So I’ve been asked for ideal specs for IT equipment for me at work, tailored towards blender work so GPU heavy, but at the same time right now I’m wrestling with a smoke sim, so a beefy CPU is also on the cards.
Talk was around a GTX 1080i, and as for a CPU, i9 territory wasn’t out of the question.
Basically, what would currently be the dream setup for a desktop machine?
And then secondly, similar question, but with regards to building a render box or some sort of server rack?
If you’re talking about drems: CPU: INTEL Xeon 56xx, GPU: NVidea Quadro GV100
But this will keep me on dreaming. (Who would we be without dreams :eek: )
I’m gonna disagree with the quadro, those workstation cards actually have terrible rendering performance. you’d be much better off with a titan.
Really? Well… as said… only a dream. 
Quadros are great for CAD and viewport performance that never crashes. Stability is more highly valued than performance for that line.
Moved from “General Forums > Blender and CG Discussions” to “Support > Technical Support”
I’m using a Quadro M4000 (iirc?) at work, where I mostly do Solidworks. Doing Cycles stuff with it is pretty similar (sometimes worse) than my old GTX680. However, I’m obviously able to use a lot more memory and gfx crashes/hangups are rare. I’d say I don’t have a clue, but I’d go with a high end gaming card for modelling and GPU previews. If finished scenes are too heavy to render on GPU, a ton of cores would be better.
Don’t get too carried away with core count. The CPUs with higher cores trend towards lower clock speeds which can hinder performance in day-to-day, non-rendering activities; those are mostly single-threaded. The ones with higher clock speeds are also much more expensive. Yes, that’s not “dream setup” territory for the user but it is for the bean counters. They don’t have unlimited funding so doing some strategic saving would help them approve it.
For rendering, check what you have available. If there’s a bunch of other computers on your network, you should look into utilizing them for overnight rendering. If you’re bound and determined to have hardware dedicated to rendering, consider how it’s going to be used. If it’s only you, sending occasional jobs from the same desktop, then a server might be overkill. For a desktop rendering station, you’ll want to be looking at more, less capable GPUs (e.g. dual or triple 1070’s instead of a single 1080 Ti) for fast GPU rendering. Things will get done faster, unless you’re exceeding the VRAM in which case it won’t go at all. At that point, you should consider CPU rendering (with sufficient RAM, of course), otherwise you will need to get into Quadro territory as the high end GPUs are the only ones with higher VRAM.
I built a machine with dual xeon e5-2690 12 core hyper threaded so, 48 cores altogether (from ebay for 390$ used for both) and an evga gtx 1070 8gb card. The 48 cores perform better than the gtx 1070 card, but not by much, especially considering the price for upgrading the specs of motherboard, compatible memory etc, (and also considering the price if the CPUs were to be bought new). So similar to what @dgorsman says, I would suggest going with i7 or higher 8 hyper threaded core or something similar, and invest more on GPUs - one gtx 1080 or possibily two gtx 1070 for similar price. The the higher clock speeds offer better viewport performance and are useful for many other programs that don’t take advantage of multiple cores. It’s still good to have some beefy CPU power for lots of poly count and for backup for really heavy scenes. Also, it’s good to mention that the AMD equivalents are getting better and better support and my work computer has an AMD card that performs fairly well.
If we are talking about dream setup, I personally would go for ASUS C621e SAGE setup… get 7 GPU’s all water cooled… along with a nice pair of Xeons… mouth watering.
Though I wish they released dual AMD Epic board with such layout… shivers down my spine.
As for GPU’s 7 Titan Xp or V’s …
As for more down to earth dream machine. Still dual Xeon setup, probably E5-2699 v4, on Z10PED8 Workstation system. With 7 GTX 1080ti’s water cooled.
