I have a limited time frame and thus am I well having to bite the bullet here.
I am looking for a Xeon Opteron based system featuring 12 cores since
I need maximum power.
Intel or AMD I honestly do not have a preference. I went to few placed
were I was blown away but the price tags. I thought Apple was expensive
but AMD and DELL can beat that even more.
Does anybody have a tip where to maybe get a barebone system you can
equip quickly?
I went to places like newegg but it looks they for example do not really have
bundles or sets for server size packages.
do you need a full computer? just a board with 2 proc?
i have been loking for that kind of rig.
actually here is the result of my investigation.
budget friendly high end computer http://www.titanuscomputers.com/
ebay
you can find some bi xeon quad core for less than 1500 euros but with slow xeon
or this card to buid you own. that way you will be able to overclock a bit.
I finally chose to go for a one intel i7 an to overclock it. More budget friendly
the shop that is building my rig is toletec.de the sheapest computer buider i did found.
Hope it help a bit.
let me know i m interested in your final choice
Didn´t you need an octcore ystd?
Seems the deadline´s building up like a Tsunami in front of you…
I´d share my limited knowledge, but it would be great to know what you need to do and under what circumstances.
You need to render stuff?
Is the renderer limited to one machine?
What render engine?
You need to run simulations, calculations, compile stuff?
What´s the budget?
U need it only for one job and sell it again?
Help us help you
If someone asks for a recommendation for a “very fast car NAO!!”, one can´t recommend a F1 car with good conscience if you´d need it for Paris-Dakar
** I UPDATED THE PROCESSOR SINCE MY ORIGINAL POST **
Here is a derivative of Philbo’s machine for ~ $1860.00. It’s a 4 CPU motherboard with four quad core CPUs! Each CPU core gets 4GB RAM. This Motherboard is DDR2 800 (not cutting edge) and the CPU a little dated but may be good for the application depending on what you are really doing with this machine, and is dirt cheap with great reviews.
It’s hard to say if this machine will be better than another machine having two higher end quad cores with DDR3. What do you guys think of this setup?
You can get an expansion card to add an additional 4 more CPUs to make it a total of 32 cores! If you dont have the expansion card you can only use 4CPUs with a total of 16 cores. I think I would need to put a “Drool Shield” on this thing like one of the reviews on NewEgg said!!!
If you decide to buy it, triple check my handy work to make sure the Motherboard, CPU and RAM are all compatible.
1) Quad Processor Motherboard ($199):
TYAN S4985G3NR Thunder n4250QE Quad 1207(F) NVIDIA nForce4 Professional 2200 + 2050 SSI MEB footprint Four AMD Opteron (Rev. F) 8000 series (dual/quad-core) processors Server Motherboard http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813151085
8) Windows? $100 * 4 = $400???
If you use Windows, I think you need to purchase one copy of Windows for each core. I may be mistaken on this but I thought I read this somewhere on the Microsoft Site.
I think I read so many pages and reviews that I confused
nobody else then myself.
wait I just reread it 4 CPUs? 0_0
I really would like to know how they compare performance wise
compared to current models. That is a really good question.
I wish I would have the ability to have both and test them.
To oversimplify, if you can distribute the renderjob or whatever it is you got to do, go for quantity not quality.
1*12 Cores@whatever for 1000 Euro is inferior to, like the blade dago posted with 18 Cores @3.2 + 10 cores @2.8 for currently 550 Euro
And rendering almost scales linear with the amount of cores, no matter if they are in your CPU, in your machine, in the next room or the other side of the world.
And the ONLY real advantage Opteron/Xeon has over their endconsumer versions Athlon2/Ci7 is, that they are build for multi processor support - and thats about it (ignoring that the DIEs for the servers are top of the crop of their production batch)
Really, if you are rendering and need instant feedback, I think most online commercial renderfarms provide that… not sure, I never used one, I just built my own renderfarm.
