disaster. Doesn't Keyshot have a render manager to control jobs remotely?

The reason I'm pushing for multiple machines is to avoid having your eggs all in one basket. What if you're using a non-redundant PSU and it dies? Or the HDD/SSD dies?

Will your data be automatically backed up to a NAS or will everything (rendering and storage) be dependent on a single monolithic machine?
 
In that case, I would suggest heading on over to the distributed computing subforum and check out some of their opinions (just scroll down on the main page). As I recall, most folders prefer the 4p Opteron systems over 2p Xeon systems because the Opterons have much better bang/buck.
 
Safety said:
Putting an expensive machine on a cart with wheels sounds unnecessary and like a recipe for disaster. Doesn't Keyshot have a render manager to control jobs remotely?

The reason I'm pushing for multiple machines is to avoid having your eggs all in one basket. What if you're using a non-redundant PSU and it dies? Or the HDD/SSD dies?

Will your data be automatically backed up to a NAS or will everything (rendering and storage) be dependent on a single monolithic machine?
Click to expand...

I agree.

If you have the budget, I would spread it across multiple machines on a network. I've never used those software packages for rendering though, so I'm not sure what they're capable of

can they use GPU rendering?
 
Safety said:
Putting an expensive machine on a cart with wheels sounds unnecessary and like a recipe for disaster. Doesn't Keyshot have a render manager to control jobs remotely?

The reason I'm pushing for multiple machines is to avoid having your eggs all in one basket. What if you're using a non-redundant PSU and it dies? Or the HDD/SSD dies?

Will your data be automatically backed up to a NAS or will everything (rendering and storage) be dependent on a single monolithic machine?
Click to expand...

Keyshot can do things network (albeit not with our current licenses), but Showcase can't unfortunately and most of us use Showcase still.

This isn't a mission critical workflow - we're a product design house, rendering is a tertiary function, but on days someone needs to do a rendering, it ties up their productivity and only workstation for hours waiting for stuff to bake. There's only about 6 people, so it wouldn't be hard for someone to walk to a machine, throw their data on the network share and pull it up on the machine, kick off the shot they need and walk away. Especially in the case of animations or some really heavy files which take a while.

If the machine were to blow up for a few days it wouldn't bring us to the ground anymore than our current workflow.

It's sounding like a 2P Xeon would probably be the performance king if we can swing the cost, but I think getting that machine built within the budget is manageable.
 
Kardonxt said:
4P AMD G34 build is probably the best bang for your buck.
Click to expand...
Perhaps not when it comes to raytracing. From the benchmarks I've seen a 4P Opteron setup would be about 30% faster than a dual E5 at the same price but when you factor in the cost of a per core license it might be better to go with fewer yet faster cores.
 
Went with the dual 2687 Xeons in an HP Z820 Workstation - just got the box in - now to load up software and see how this beast cranks.

466620_10101033762578363_6221822_57611329_1896320575_o.jpg
 
motherofgod.jpeg when I saw the task manager screenshot. Well done sir.
 
Why are the front of my pants all wet, now?

16 threads...dayum. That rocks.
 
DejaWiz said:
Why are the front of my pants all wet, now?

16 threads...dayum. That rocks.
Click to expand...

16 cores, 32 threads to be precise, but who's counting :D

Have to wait to have the machine re-imaged to get it into the corporate network then throw some renderings at it.
 
Cyberdemon said:
so the question is would I get almost as much out of the cheapest 8 core as I would the top of the line.
Click to expand...

the answer to that question is yes unless you can come up with a test that you need done which does way better with the extra threads of a multiprocessor system
 
magixx said:
I'm curious on benchmarks of such a machine.
Click to expand...

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/xeon-e5-2687w-benchmark-review,3149-8.html

Theres been some benches of these configs - the tool I'm using isn't listed here so it will be interesting to see how it scales for the rendering apps we use, but since it's all raytracing we should be seeing a huge performance boost over our current i7 desktops, and building an overclocked SB-E was less of a feasible option working within "corporate" guidelines. Was much easier to click all the boxes on the IT website than it would have been to convince IT to let me build an out of the box machine.

Will be good to put it through it's paces next week. We deal with very high polygon engineering data, sometimes dozens of products on screen at once so this machine will let us offload the big heavy renderings so our personal machines are free to do more work.

No idea on the power draw - would have to see if I have a Kill-a-watt laying around somewhere.
 
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