Good place to look at GPU/CPU rendering is blenders official results under below link.
http://download.blender.org/institute/benchmark/latest_snapshot.html
As for an affordable option, like dimitarsp mentioned, getting an older build, with Xeons of V2 veriety (12 core/24 threads) in dual setup to gain 24 cores/48 threads. Along wtih again ASUS Z9PE WS. I just love their designs. and honestly haven’t seen good alternatives.
https://www.asus.com/uk/Motherboards/Z9PED8_WS/
Though personally running dual Xeon E5-2687w (v1) on AsRock EP602c… with only 5 PCIEx16 and 1 PCIe x4 (open) … so max 6 GPU’s can be used… and much less desktop features compared to the Z9PED8 Work Station board
Thanks for the replies!
I’m tempted to more agree with"dgorsman", dependent on some testing of what exactly you are running. For the most part, most of the simulation systems are only single tasking, so for that, really high single core speed is better.
So for the workstation, I’d more look at a i7-8600K clocked as close to 5GHz as possible, with maybe a single 1080Ti or two 1070’s. Combine that with the usual high speed m.2 storage, 16-32GB of RAM etc for a fast workstation that can handle the single core tasks, along with fairly fast ‘preview’ rendering via the GPU(s) or in Blender 2.8 CPU+GPU (which may or may not be faster).
Often you would use lower sample settings, smaller render image size, etc to quickly evaluate changes as you work. Such a desktop PC would be able to do that, without breaking the bank.
Then, as others have said, get older Xeons or maybe a few mid range Ryzen CPU’s to build up a small render farm which is then used to do all the final high res overnight rendering. Use Linux for the render nodes as it’s faster for CPU rendering and if you setup a few boxes, consider getting a little NUC or older low end PC with Linux to act as the render manager, which can then also use your workstation a free’s up that task from any of the render nodes.
Anyway, just a thought, depends on how full on you want to go about it.
Used equipment seems less likely to be purchased for production purposes. Home use like us sure, but for a company, sometimes it is too risky geting used equipment due to lack of warranty/support on End Of Life products.
Overclocking should be a bit NO-NO for company production servers. Last thing he/company wants is system to crash mid render during the night .
Based on Blender’s own benchmarks gives good insight on rendering. Unfortunatley there is no i7-8700k. But other sites have shown that blender loves cores, and this is where desktop chips from Intel are currency behind. HEDT (High End DeskTop) Intel i9 or AMD Threadripper is the best option for a build. If you can convince them to spend on Intel Xeons, or AMD EPYC workstation setup… one can dream 
http://download.blender.org/institute/benchmark/latest_snapshot.html
I do wonder, which parts of blender rely on single core performance? Simulations?? I never could actually figure that part out. I’ll have to do some more testing on my system to see which core tasks will tax a single core only.
Still for now, either Xeon/EPYC if you wnat stability and many many cores, or the HEDT (High End DeskTop) like Intels i9 or AMD’s Threadripper.
32GB of memory is the least I would go if you are serious about larger scenes, but again depends on the type of projects. 16GB avoid for larger projects at all cost. I easily blow past 16GB on my setup when i render larger projects (including smoke/particle sims)
Definiltey m.2 storage but I hope you all have remote storage space to backup the project files.
With regards to Racks/render boxes.
First the issue is will the company invest money into building it if it is not going to be used 100% of the time? Or is the goal to use it 100% of the time? If not I would recommend to simply purchase time on an already existing render farm service as the need arises.
Still, if you are going to build your own Render Farms then same requirements as the above build. Similar CPU/GPU and Memory. No need for mass storage as thes systems just require
You don’t mention a budget. A dream setup for a desktop could be quite expensive (at least in my “dreams” :eyebrowlift:).
Personally, and for blender specifically, I think that a single workstation would suffice for the job, but of course with a more gpu heavy configuration. The ideal cpu for both modeling and hybrid cycles rendering would be the 7900X imo. It has enough cores and threads to contribute to the rendering process (gpu is always more important in hybrid rendering too), and a decent turbo boost clock (4.5GHz) to manage modeling and simulations too.
Edit: The 8700K still is the champion in single-threaded tasks (like modeling and simulation in Blender) but it only has 16 pcie lanes for the gpus, and it’s not the best option for mult-gpu setups imo.