You needed 8 cores (previous post), now you need 12. If you need the kind of raw computing power you are speaking of, why are you even thinking about 8, 12 or 16 core machines? Those are child’s toys compared to what is available.
because I also do not have unlimited funding Randy “;)”
I was first considering an 8 core because I did not know
about the six core versions.
In the past I did try out some render platforms and it is
not really what I need or can make use of the best way.
Those are great when the shot is done and you send it out.
But the time of saving exporting uploading setting up rendering previewing
is not what I can use at the moment.
Plus once the stuff is done the machine should still have
use and thus do I not want to invest only for on single
purpose and plan ahead for the time after that.
I recently built a system with an Intel I7 980 extreme, it is six cores, hyper threading rendering over 12 threads and it’s unlocked and very easy to overclock. I can get to over 4 Ghz on my gigabyte ud3r motherboard through a desktop application without any need to touch the bios. I think such a setup is probably the most (relatively) cost efficient powerful solution for rendering on self build systems.
If you look at the renders in my sig you’ll see that they are 2hrs in Luxrender with that processor overclocked to 3.75Ghz, they could maybe have done with a little more cooking time, but it’s pretty good considering the speed of Lux and that the car plus interior and underneath is very high poly.
I apologize for my previous post… I was being an idiot…
A couple of thoughts though, and please correct me if I am wrong about this one, but if you are using a gpu based renderer, (like octane) it really doesn’t matter what cpu you are running, the gpu is doing all the work.
On overclocking - my gigabyte motherboard came with software to overclock from within windows.
Randy - no need for it. I did not take it personal. I added a smiley in my former post
This is the problem I have:
The investment I make will well have to hold for the next years
and be as flexible as possible.
At PhilBos place I saw Octane running on 3 GPUs and seriously
incase HDRI rendering ala Hypershot is all what you do forget
about any CPU. It was plain madness.
But GPU rendering would not be everything I would do.
Fluids, smoke, audio, cutting, etc those tasks are not handled via
the GPU.
I did not know that good 3D cards can be so cheap and even on one
GPU Octane was plain fast already. The card he mentioned is around
200 and I thought for the performance he was missing a “0” here.
Also, some of the CAD apps I use have some slow and I mean slow functions
and a faster Computer would be nice. T-Splines for example is nice and fast
when you have a simple object but behold when it is getting complex.
So I am not only considering render performance but also what else would that
computer speed-up when I work.
Last year I was working on an animation and we gave up because our laptops
were just not cutting it at all.
I was even considering just renting but well that seems more then
impossible to do for just 3 weeks
I bought a Corsair h50 water pump cooler for the cpu at about £55. It does a very good job, is easy to install and if like me your a bit nervous about messing with water in your system it’s ok because it’s a pre built pre sealed system. The temps of each core don’t go above 30 degrees in normal running and hit around 55 when rendering on all cores using software like Luxrender/vray. The processor is supposed to be completely safe at anywhere under 75 degrees and I’ve read that you can go a good bit higher but that would worry me personally. As far as I know Corsair have a new Hydro cooler out that costs more but provides even better cooling.
The software that I use for overclocking came with the motherboard from Gigabyte and is called easytune 6.
I’m sure you guys know that buying components for building a system costs quite a bit less in the US. My system cost about £2500 in the UK 2 months ago, I’m sure it would be less now. Including a good Dell IPS monitor, 6 core processor, 12 Gb of Ram, an Nvidia Gtx 460 GLH graphics card. Bluray burner, 1 TB harddrive, good case, high end PSU and Windows 7 professional.
For cuda rendering through Octane I would dispense with the high end processor and invest in an extra graphics card. For Vray the 6 core I7 is great.
Self building a system is pretty easy there’s lot’s of info on the net, the components should all have a good warranty, you’ll get exactly what you want and the cost will be a lot less than a pre built solution by apple, dell or anyone.
